Hayyim Feldman's Page

The Songs

1. Supplication, by Sami Yusuf, is from the soundtrack of The Kite Runner, a film of great spiritual power (and occasional repulsive violence), about betrayal and atonement in contemporary Afghanistan. This song comes at the moral climax of the film, and the combination had me sobbing. You can see a music-video performance of the song, not from the film, on YouTube.) Here are the lyrics in English and transliterated Arabic (the last part of the English, "Yah Allah...", is a rough translation of the Arabic) - but please, do yourself a favor and don't just read them; stay and listen:

Allahumma salli 'ala,
Sayyidina,
Muhammadin an-Nabiyyi al-ummiyyi
Wa 'ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim

Oh my Lord
My sins are like the highest mountain
My good deeds are very few
They're like a small pebble

I turn to you
My heart full of shame
My eyes full of tears
Bestow your forgiveness and mercy upon me.

Yah Allah
Send your peace and blessings on the final prophet
And his family and companions
And those who follow him

2. In Tzama l'cha nafshi, Matisyahu - a world-popular reggae/hip-hop artist who is also a Lubavitcher (Chabad) chasid - sings lines from the 63rd Psalm:

Tzama l'cha nafshi
My soul thirsts for you
Kama l'cha b'sari
My flesh longs for you
b'eretz tziyah v'ayef, b'li mayim
in a dry and weary land, without water.

Keyn ba-Kodesh chaziticha
I have envisioned you in the Holy Place
lirot uz'cha u-ch'vodecha
to see your strength and your Glory.

3. Imagine: Thanks to Richard Silverstein for his Tikun Olam blog where I learned about this moving cover of John Lennon's utopian anthem by two more international stars, Algerian rai artist Kheb Khaled and Israeli singer Noa (full name, Achinoam Nini), singing in their respective languages and in English. For this duet from Khaled's 2005 Kenza album, the two of them add the following verse (which I've translated from Noa's Hebrew, but I think Khaled sings the same in Arabic; can anyone here confirm please?):

Imagine a world without fear
A world without hate
Where we can live together
A world of love
To build a future for both of us
In the same place

As a religious guy myself, I want to join Richard Silverstein in honoring Khaled for singing Lennon's line, "Imagine... no religion, too". Mr. Silverstein writes: "During the 1990s, other rai performers were murdered in Algeria for singing lyrics like this one. Though the Algerian civil war appears over, Khaled still shows great courage in singing these words..."

4. Living Like a Refugee, by Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars. The core of the band met and first performed together in the refugee camps of Guinea, West Africa, after fleeing the horrendous violence of civil war in their home, Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone. Read more of their story at their website. (There's also a well-received documentary film about the band available, but I haven't seen it yet.) Simple but vivid lyrics, and remarkably upbeat music from such painful experience. I include it here as a message of solidarity and hope for the refugees of Palestine.

You left your country to seek refuge
in another man's land
You left your country to seek refuge
in another man's land
You will be comforted by strange dialects
You will be fed with unusual diets
You've got to sleep in a tarpaulin house which is so hot
You've got to sleep on a tarpaulin mat which is so cold

Oh real time
Living like a refugee is not easy
It's really not easy
Living like a refugee is not easy
It's really not easy

5. Lift Every Voice and Sing is widely known among African Americans (at least of an earlier generation; I don't know about today's youth) as their unofficial "national anthem." Here, it is performed by Women of the Calabash on their Kwanzaa Album. Kwanzaa, for those of you unfamiliar, is a 7-day winter festival that was founded in the late 1960s as a way for African Americans to reclaim their African heritage.

Here are the lyrics (James Weldon Johnson, 1899):

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past
has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present
has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears
have been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood
of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God,
where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world,
we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our GOD,
True to our native land;
True to our GOD,
True to our native land.

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This bit from the last speech given by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (alav ha-shalom), is central to how I think about the politics of the Holy Land. (I'll blog an explanation soon.)

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I work with the Network of Spiritual Progressives (affiliated with Tikkun Magazine) - a spiritually oriented progressive political group whose members include people from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions. On Sunday, 06 Aug 2006, we held an interfaith gathering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Pray for Peace in the Middle East. During the course of the four hours we were there, about 80 people - Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and others - came to share their pain, prayers, and hope regarding the violence, and the possibility of peace, in Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel.

Early on in the event, I sang a song that I wrote in 1978, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of both the founding of the Jewish state of Israel, and the Palestinian naqba ("catastrophe") of dispersion and exile.

A Buddhist nun responds to my Israel/Palestine peace song, "Land in the Middle" (see my blog, 21 Aug 2008).

I put this Middle East peace candle here because
its animation doesn't show in the photo galleries.