Two seemingly impassable obstacles are positioned opposite one another: one is the Mishna and the Talmud, about which ordinary people know hardly anything, while on the opposite side is contemporary concert music, which is also a mystery to most people. Two terrifying cliffs, as the composer Andre Hajdu describes them, which are equally threatening and are not connected to each other.

But, lo and behold, Hajdu and his young colleagues, all of them members of the Ha'oman Hai Ensemble, have managed to build a bridge between these two worlds in the performance of "The Floating Tower" (produced by the Hazira Interdisciplinary Theater, and to be performed at the Israel Festival in the Khan Theater tonight at 9 P.M.).

"Like a scene from a Western movie, what we have accomplished resembles an Indian rope bridge built over a deep ravine," Hajdu says. "True, you have to be a little bit crazy to do this, to tell people to come even though they do not know or understand it, but so far the concerts have been sold out. The people who come to them are inquisitive, and many of them are surprised to hear Jewish music like they had not imagined before - without a religious atmosphere, performed by musicians who take on the most profound Jewish commandment without adding color to it."

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It has been almost 40 years since Andre Hajdu set the mishnaic texts that appear in "The Floating Tower" to music, most of them for vocals and piano. "Despite my great love for the composition, it was a failure," the composer admits. "An opera singer cannot sing 'An egg that was born on Yom Tov,' and 'Rabbi Akiva said' is not suited to be performed alongside an artistic song. Also, those sections I wrote in the style of Gershwin are now outdated. It did not go over well in the concerts. Thirty years elapsed until the pianist and composer Ronen Shapira began to sing the Mishna passages in a completely personal manner, with a microphone and accompanying himself on the piano. After a few years, a repertoire of adaptations was built up."

The adaptations were the work of Hajdu's pupils at the Israel Arts and Science Academy in Jerusalem, which Hajdu cofounded and where he taught for many years. Hajdu taught his students about the music of the Chabad Hasidim, improvisation and the history of classical Western music. His former students remained in touch with him, including Matti Kovler, Nori Jacoby, Jonathan Niv, Yair Harel, Avishai Fisch and Eitan Kirsch (who take part in the performance). Together they established the Ha'Oman Hai Ensemble, named after the studio located at 18 Ha'Oman Street in Jerusalem, where they both worked and performed. "They are stage animals and can play anything in the world: jazz, klezmer, Yiddish, classical music and it is only through their playing together that a performance comes into being," Hajdu says. "When Matti Kovler sings, no stone remains unturned. He turns everything upside-down, with pop and a parody of pop."

Don't you direct them to compose in your vein?

"I am not a dominating personality - on the contrary; they are able to dominate me, they deconstruct what I have done and I help them to do so. It is most interesting when they begin to make up something according to their imagination. In my eyes, they are redeeming this type of work."

Hajdu considers teaching high school students the high point of his life. "My academic career is topsy-turvy. I st arted teaching at the academy in the 1970s and then at Bar-Ilan University's music department, where I taught for 30 years. During the past 10 years [I have been teaching ] children at summer camps and in schools. From a pedagogic point of view, my peak did not occur at the academy or at the university but at the high school in Jerusalem.

The composer and educator Zoltan Kodaly once said that a person's musical fate is established in kindergarten and that the nursery school teacher is the most influential musical factor in one's life. I was his personal student for many years and I absorbed his theories. I understand that the higher one climbs, the further one gets from the basics. I considered myself as the Israeli Kodaly, but I first had to immerse myself in the academic world, so as not to remain the eternal pioneer who goes to far-off places and remains there without having any influence."

Hajdu was born in Budapest in 1932 and studied with the two distinguished Hungarian composers, Bela Bartok and Kodaly, who created a personal and modern language of musical expression under the influence of the study of folk music and who thought up original methods of teaching. While Kodaly created a revolution in musical education in schools, Bartok revolutionized the method of piano instruction.

Hajdu and his family were saved at the last minute from being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, and at the end of World War II, he began to study music, collected folk songs in the villages and also familiarized himself with the Gypsies, their language and their way of life, becoming an expert in their music. In the wake of the Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Hajdu fled to Paris where he continued his studies in the famous Conservatoire de Paris under the tutelage of two other eminent composers - Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.

Hungary, France and Tunisia, where he worked as a piano teacher - different nations and a life of wandering filled with experiences and searches - all served to mold his personality, and not even one of these experiences was connected with Judaism. It was only through chance meetings in Paris and Rome that he discovered Judaism and devoted himself to it more and more. He studied and researched Judaism from the cultural, historic, artistic-musical and ethnographic points of view, and slowly he began to observe the religious precepts (mitzvot).

In 1966, he came to Israel and became a researcher, a professor and a member of the academy in addition to being a composer, and in 1997 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Music. "Even my very beginnings here in Israel were connected with a scandal," Hajdu says about one of his first stage works produced here: "A Passover Game," which tells the story of Christian children who pretend one of them is a Jewish child and murder him in the end - with Israeli children playing the parts.

"President Zalman Shazar attended the performance. He managed to restrain himself and did not walk out in the middle. There was an interjection heard in the hall - someone shouted 'Mr. President, forgive this performance!' The newspapers protested that this was 'a Holocaust in a kindergarten' and 'a masochistic anti-Semitic creation,'" he recalls.

Does the work contain autobiographical elements?

"Every work of mine emanates from my childhood traumas, whether anti-Semitic or otherwise, but I don't like works called 'Kaddish' or 'Psalms' - that is pseudo, music which does not depict Jewish history but rather nostalgia. The second generation has difficulty transmitting the traumas of Europe's Jews in an opus. This is easier for the third generation, especially since I go onto the stage with them."

The performance of Hajdu and his colleagues, all of whom sing and play a wide variety of instruments, includes stage components - lighting and props, acting and marionettes, a projector and recorded sound. Hajdu does not explain the contents of the Mishna and the Talmud during the performance but only provides their form, while the texts are screened. To this he adds the recordings of sounds from a Bnei Brak yeshiva, made a few decades ago. "Every yeshiva student is immersed in his study and does not even pay attention to the fact that he is singing. He certainly doesn't listen to the others, but even so, some kind of unity is created in its musical nature. My greatest discovery is that the best Jewish music is created by those who perform it without even realizing in any way that it is music."

This oeuvre of yours - is it Jewish?

"In the sections of the Mishna, there is no traditional component whatsoever. There are no Jewish melodies or a Jewish atmosphere because the Mishna is Judaism without ideology, society or politics. It testifies to Jewish life, to the Jews' habits and way of life. It is not literary like the Bible but rather ethnological; it is not a legend and a thought but rather a neutral day-to-day story. I see this as an avant-guard production - not to find favor, not to pay compliments but to be provocative; and the Mishna together with contemporary music is a provocation."

Those who criticize Hajdu refer to his variegated eclecticism, which boils down to a lack of style. "That is true, I touch on a style and then leave it, because I hate being identified with something, anything, and especially with the image of 'the composer' and the superstar. Shlomo Carlebach, for example, is the antithesis of me. He portrays a certain identity - a little bit hippie, a little ex-pop, a little Bratslav. All popular music identifies with a certain star, so you know what your own identity is. I am aware that there is something eccentric in this, but at the same time, nothing would succeed if there were no humor. There is constant laughter in "The Floating Tower," even about the passages from the Mishna, although this is never cynical."

How does your belief find expression?

"I am a great believer in significance. Messiaen said that a bird, which embodies the wonders of flying and singing, is proof that God exists. That is the kind of example that holds significance for me. And I agree with Sartre, who said that people should be committed to one great thing. In his case, it was Marxism, and in mine, it is Judaism. And just as he was not the ideal Marxist, I imagine that is how I am. It is thanks to Judaism that I came to Israel, set up a family and have children. I accept reality but not any kind of ideology - not even religious ideology."