[saymaListserv] Concern about one of the songs in the hymnals requested for use at SAYMA's YM

[free polazzo]

Dear Beth,

Best wishes on finding the hymnals for yearly meeting.   I enjoy hearing 
the songs sung by those who love to sing them.

I do not enjoy songs that cause pain and suffering to others, whether 
intentionally or not.

I bring a concern about a song in the Quaker Hymnal called  "Lord of the 
Dance".   Friends on the Jewish Friends List in 1997, after lots of prayer 
and gnashing of teeth, concluded that the song includes a verse that 
attacks the Jewish people.    We did not think that FGC would want to 
include a song which was offensive to many of it's members or which 
perpetuated violence against a whole group of people.

We brought our concern to FGC's Hymnal Committee and to FGC Staff.   We 
also contacted the author and asked him to change the offending 
verse.    He denied it was anti Jewish and refused to discuss it 
further.   Our group labored with FGC for many years about our concern that 
the song perpetuates stereotypes of Jews as Christ Killers.  While many 
kind Friends agreed that the song did indeed do that, they admitted never 
being conscious of it until we brought it to their attention.  "And this is 
my favorite song, too!" Said many Friends.    All we asked was that the one 
offending verse be removed.

Even so, all we could get was a FOOTNOTE that referred the singer to the 
back of the hymnal.  Most Unsatifactory.   Which of you reads footnotes in 
a hymnal in the back of the book, while singing?    And remember that there 
have been Two different footnotes in two different editions.  (These 
"notes" are a whole other magilla! There are more emails that discuss the 
footnote(s) that FGC added over the years to try and make it "OK".  But 
none of the footnotes are simple nor fair, IMHO).

For those who wish to learn more about the pain and suffering that songs 
like this caused your Jewish brothers and sisters, please read the email, 
below, from a Jewish Friends List member whose name I have removed.

Blessings and Safe Journeys to SAYMA's Yearly Meeting at Warren Wilson 
College next week.

Free

PS:     "We'll be coming 'round the mountain when we come"


At 09:47 AM 5/31/2005, Helen Ensign wrote:

>Greetings, Friends
>
>This is a call to any meeting that can share the use of their hymnals at 
>our annual gathering. The singing workshop (Friday afternoon) has 29 folks 
>registered at the moment, and my own meeting, Atlanta, has only 6 hymnals 
>right now. Last year Celo Meeting lent their 20 hymnals and I do not know 
>if they will do so again. If any meeting is willing to send any amount of 
>hymnals for the gathering, I promise to make sure that all of them return 
>to your meeting safely! I will be arriving at the gathering on Thursday 
>midday. The workshop needing the books is on Friday. Thanks in advance for 
>sharing!
>
>Beth Ensign--workshop coordinator
><mailto:hensign at mindspring.com>hensign at mindspring.com
>404-658-1531
>


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Mon, 07 Sep 1998 11:48:57 -0400
> >Dear Friend S G,
> > >Thank you for your comments regarding Lord of the Dance. About a year 
> ago the
> > >song was extensively discussed on line by Jewish Quakers, a small American
> > >list, headed by Dick Bellin (rbellin at cpcug.org) because it was
> > incorporated in the Song Book, published by Friends General Conference. 
> Members of the list
> > >brought the matter before their Monthly Meetings; as a result, several MM,
> > >including my own Meeting Claremont in California, asked that Members 
> refrain
> > >from using the song and called on FGC to disown the words. There is 
> extensive
> > >correpondence on the matter, not being able to type lengthy documents, 
> I have
> > >taken the liberty to forward your letter to Dick Bellin, to Joy Weaver
> > >(ABC @erols.com) and Free Polazzo (XYX at mindspring.com)
> > >G K (XYX at aol.com)
> >


> From Friend S. G.:
A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to peruse a booklet published 
by the Leaveners, Margot Tennyson, *Millennium Interfaith Invocation -- 
Universal Love: Guide to help participants in an act of universal 
awareness*. It provides resources, in the form of a programme for an 
interfaith service, quotations from different faiths on universal love, 
poems, a play, songs and circle dances, which seek to encourage dialogue 
between world religions. Specifically, it seeks to instigate a millennial 
event around the country focused on the theme of universal love, and 
provides resources intended to seed and inspire the imagination. dancing, 
and imagery of dance, looms large in it. The project will be launched with 
a local multifaith celebration at Friends House next April.

There is a wealth of material and ideas in the booklet, and it is clearly 
an excellent initiative. One element, included with the very best of 
intentions, struck me as out of tune with the eirenic spirit of the 
project, and it is to test my intuitions about this that I am posting this 
message. It seems to me that its inclusion points to issues, and a failure 
to realise that there are certain sensitivities, which go far beyond the 
booklet; and this too is a reason for writing.

As I have noted, dance and imagery of dancing looms large in the booklet, 
and this is surely a good thing. Given this, it is understandable that the 
song "Lord of the Dance", which exploits the image of dance and dancer to 
tell the story of Jesus, looms large in the collection of "Songs of 
Universal Love". The melody has Quaker connections, based as it is on the 
Shaker song "'Tis a gift to be simple", which is also included in the 
booklet. The imagery of "Lord of the Dance" and the music strike me as 
beautiful and as wholly appropriate. Some of the specific content of the 
song itself, however, does not.

>The third stanza reads:
>
>"I danced on the Sabbath
>"And I cured the lame;
>"The holy people
>"Said it was a shame.
>"They whipped and they stripped
>"And they hung me on high,
>"And they left me there
>"On a Cross to die."
"The holy people" in question is of-course the Jewish people, who are 
portrayed as having crucified Jesus because he healed the lame on the 
Sabbath. The labelling of the Jewish people as a nation of Christ-killers, 
all generations of which bear this guilt [Matthew 27:25] (and, in the terms 
of most of the credal Churches, as corporately guilty of the unforgivable 
sin of deicide), has been the archetypal reason for two millennia of 
persecution of the Jewish people and the inspiration for massacres, 
pogroms, burnings at the stake, forced conversions and a tradition of 
anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism which culminated in systematic attempted 
genocide by means of carefully planned and programmed factories of death 
not many decades ago. The stanza quoted above gives me offence, and Jewish 
friends and acquaintances who have encountered it -- at an ecumenical 
service of the Council of Christians and Jews, for example -- have told me 
that they find it offensive in the extreme and have characterized the song 
as virulently anti-Semitic. It is anything but eirenic, although the beauty 
of the melody and of the imagery of dance evidently obscure this, ad 
Friends in particular should take pains to distance ourselves from its 
claim and not to use the song.

As a Jewish child aged about seven, I was friendly with a couple of 
children in the neighborhood who were Catholics. One day, they ushered me 
into their home and led me to a crucifix which hung on a wall. Pointing to 
the image on the crucifix, they asked me quite aggressively why I had 
crucified my king. I was rather taken aback, firstly by the claim that the 
figure impaled on the cross represented "my king", and by the claim that I 
was responsible for the crucifixion itself. In response to my denial that 
the figure represented my king, they pointed to what represented a scroll 
above the figure's head, and told me that it said clearly that the figure 
was King of the Jews. The crucifix was a tiny one, and one would have 
needed a micro dot reader to verify that this was indeed written there, but 
it seemed to me that the whole scenario was so crazy in any case that it 
would be futile to question the veracity of the claim made about the 
representation of the scroll. I knew something about the story of the 
crucifixion, though, and remembered quite clearly that Jesus had been 
crucified by the Romans and that his garments had been said to have been 
appropriated by Roman soldiers. This was something I had learnt from 
something written by someone who was not Jewish. It then dawned on me that 
the two children accusing me of crucifying Jesus personally were *Roman* 
Catholics, and that Roman Catholics were surely Romans. I therefore said 
that the Romans had crucified Jesus, that as Roman Catholics they were 
clearly Romans, and that by the logic which they applied in accusing *me* 
of this heinous crime which took place some two millennia before I was 
born, they -- as Romans -- were actually the ones who should be said to 
have crucified him. The interrogation before the crucifix stopped abruptly 
at that point, and I suspect that their parish priest faced awkward 
questions that Sunday. Now that I think of it, I do not recall them ever 
playing with me after that. The incident had brought back an unpleasant 
memory. A year or two before the interrogation before the crucifix, I had 
been sitting quietly on the steps outside the block of flats in which my 
parents and I lived at the time. There was no connection with my Catholic 
friends: we lived in a different part of the neighborhood at the time. I 
think that it was around Passover-time, in other words, at around Easter. 
An adolescent of perhaps twelve or thirteen -- at least double my age at 
the time -- walked past, noticed me sitting there, and looked at me 
speculatively. He turned to me and asked whether I was Jewish, and I said 
that I was. He then punched me full in the face and walked away. My 
impression at the time was that it was because Christians said that the 
Jews had murdered Jesus, whom they believed to be God. By the age of five 
or six (in the 1950s), I already knew that there were Christians who 
regarded even new-born Jewish infants as Christ-killers and as "fair game" 
for attacks or even extermination; and the memory of where this portrayal 
of us as a Satanic nation of decides could lead had been branded indelibly 
into our memories by the extermination of European Jewry a mere decade before.

As I knew even at the age of seven, the Jewish people at large had not 
crucified Jesus, and this corporate accusation should surely have been put 
well and truly to rest by New Testament scholarship. Even the Roman 
Catholic Church has ceased officially, albeit reluctantly, to teach that 
the Jewish people killed Jesus. New Testament scholarship recognizes that 
the New Testament canon general, and the gospels in particular, took their 
present form decades after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and that the 
gospel accounts reflect, among other things, community-specific 
contemporary concerns which had little to do with the life of the 
historical Jesus. Gentile Christianity was emerging and Jewish-Christianit= 
y was already being bludgeoned out of existence in the communities in which 
the gospels as we have them took place, and this has much to do with the 
polemic against "the Jews". In the eighties or early in the nineties of the 
first Christian century, the addition of a "conscience-clause" benediction 
to the Eighteen Benedictions which form the core of the synagogue service 
sought to exclude Christians from  the synagogue, and the trauma of this 
late rift between "Church" and synagogue also enters into the excoriation 
of "the Jews" and the portrayal of "the Jews" as the crucifiers of Jesus. 
As for the evidence of history about the trial and death of Jesus, people 
who want an accessible discussion could do worse than to read Haim Cohn, 
*The Trial and Death of Jesus*, New York, 1977, for the perspective of an 
eminent Jewish jurist and former member of the bench of the Supreme Court 
of Israel, who brings his legal expertise and expert knowledge of both 
Jewish and Roman custom at the time of Jesus to bear upon this question. As 
far as the gospels are concerned, John G. Gager, Professor of Religion at 
Princeton University and a student of the eminent New Testament scholar 
Krister Stendahl, expresses the view of most modern New Testament 
scholarship when he writes in the introduction to his book *The Origins of 
Anti-Semitism* (New York and Oxford, 1985, page 7):

"The bulk of early Christian literature and certainly of the New Testament 
does in truth deal harshly with Judaism.  But this undoubted fact must be 
interpreted in light of the strong likelihood that the surviving Christian 
writings comprise a deliberately selective sample.... The conception of 
early Christian history ... is true only for the victorious minority 
[within Christianity itself] whose position is reflected in the surviving 
literature.  The New Testament and other extant Christian writings 
represent and reinforce the views of the ultimate winners.  Like other 
retrospective, value-laden assessments endorsed by history's winners, these 
writings are intended to create an image of earlier centuries that accords 
with their idea of what should have been.  This artificial image must now 
give way to a richer and more variegated picture that is only now beginning 
to emerge."

The stanza which I quoted epitomizes the spurious rationale for almost two 
millennia of anti-Jewish persecution. The stanza itself is small and looks 
inconsequential, but the myth which informs it is not. We are surely bound 
to eschew the myth of eternal Jewish guilt and all that rests upon it.

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