Great Story

On November 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you’ve ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly is an awesome sight.

He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other forward. He then bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap --- it went off like gunfire across the room and there was no mistaking what that sound meant. We figured he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off-stage to either find another violin or to find another string for this one. But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with a passion, power and purity the audience had never heard before. Of course anyone knows it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just 3 strings, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.

You could see him modulating, changing and re-composing the piece in his head. When he finished, there was a hushed silence --- and then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.

He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, then said in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.” That powerful line has stayed in my mind. Who knows? Perhaps that’s how life is. We, too, might have prepared all our life to play with 4 strings when all of the sudden we find ourselves with only 3. But we, too, can make music with those

3 strings that is more beautiful, sacred and memorable than any that we ever made before, when we had 4 strings. So perhaps our task is to make music, with all we have, and when that is no longer possible, with what we have left.

This story really touched me, we all have challenges in this life, I guess it is what we make of them and how we go through them that matters, hopefully we are better on the other side.