B"H

What could the blues have to do with the music of the ancient Temple? Why can a melody carry sorrow and joy at the same time—and leave us feeling more alive?

These questions open my conversation with Eduard Shyfrin, a scientist, entrepreneur, author and blues musician whose life has taken him from the steel industry to the study of Torah and Kabbalah. Raised in a home filled with jazz, blues and books, Eduard studied classical piano as a child. During lockdown, he returned to playing, took vocal lessons and eventually began composing his own music.

His books, From Infinity to Man and The Relativity of Death, explore the relationship he sees between science and Kabbalah. But we begin with something more immediate: what happens within us when we hear the blues?

Is the blues Jewish?

Eduard describes the question behind his essay on this subject: how can musicians return to a familiar musical pattern and still move us in so many different ways? Our conversation follows the connections he sees between music, sacred proportions and the meeting of opposites—sadness and joy, judgment and mercy.

The blues grew out of African American work songs, spirituals and folk music. Eduard offers his own theory about a possible thread connecting Temple music, Jewish chanting, Christian worship and the spirituals that helped shape the blues. He explicitly presents this as a hypothesis. For us, it opens a conversation about how music carries memory, longing and a desire to connect with something beyond ourselves.

From success to a search for meaning

From music, we turn to the personal crisis that led Eduard into deeper Jewish learning. A successful career had not answered the questions that now pressed upon him: Why are we here? What gives our lives meaning? What happens when our lives in this world come to an end?

He began reading Torah and Kabbalah with the curiosity he brought to scientific study. When he encountered something that seemed contradictory, he took it as a reason to keep learning. His understanding might be incomplete, and further study could open something he had not yet seen.

Eduard presents Kabbalah of Information as his attempt to describe creation through the language of information. The explanations in the interview belong to that approach and to his reading of the sources.

The time we measure and the time we experience

We can measure time with a clock. What does it mean to experience the present?

Eduard distinguishes between measured time and what he calls inner time. In our conversation, this leads into the difference between understanding the word now intellectually and being present in our own lives. We can be in a room while our attention is somewhere else.

This is one place where an abstract question becomes familiar. We know what it is to be absorbed in a thought, to return to the body, and to become aware of the person in front of us.

Relative to which world?

When we turn to life and death, Eduard asks that we be precise about the perspective from which we are speaking. He relates his understanding of death as a transition to his reading of the Arizal and the Kabbalistic worlds.

He uses the language of an information space to explain his interpretation of those distinctions. In this framework, death relative to one world is different from an absolute statement about all of creation.

The biblical story of Yaakov and Yosef gives us a way to consider perspective. Yaakov believed that Yosef had died, while Yosef was alive in Egypt. We discuss how the same situation can be understood differently from the position of each person involved.

How should we live?

Near the end, Eduard returns to a practical question: whatever language we use to describe creation, how should we live?

We speak about bringing our will into relationship with the will of the Creator. That gives the discussion a direction in our own lives. What does the way I understand life ask of me in my actions? How does it affect the attention I give another person, or the care with which I make a decision?

With love,
Rabbi Amichai

Recorded with Eduard Shyfrin on 8 October 2026.