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2 4 6 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3the spiritual elite of Israel are temple musicians. 51 This rather startling factabout the Bible should, however, ring familiar to modern Westerners whoare familiar with the outsized role that music plays for many in shaping theirnotions of identity. 52 And not only identity. Many Westerners, religious andsecular alike, turn to music for spiritual sustenance—to get the “big feeling.”The Tanakh validates the authenticity of these experiences—Israel’s spiritualelite were temple musicians—but it resists the temptation to idealize them.That combination is not completely in tune with contemporary sensibilities,and it is thus a helpful place to start thinking about the problematic characterand potential nobility of music. 5351See also Judah HaLevi, The Kuzari, 2:6452See Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 68–81.53Popular twentieth-century rock operas such as Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar exploredthe messianic role that musical megastars sometimes play for their fans. A helpful place to beginthinking deeply about the relationship between artist and audience in a broadly modern context isThomas Mann’s monumental Doctor Faustus. Mann implicitly critiques the romantic notion that, inHoffmann’s words, “we should honor only that which is inspired and that everything else comes fromevil,” by having the novel’s protagonist, the classical composer Adrian Leverkuhn, get his inspirationfrom the devil himself. In so doing Mann takes us back to the beginning—to the problematic originsof music. See note 9, above.