Singing the Exodus Story
By JEFFREY A. SUMMIT
My coming of age as a Jew, and, I imagine, yours as well,
has a musical score, composed of various styles of our choosing. We choose the
Jewish music we sing at home, in our congregations and around our Passover
tables, at our happiest simchas
(joyous occasions) and in our most difficult moments. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, an
ethnomusicologist at Harvard, calls this scripting, this music backdrop, our
soundscape, the aural landscape in which we live.
For many of us, the African-American spiritual “Let My People Go” is part of
the soundscape of Passover Seders. This invented tradition is hardly new: many
of us have sung “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land” at Seders for more than
forty years. How did this come to be? And, even more importantly, what does
this musical choice teach us about the process of making the Seder experience
relevant—to contemporary Jews—through music?
Historically, the inclusion of “Let My People Go” is connected with the Jewish
commitment to the civil rights movement. The song was included in Arthur
Waskow’s Freedom Seder (1969), which made use of an innovative haggadah that
explicitly linked (through readings and songs) the Exodus story with the
struggle for civil rights. (A video of the original Seder was
recently posted on YouTube.) But this was not the first time Jews
connected the struggles of blacks in America with the story of Jewish slavery
in Egypt. As ethnomusicologists Judah Cohen and Marion Jacobs have pointed out,
left wing Jews of the 1920s held “third” Seders that included African-American
spirituals as a way to underscore the contemporary relevance of Passover’s
message of liberation.
When black slaves sang about the Exodus from Egypt, they were singing about
their own struggles—in coded form. These spirituals could pass as worship and
bible study, which slave masters were unlikely to interpret as incendiary. The
Fisk Jubilee Singers, students at Fisk College who were emancipated slaves,
performed and published this spiritual in the 1870s. Paul Robeson, the
prominent actor, singer, and social activist, brought the song to a wider
audience in the 1950s. For Jews active in the civil rights movement, the lyrics
(“Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land/ tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go”)
fit seamlessly into the Seder. And we loved the soulful music. Coming of age
during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, our tastes in popular music
were shaped by African-American music—gospel, the blues, rock and roll.
When I was growing up, I had many reasons for thinking that our Jewish
community and the African-American community shared a kinship, and a common
plight. (This was reinforced by my experience traveling in the deep South in
the early 1960s and seeing signs on hotels, bathrooms and drinking fountains
that “Blacks and Jews”—and I am prettifying the language here—were not
welcome.) Common experiences of slavery and persecution were underscored by my
family’s Holocaust stories. Even as I enjoyed white privilege, for years I
maintained (incorrectly) that I wasn’t white; I was Jewish.
When I was 14, and my Jewish youth group advisors were driving to Mississippi
in a beat-up Volkswagen bus for voter registration drives and to march on
Washington, songs of the civil-rights struggle signified the core values that
brought me into Jewish life: a passion for social justice, courage to take a
stand and a belief that our tradition was actively committed to social change.
Everything about my experience told me that “Let my People Go,” “Follow the
Drinking Gourd,” “Oh, Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome” were part of my Jewish
soundscape—“Hey Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan. Pharaoh’s army got
drownded” has been part of our Seder for 30 years. True, the song has required
certain textual emendations: Mary has been “returned” to Miriam, excising
Christological references. To return to “Let My People Go,” it’s difficult to
define what constitutes Jewish music. I generally favor the definition offered
by ethnomusicologist Kurt Sachs, who said that Jewish music is music made for Jews, by Jews, as Jews. Of
course, part of the answer here is that the American Jewish experience is
essentially an American experience, a truth underscored by historian Jonathan
Sarna in his book, American Judaism
(2004, Yale University Press). From my experience singing African-American
spirituals at our Seders, I believe that passionate music, sung with purpose,
from many traditions, has a place in our broader lives. We don’t have to
include every moving piece of music, but if we want to deepen the music that
flows out of us, we must listen, and sing, expansively. Music is energy and
whatever comes in will find a way out, filtered through our own expression and experience.
Ultimately, I think it’s less productive to put up walls and declare, “That
music isn’t Jewish!” than to open ourselves up, asking instead, “How does this
music move my heart as a Jew?”