Jewish Folk Songs for Shavuot

Shavuot [Pentecost], a festival tucked away in the middle of the year and likely to be forgotten by secular Jews if not for the abundant assortment of cheesecake and blintse recipes, is actually a rich source of folklore and folksongs reflecting agricultural festivity and the mysticism of revelation. The different names highlight various aspects of the festival.

1. The names Festival of the First Fruits [Chag habikurim] and Harvest Festival [Chag hakatsir] reflect the fact that Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival - "You shall observe the festival of the harvest, the first fruits of your labors, which you will sow in the field…" (Shemot [Exodus] 23:16). The Mishnah (Bikurim, C.2-4) gives a detailed account of the procession of people bearing their first fruits to the Temple: "The inhabitants of the district assembled in a city of the district and spent the night in the town square. Early in the morning, their leader said: 'Let us rise and go up to Zion, to the house of the Lord our God.' Those who lived near Jerusalem brought fresh figs and grapes, and those who lived far away brought dried figs and raisins. . . . The sounds of the flute announced the pilgrims’ coming until they neared Jerusalem, when they sent messengers ahead and arranged their first fruits for presentation. The children's song Saleinu al k'tefeinu [Our baskets on our shoulders] by Levin Kipnis and Yedidya Admon (1929) harks back to this ancient Biblical festival. It is this agricultural aspect of Shavuot that was highlighted in the early days of modern Israel, especially in kibbutz-inspired celebrations. Here are two sites with lyrics of the many agriculturally-based folk songs, one in Hebrew and the other with English transcriptions.

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From Bible heroines to Bernie Madoff: Alicia Jo Rabins strikes new chord

By Rebecca Spence for JTA

BERKELEY, Calif. (JTA) – Plucking a violin on an empty stage, an animated scene of Manhattan skyscrapers scrolling behind her pregnant body, the musician, poet and Torah scholar Alicia Jo Rabins begins to sing what sounds like a mystical incantation of sorts.

“Bring me your empty jar, I will fill it,” she intones. “Where it comes from, I can’t tell you, no one knows.”

Inspired by the biblical story of the prophet Elisha, Rabins, 37, is musing in the broadest possible terms about the crimes of Bernard Madoff, whose decades-long Ponzi scheme and the resulting fallout — particularly in the Jewish community — led to the creation of her first experimental rock opera, “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.”

Rabins’ one-woman show, which had its California premiere last month at the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival and will be released next week as a digital download, parses the unholy ground of Madoff’s crimes through the eyes of seven disparate characters with both direct and indirect ties to the $50 billion scam.

Over the course of two years Rabins – who with a workspace grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council was working out of an abandoned Wall Street office when news of the scandal broke – conducted interviews with a wide-ranging cast of characters, from a Jewish-Buddhist monk who offered philosophical reflections to a Wall Street risk analyst who saw the writing on the wall.

“I wanted to have a Jewish response to Bernie Madoff,” Rabins said over coffee in Portland, Ore., where she moved last year from Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and 2-year-old daughter, Sylvia. “I grew interested in the ancient rituals of excommunication, and so I wanted to consider whether a modern, secular excommunication might be warranted. I mean, if not Madoff, then who?”

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The Rock Star’s Guide to Eating, Praying, and Loving in the High Security State of Israel

Why Justin Bieber, Elton John, Madonna, and, yes, Alicia Keys, love to play Tel Aviv—and why Israel loves them back

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

It was the summer of 2011, and some of Israel’s best-trained security personnel were having a rough time: The perimeter had been breached, and before they knew it, hordes of hostiles were moving quickly, closing in on the target. All seemed lost, but men trained in close-quarter combat in Gaza and Ramallah and southern Lebanon are never without contingency plans. They didn’t disappoint: Before anyone could tell what was going on, an engine roared and a white scooter appeared from somewhere just by the waterline.

It was time to get Justin Bieber away from the paparazzi.

Before the photographers and the shrieking fans could give chase, the scooter whisked away the boy wonder into traffic and toward an undisclosed location. It was an Entebbe-like operation, rich with detail, the kind that makes Israel among the best places in the world for rock stars to visit.

Think of international artists performing in the Jewish state, and a parade of controversies comes to mind, such as the time Roger Waters used his visit as a platform to talk politics, the time Macy Gray came back from her visit and Tweeted that she regretted the whole thing, or the time Elvis Costello canceled his concert to express his solidarity with the Palestinians. And Israel’s concert promoters, a very small clique, hold the same stature as the country’s top diplomats, more accustomed to discussing politics than sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

What they’ve given the country in return is simple but priceless: Bieber, Elton John, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and a host of other luminaries who’ve performed in Tel Aviv recently, leading a renaissance in celebrity visits to Israel unseen since the heady and hopeful days of the 1993 Oslo Accords. For these entertainers, accustomed to the vagaries of touring, Israel is not a sensitive topic to discuss sotto voce, but a haven, a country seemingly engineered to provide itinerant performers with their very particular needs.

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Did Richard Wagner Inspire Hitler or Did He Inspire ‘Star Wars’? And Does It Matter?

The whole question of modernity, in new assessments of the German composer and his work

By Vladislav Davidzon for Tablet Magazine

While Wagnerian fanatics undeniably include a contingent of what one critic memorably referred to as “leathery old Nazis,” these are now no longer taken seriously. After a period of intense academic/historical skirmishing in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, recent advancements in Wagner studies scholarship have settled our understanding of the genealogical sources of his ideas. His anti-Judaism belonged to the Utopian, anti-clerical family of the sort held by Marx and Bauer as well as drawing on the race theorists and social Darwinism circulating at the time: His overriding obsession with purity of German myth and language metastasized easily into a crusade for purity of race. Adorno’s once crankish position that Wagner’s work was the decisive element linking the 19th-century rebirth of German Romanticism to the development of National Socialism now approximates something akin to received wisdom. Hitler’s love for the work, epitomized by his identification with the character of the sensitive misunderstood (and eventually victorious) artist Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers From Nuremberg) is a fait accompli matter in the opera’s patrimony and will most likely forever encrust the works with a grimy layer of infamy.

Given that Wagner’s music has clearly stood the test of time, what remains is a host of delicate and unresolved questions about the implications of the composer’s anti-Semitism and other toxic affinities: Was Wagner merely acting as a vessel for commonly accepted ideas? Are the anti-Semitic tropes interwoven into the formal properties of the music and operas themselves? If music, as Wagner’s defenders often proclaim, cannot be fascist, what about the contents of the librettos? If the librettos are indeed not anti-Semitic, does that justify the lifting of Israel’s unofficial ban on reciting his works? Writing in the New York Review of Books last summer, the conductor Daniel Barenboim, perhaps the most ardent living champion of Wagner’s rehabilitation, began his eloquent vindication of the right to play Wagner in Israel with the observation that “perhaps no other composer in history sought to combine such obviously incompatible elements in his works.”

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