How a Don McLean Concert Gave Me Insight Into the Torah

Last Saturday night, I went to a Don McLean concert at the Saban Theater. Yes, that Don McLean, icon of popular culture, poster child of whimsical 1970s music. As the lights dimmed and a palpable buzz of excitement murmured through the crowd, I felt the nostalgic anticipation bubble within me, knowing exactly why I was there.

You don’t attend a Don McLean concert to hear something new, and you certainly don’t go for a sound-and-light show. You go to pay tribute to a musical hero, to show up for someone who occupies a real, almost mythic place in the popular culture of your youth.

Don McLean isn’t merely another aging performer touring on old hits. He’s a cultural marker. His No. 1 hit, “American Pie,” isn’t simply a song — it’s a time capsule. Eight and a half minutes meditating on the loss of American innocence: the death of Buddy Holly, the shattering of postwar optimism, the uneasy coming-of-age of an entire generation.

People have been arguing about its meaning for decades — precisely because it meant something. Deeply.

Then there’s “Vincent” — better known as “Starry, Starry Night” — a song about Vincent van Gogh so restrained and tender it somehow made a 19th-century painter’s inner torment feel intimate to late-20th-century listeners.

Very few songwriters have managed to do this without tipping into cloying, overcooked sentimentality. McLean did it effortlessly — no theatrics, no emotional manipulation — and it worked. To this day, “Starry, Starry Night” is played regularly at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, quietly soundtracking the experience of standing before the real thing.

Don McLean, born and bred in the bedroom town of New Rochelle, NY — hardly a breeding ground for folk-music greatness — has somehow come to embody the American folk tradition. Mentored and befriended by legends like Josh White, he absorbed the moral seriousness that defines folk music: the sense that songs can carry memory, protest, grief, and conscience all at once.

And he did it without tipping into angry remonstration or cloying sentimentality. Mclean was never flashy, and certainly never cool in the trendy sense. But he mattered. And for many people, he still does.

There is also something meaningful about the fact that McLean has long been openly supportive of Israel, without apology and without hedging — a position that has become increasingly rare in the showbiz world.

At one point, his significant other was Israeli, a connection that deepened his ties to the country. He has written a song about Jerusalem and another — “Dreidel” — built around the familiar Hanukkah game, and he has never been coy or evasive about where he stands.

Unashamedly pro-Israel and a genuine friend of the Jewish community, McLean belongs to that rare group of artists — including, sadly, only some Jewish ones — who don’t feel the need to hide in the herd, and are openly positive about the miracle of Israel.

So, when I walked into the packed theater — a full house, brimming with goodwill toward an 80-year-old legend of American pop music — I wasn’t just going to a concert. I was acknowledging a nostalgic moment in my own life. A time when songs didn’t merely play in the background but actively framed how I understood the world. Which is precisely why the letdown was such a disappointment.

McLean is long past his sell-by date. His energy was low. The singing was often flat and unenthusiastic. Long stretches felt labored and passionless, as though he was simply going through the motions. Even the comb-over hairstyle — epic in its own stubborn way — felt like an unintentional symbol: a refusal to surrender to time, even when time has clearly won.

And then came “American Pie” — the showpiece, the emotional climax, the song everyone had been waiting for — and it simply didn’t land. You could feel the audience willing it to work, wanting to be generous, desperate to preserve the magic. But there was no magic.

We clapped respectfully. We reminded ourselves that legends age, and that memory is often kinder than reality. And we were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: maybe some things are better left in the mind’s eye as pristine nostalgia.

Maybe seeing a hero of your youth in a diminished state doesn’t deepen the experience — it diminishes it. Walking out of the theater, that was the thought that lingered most.

And that’s when it hit me: our Jewish sourcebook, the Torah, does something very similar to us — almost intervention-style — in Parshat Mishpatim. This is the portion that comes immediately after the revelation at Sinai, the greatest spiritual moment in Jewish history: thunder and lightning, followed by God speaking directly to His newly born nation.

We’re swept into a moment that is dazzling and overwhelming, the kind of experience every believing Jew would love to freeze in time and relive.

But we barely have time to savor it before the Torah pivots sharply. There’s no lingering on the drama, and no attempt to recreate the high. Instead, we’re dropped straight into the mundane reality of law: damages and injuries, loans and workers’ rights, lost property and personal responsibility.

Mishpatim is dry. It’s technical. And, on the surface at least, it’s deeply uninspiring. The juxtaposition feels like a comedown — a real downer.

But that whiplash is entirely deliberate. Inspiration is always a flash. Even the greatest moments in time are just that: moments. Sinai, like a great song or the vigor of youth, cannot be sustained indefinitely. You can’t live forever in a suspended state of awe, and you certainly can’t build a day-to-day life on peak experiences.

Reality is the true engine of our lives. And reality includes fatigue, complexity, disappointment, human weakness, and long stretches that feel decidedly unremarkable. But it is in these moments that there’s a chance for everyday holiness. The Torah, unlike nostalgia, refuses to pretend otherwise.

Mishpatim is the reminder that the spectacular visions that may once have animated our faith are incapable of sustaining us once those moments have passed.

The Torah is teaching us a crucial life lesson: you were inspired — now let’s see what you do with it. Not when God’s voice is thundering from the mountain, but when you’re arguing over financial liability and damages. Not when everything feels elevated and transcendent, but when life is stubbornly ordinary.

Inspirational experiences define moments. But moments age badly if that’s all they are. Which is why Judaism doesn’t try to recreate the emotional experience of Sinai.

There is no commandment to feel revelation. Instead, the Torah translates revelation into structure — into obligations that don’t depend on energy, charisma, or being at your peak. What ultimately matters is how we conduct our lives once inspiration has faded.

God doesn’t want Sinai to be remembered as an unattainable peak, a moment so overwhelming that everything afterward feels like decline. It was never meant to become the yardstick by which all future religious experience is judged, or the excuse for disengagement from the present.

Sinai only has meaning if it translates into better people, expressed through our loyalty to the laws of the Torah that were given there.

So maybe it was good to go to that concert after all. Not because it preserved the magic — it didn’t — but because it clarified something deeper. I don’t need Don McLean to be great now for his impact on my life to remain meaningful now.

The music fades, the voice weakens, the moment passes. What remains is whether what once inspired me is strong enough to shape how my life is lived once the applause has died away.