Bach, Dvorak and Verdi all wrote musical settings for it. ( Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)'How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?' The forced migration of millions of people from the region, mainly from Syria, is having worldwide consequences.
And that is the message of Psalm 137 as well. It has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African-Americans.
The trauma served as a crucible, forcing the Israelites to rethink their relationship to Yahweh, reassess their standing as a chosen people and rewrite their history. Psalm 137, the subject of my most recent book, “Song of Exile,” is a 2,500-year-old Hebrew poem that deals with the exile that will be remembered on Tisha B’av. So did Jeremiah Wright, who was Barack Obama’s pastor when he lived in Chicago.So, what is the central message of the psalm for today’s world?The problem of what to remember, what to forgive and how to achieve justice has never been more vexing.By the original rivers of Babylon, now war-torn regions of Iraq and Syria devastated by the Islamic State, stories emerge of captives taking refuge in the river. THE CONVERSATION via AP — At sundown on July 29, Jews around the world will observe Tisha B’av, the most somber of Jewish holidays. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)Thousands pray at the Western Wall on the eve of Tisha B’Av in the Old City of Jerusalem, on August 10, 2019.
The psalm has also inspired numerous political leaders and social movements, and immigrants as varied as Irish and Korean have identified with the story. Franklin, at a city park named in the late civil rights leader’s honor Monday, Aug. 1, 2005, in Detroit. The exile story, which echoes through the Bible, is central to the major prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Lamentations and Isaiah. Like the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, which happened several centuries earlier, the Babylonian exile dwells at the heart of Judaism. C.L. And the aftermath of exile, when Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and allowed the Judeans to return to Israel, is narrated in books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In Franklin’s case, he answered the psalm’s central question of whether to sing with a resounding yes.
It captures succinctly the ways people come to grips with trauma: turning inward and venting their rage.There is a reason the psalm continues to resonate with people, even today.By the rivers of Babylon: Why a 2,500-year-old Hebrew poem still mattersBy the rivers of Babylon, painting by Gebhard Fugel, c. 1920 (Wikimedia/ creative commons)Soul singer Aretha Franklin performs during a ceremony honoring her father, the Rev. And rightly so. “By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down and wept when we remember’d thee O Boston….”On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made the psalm the centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.About 100 years later, in the wake of World War II, the dissident actor and singer Paul Robeson saw deep parallels between the plight of Jews and African-Americans and loved to perform Dvorak’s setting of the psalm.Some of the most celebrated African-American preachers, including C. L. Franklin of Detroit (Aretha Franklin’s father), also preached on the psalm. It has featured in the musical “Godspell.” Dozens of artists have recorded their own version of “Rivers of Babylon.” This includes a Rastafarian-tinged version by the Jamaican group the Melodians and a version by Boney M that became a blockbuster disco hit in 1978.
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