Playing for Change

Playing For Change | “War/No More Trouble” – Song Around The World from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

The Playing for Change song-around-the-world Stand By Me has hit Morgantown… three friends have emailed it to me today. And I am in love… with the song, the idea, the individual performers, and the possibility that we are not beyond salvation. But as much as I love the song Stand By Me, I think it lets us off the hook a little. Here is the same organization’s take on the War/No More Trouble. Buy the DVD for someone you love.

http://www.playingforchange.com/

P.S. Yes, Sherry, I posted a song with Bono in it, and I am not even going to say a single snide thing. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximum culpa.

Changed

I feel like I’ve died and gone to America.

–composer Barry Franklin

I can’t stop crying.  I have been crying for five days now.  Every time someone says something to me that includes the words “President Obama,” I well up.  Jessie Jackson, Will Smith, and Oprah Winfrey cry, and I’m snot-nosed and red-eyed right along with them.  Colin Powell cries and–defends his right to cry–and I weep.  

Intellectually, I understand why I have been so invested in the Obama campaign, but until he won, I didn’t know myself how emotionally invested I was–not in his campaign, but in a dream of America that I pretended to stop dreaming some time during the Reagan years.  Or maybe it was after the The Cosby Show was cancelled and Cops debuted.  I can’t put my finger on it.  But it died when I was young enough that dreams were dying off by the dozens, and I don’t remember taking particular notice of it then.  

Now, in its triumphant return, I begin to wonder what other dreams I put aside that, instead, I should have worked toward.  It’s a scary, brilliant moment.  I am glad to have been here for it, and I hope I am up to the things it will ask of me in the coming months and years.  

 

Dayenu Reconsidered

The problem with praying in English instead of Hebrew is that the words have meaning beyond the sound of them–their rhythm in the cant.  Praying in a language one does not speak is a different thing all together.

And so I look back on my most recent post, the one in which I say that the song Dayenu is my favorite prayer, and am a little horrified.  To me, this is a prayer sung around the seder table… “Ilu hotsi, hostionu, hotsionu mi Mitzrayim, Hotsionu mi Mitzrayim Da-ye-nu…”  It’s the sound of the voices of my family, young and old, frum and gone over to the other side, all together on this one night of the year.  It is the sound of thanks and of saying, “No matter what happens to us from here on out, we have been blessed and we will not complain.”  Although, of course, we will.  Still, it’s a nice thought.

But in writing it all out in English, I am stunned by the actual words of the song.  It’s not that I didn’t know them–I did.  It’s that, sung in Hebrew, I hadn’t thought of their meaning in decades.  Not since I was a little girl in Sunday school, just learning to ask the four questions.  “Why is it that on all other nights, we eat herbs of every kind, but tonight we eat only bitter herbs?”  I am forced to look beyond the meaning of “it would have been enough” to what, in fact, I am saying would have sufficed to make G-d worthy of my worship.

And there, I am forced to ask myself:  is it really enough for me that G-d killed the first born sons of the Egyptians?  Does that make Him fit for worship?  Or is it not enough, not by a long shot?  Don’t I have the right to say, “If You want me to worship You, how about not killing any more infants in my name?  In fact, You could lay off the smiting all together, thank you very much.  Tell the Angel of Death to pass over every door, not just the ones with a smear of lamb’s blood.  Tell him not to come until he’s called by the old, the weary, the ready to die.”  Do I really want to take a drop from my own cup of wine in thankfulness that G-d slew babies to secure my freedom from Egypt, or would I rather be a slave unstained by the blood of all those sons of other mothers?

I will thank G-d for parting the sea, and for allowing me to cross on dry land.  Dayenu.  But must I really thank him also for drowning my oppressors?  Can I not instead wish he had simply gentled them back to their own land, changed by having seen a miracle performed and been shown a kindness?  Must vengeance and murder really be enough for me?  Can I have no hope of peace?

Dayenu is no longer my favorite prayer.  My favorite prayer is the silent one I say among my Mennonite brethren as we light the Peace candle and hold in the light all those in our world afflicted by violence.  Or maybe it is the gentle, steadfast prayer of the Dalai Lama as he turns away, again and again, from a violent struggle for the freedom of his people.   Or maybe it is the prayer you will say for me tonight, afraid for my soul because I have blasphemed.  But it is not a prayer thanking G-d for the deaths of infants or the drowning of enemies.  Not any more.