CANTORIAL COMMENTS
BY
CANTOR ELIHU FELDMAN
This year has been a hard one for the State of Israel.
Hundreds of people including infants and civilians have been killed since
September. I would like to dedicate this article in their memory.
Every day preceding
the Grace After Meals, Al Naharot Bavel (literally by the rivers of
Babylon) is said. It is a fitting and living memorial to all who have loved and
given their lives for Israel. This hymn in part, and in its entirety, has been
set to music, song, and oratorio. In fact, the text of
Most musicologists attribute the prominence of
this psalm in music to the Mitzvah of remembering the destruction of the Holy
Temple. The destruction of the Israel and the Temple and the exile to Babylonia
(6th-5th centuries, B.C.E) were traumatic experiences that produced extensive
literature and music expressing desires for revenge, stirrings of repentance,
expressions of anguish and lament, and a yearning to be reconciled with God and
restored to the land of Judah. The text is so beautiful, real and meaningful
that several composers have set it to music.
The text is as follows:
By the rivers of
There on the willows we hung up
our lyres,
for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of
how they cried, "Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!"
Fair
a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us;
a blessing on him who seizes your babies
and dashes them against the rocks.
The authorship of Psalm 137 has been
attributed by rabbinic sources to the prophet Jeremiah, placing him "at
the rivers of Babylon" either at the very beginning of the exile or at the
very end; although many modern scholars refute this view. Of musical interest
is that several scholars have claimed that the harp-playing weepers by the
rivers of
In addition to be the subject of several musical selections,
Psalms 137 has been the subject of medieval manuscript illustrations and
paintings, Judaica and Christian art, and even English poetry. The Middle Ages
have also left manuscript illuminations of other subjects taken from the
Psalms; and these are often extremely literal in interpretation. Psalm 137
("By the rivers of Babylon") likewise formed the subject of
manuscript illustrations, but also of paintings by the 19th-century French
Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix (in the dome of theology of the Palais
Bourbon, Paris, now the National Assembly) and the 19th-cent. German
academician Eduard Bendemann (
Later on, in 1622,
Al Naharot Bavel, was set to music by Renaissance musician and composer
Salamone Rossi. According to some Jewish musicologists, this composition was
the most darkly dramatic of his music. His approach to the text from Psalm 137
is extremely personal, suggesting an ardent Jewish nationalism. Since this work
was considered a lamentation in Jewish liturgy, Rossi may have turned for his
models to the Latin late sixteenth century settings of the Lamentations of
Jeremiah. Pietro Cerone described the prevailing 17th-century church music
practice in his treatise: "The style for composing the Lamentations is
such that all the parts proceed with gravity and modesty, nearly always singing
together.... In this kind of composition, more than in any other, the composer
makes use of dissonance, suspensions, and harsh passages to make his work more
doleful and mournful, as the sense of the words and the significance of the
season demand... They are always sung by very low and heavy voices."
The Romantic Movement fostered an interest in works of ancient
and primitive national literature, as well as traditional national music. In
this spirit, Jewish composer Isaac Nathan (1790-1864, England) embarked on a
project, which produced the famous Hebrew Melodies. Nathan composed Hebrew
chants, claiming that they were "all of them upwards of 1,000 years old
and some of them performed by the Ancient Hebrews before the destruction of the
Temple." They were not of course, but rather a jumble of familiar
synagogue hymns, none more than two or three centuries old.
British poet Lord
(George Gordon Noel) Byron (1788-1824), intrigued by the project, produced for
the sacred tunes some of his most lustrous verses - including She Walks in
Beauty Like the Night, Thy Days Are Done, and The Destruction of
Sennacherib.
The Hebrew Melodies enjoyed instant success and
popularity, Though not all are specifically Jewish in theme, most are on themes
from the Hebrew Scriptures and many express sympathy for the plight of the
oppressed Jews. Byron's Selection of Hebrew Melodies was published in
1815, simultaneously with their musical edition. A further Selection was
published the following year; the lyrics remained in print for a full fifty
years, and the songs were performed in both home and synagogue with great
regularity until the late 1860s. Byron based two of the Hebrew Melodies on
Psalm 137.
More recently, The
Zamir Chorale has performed Al Naharot Bavel as part or its repertoire, and in
May 2002 Al Naharot Bavel was performed by the Multicultural Bilingual Choir of
the National Bilingual Association in
At this time I would like to wish everyone a
pleasant summer. Let us pray for the day when Psalm 137 will be superfluous and
will no longer have to be read in Diaspora.
Sincerely,
Cantor Elihu Feldman