Ariel Louis, a multi-talented artist driven by his passion to create and to serve God, is making Baroque flutes which his late father believed would be the missing element required for the music of the Third Temple.

Growing up, Louis always had a passion for artistic creation. When he was nine years old, his sister asked him to make a guitar for her. Much to her surprise, he dismantled his bed and succeeded in fulfilling her wish. In primary school, he painted portraits of major rabbis in his spare time, selling his creations to his friends and neighbors. 

Louis, however, was also a Biblical scholar from a very young age. At six, he began studying scribal arts and by age nine, he was earning money. After leaving school, he made a living for many years as a scribe writing Torah scrolls, a difficult and exacting task requiring precision and absolute attention to detail. 

In all of these endeavors, Ariel was guided by his father, Rabbi David Louis, an accomplished musician who had played first trumpet in the Chicago Symphony until he became religiously observant and moved to Israel. Rabbi Louis studied classical Jewish texts but also became a recognized scholar of Kabbalah and esoteric teachings. The two collaborated as scribes and artists, creating illustrated Scrolls of Esther. 

At one point, the collaboration took on a new dimension and the father and son went on a musical tour. Ariel is a gifted vocalist and self-taught clarinetist. For five years, the two toured the world, playing a combination of rhythm and blues mixed with Jewish spiritual music. After the tour, Ariel gifted his father a Gibson ES 335 guitar, an expensive and impressive instrument.

Upon returning, Ariel was hired by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service, to write a Torah scroll dedicated to the operatives who died in the line of duty, many of whom could never be named in public. Ariel worked on this project at the Masada archaeological site on the shores of the Dead Sea in an area open for the public to watch him at his holy task. 

One day, Ariel’s father approached him with a strange request. He asked that he sell the guitar he had gifted him and use the proceeds to make a baroque flute. Trusting the inner wisdom of his father, Ariel did so. 

“It was a crisis,” Ariel told Israel365 News. “I realized that I was stuck at a crossroads, and that I had to make a revolution in my soul.”

Ariel realized that he had achieved many remarkable things but he had never really struggled to go deeper in his artistic endeavors.

“I began to be ashamed of the fact that in all the fields I touched, I reached the outer layer in an amazing way,” Ariel said. “But I was shying away from the inner ones, for which you have to sit and study and tear yourself apart.”

He was unsure how to approach building a Baroque flute. He had never even heard of the instrument before. He practiced by making several Biblical harps, which he considered more simple to build. His first attempts were aesthetically beautiful and he managed to sell them, but he realized that they were not high level precision musical instruments that would be used by skilled musicians.

Ariel realized that creating a Baroque flute would require a deeper commitment.

“Making Baroque flutes is a lost art,” Ariel explained. “It is deceptively simple with only six holes  but it can produce the entire chromatic scale in three octets which is insane for a primitive instrument.”

Seven years ago, Ariel traveled to Duseldorf, Germany to study with Fridtjof Aurin, one of the very few craftsmen alive today making Baroque flutes.

“The flutes have to be accurate to a perfect level to produce the right sound. The inner channel is not uniform like a tube, but in the shape of a cone – every tenth of a millimeter the thickness changes. I had to study the plans to understand it, because you have to reach amazing accuracy. For example, there is a hole that should be 85.85 millimeters in diameter. I use cobalt drills that are accurate up to a thousandth of a millimeter.”

Ariel uses rare woods aged at least 80 years and hand tools which he claims produces a sound that cannot be duplicated on flutes made with power tools.

“The sound of my flutes made from this wood is intense, trenchant, powerful, and rich,” he said. “They are surprisingly responsive to delicate nuances of style and embouchure.”

In the meantime, Ariel’s father had been tasked by the Temple Institute with composing the music for the Third Temple. Ariel finally gifted his father the promised flute and he immediately began to play. 

“He felt that the Baroque flute would lend a necessary and unique voice to the Temple music,” Ariel said. According to the Talmud, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments, and the choir of twelve male singers. “Everything in the Temple was made of gold and silver. But the Baroque flute is made of living wood. Gold and silver are the root of so much sin but there is a living aspect in the flute that remains pure. It can’t be duplicated by modern instruments. It takes us back to the Garden of Eden.”

With his flute, Rabbi Louis composed several pieces of music for the Third Temple. He passed away about one year ago with his vision unrealized, but Ariel is hard at work, making very special flutes for classical musicians and for the Third Temple.

“It’s a lot of fun to turn a piece of wood, which no one took care of, into a musical instrument with so much depth, holiness and beauty,” Ariel said. “It is very satisfying.

Ariel noted that so many aspects of bringing the Third Temple require reviving lost arts, such as the crimson and techelet dyes, the special breads, and even the music, recreating sounds that haven’t been heard for 2,000 years.

“I also see myself in some way as the one responsible for returning something that was taken from Judaism,” Ariel said.

Ariel lives with his wife and nine children in Maale Adumim.