Leonard Bernstein’s sentence reframes retaliation: instead of returning harm, we intensify creation. He voiced it in the days following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Nov. 1963), writing in the New York Times that the artistic response to brutality must be more music, made with greater care and love. This was no abstraction. Bernstein soon dedicated his Symphony No. 3, Kaddish (1963), to Kennedy’s memory, insisting that lament could be transfigured into resolve. In doing so, he offered artists a moral posture: answer destruction not with silence or despair, but with a redoubled devotion to craft and communion. [...]
