Redemption Song

In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved, Toni Morrison describes how the protagonist, “Baby Suggs,” would, on occasion, take her company of slaves to an open area some distance away from the white-knuckle grip of their slave masters. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” laments Sethe, “and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.” Traumatized by the psychological effects of slavery, the community is led by this prophetic woman into the clearing.

Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed, and as she put her stick down they knew she was ready. “Then she shouted, ‘Let the children come! …Let your mothers hear your laugh,’ she told them, and ...‘Let the grown men come,’ she shouted… ‘Let your wives and your children see you dance.’… Finally, she drew the women near. ‘Cry,’ she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.’ And without covering their eyes the women let loose.”

And in the Clearing it began: Laughter, dance, tears and most of all…song. Morrison continues, “[Baby Suggs] stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.” (Beloved, p. 103ff).

When I heard of the passing of Debbie Friedman in this week of Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song, I thought of this scene from Morrison’s novel. Debbie Friedman, considered the “Joan Baez of Jewish Song,” over the last decades and twenty or so albums, drew on her voice, her musical creativity, and most of all her passion for the Jewish people to revolutionize Jewish prayer. Her premature death this past week at the age of 59 marks a sad, if not searing, loss of one of the most prolific and impactful Jewish leaders of the past century. It is bittersweet comfort that her death fell this very week of Shabbat Shirah, the time that the Jewish world turns its attention to the transformative power of music, specifically, the redemptive song of Moses and Miriam as they crossed the sea towards liberation. I did not know Friedman, but I had the honor of hearing her speak and perform. She suffered from a chronic and often debilitating neurological condition that at times impeded her own movement. Yet like Miriam herself, like the figure in the Morrison novel, despite her twisted hip, her musical pitch and passion liberated so many Jewish souls towards serving God in prayer.

The Shirah, the Song of the Sea, begins with the words az yashir moshe u-v’nei yisrael. If you know a little bit about Hebrew, then you know that these first few words contain a grammatical oddity. Az yashir, translates as “Then Moses and Israel will sing.” It should read, we know, Az shar, “then Moses and Israel sang” – past tense, not future. The rabbis explain that it is the very conflation of past, present and future that is the point, the redemptive message of the Song. “Lashon avar v’atid,” “language of both past and present,” writes Ibn Ezra. Caught between terror and joy, oppression and liberation, suffering and freedom, the Israelites were on the threshold of death and on the precipice of new life. And in the midst of this disorienting swirl of events and emotions, they take the grandest leap of faith – they commit to the future. Not only do they sing, but they stake their intention to sing in and into the unknown days ahead. The song is redemptive not merely in the present, not merely as a break with the past, but because it anticipates: az yashir, “then Israel will sing,” future melodies that await be sung.

From the crossing of the sea, to the rivers of Babylon, to the exilic dreams of Yehuda Halevi to Antebellum spirituals, to Debbie Friedman, right through this very sad week of national mourning in the wake of the Tucson Tragedy, it is by way of song that we approach the raw and often piercing physical and emotional dislocations that befall us. “How can we sing a song?” wrote the psalmist in exile, a lament that ironically comes in the form of a song. Even as we sowed our tears of exile, we harbored a dream to return, to reap with songs of joy. I was not surprised to discover that the 1979 classic “Redemption Song” was written by Bob Marley after he was diagnosed with cancer, as he himself was privately dealing with physical pain and his own mortality. This song, and so many others we could list, liberate not because they change reality, but because they anticipate the possibility of self-assertion and liberation. By distinguishing between the world as it is and the world as it should be, these songs wedge open a gap through which a soul can both escape a painful reality and arrive at a truer essence – at one and the same time.

In her study Singing for Survival, the ethnomusicologist Gila Flam studied the deeper meaning of music in the darkest hour of a people. She examined the music of the Lodz Ghetto. The fate of the Jews was sealed. When Russian troops advanced on Poland in 1945, less than 1000 remained hidden in the ruins of the ghetto of the approximately 250,000 who had been there. “The Song was the only truth,” Flam concludes. Nearly all the survivors interviewed declared that within the walls of the ghetto, singing was freedom, a means of escape from the bitter reality. Flam theorizes: “…when one sings, one creates another world. Individuals can sing whenever they wish…becoming the ultimate, albeit in this instance private assertion of personal liberty.” In music, the persecuted of Lodz found truth, solace and freedom. On this weekend, it seems appropriate to consider the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in discussing the impact of music, explained, "…if you think for a moment, you realize that [musicians] take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.” It is this effect on our souls, the gift of hope in spite of a reality that tells us otherwise, which makes for the power of music.

After a week like ours, we need not look far to see the just how the world falls short of our hopes. I think of Representative Giffords and thirteen others who were wounded in the attack in Tuscon. I think of the six innocent men and women who were murdered in cold blood, one victim a little girl of nine years old, and I pray for them and their families. All week I have searched for the words to give expression to the loss, to the tragedy, to the shock of bearing witness to the frayed fabric of our society. Like many of you, I find myself overwhelmed by sorrow. And yet, in that sorrow, I know, also lies the path to step forward. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who knew full well the depths to which humanity could sink, once said: “There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the next level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into a song."

In tribute to Debbie Friedman, in anguish over the death of innocents, in hopes for the speedy and full recovery of so many, and in full awareness of just how much we do not understand about our unjust world – we shall conclude by rising to say a prayer written by my colleague Rabbi Naomi Levy, followed by Debbie Friedman’s Misheberach, Prayer for Healing. We sing. For the living and for the dead, for those mourning and those mourned, for the past the present and most of all, for the anticipated future, a redeemed future. A time, when, please God, our tears will turn to joy, our lament to dancing and our sorrow into song.

A Prayer for Tucson 
by Rabbi Naomi Levy

On this Shabbat Shira, the Sabbath of Song,
We sing to God a song of grief
For innocent victims
Cut down too soon.
May their memories be a blessing,
May their lights shine brightly upon us.
Gather them into Your eternal shelter, God,
Your shelter of peace.
We sing to God a song of mourning
For the broken hearts,
The senseless loss, the shock, the emptiness.
Send comfort, God, to the grieving families,
Hear their cries.
Fill them with the courage
To carry on in the face of loss.
We sing to God a song of healing
For the wounded.
Lift them up God,
Ease their pain,
Restore them to strength, to hope, to life.
We sing to God a song of peace
For our nation.
Teach us how to rise above hatred
And cruelty and indifference.
Show us how to live up to the beauty You've planted within us.
Let us rise up from this tragedy,
Let us walk together hand in hand
United in hope
On a path of peace, Amen.