By Donald H. Harrison

Drama and music can be powerful tools for forging international understanding and Jewish identity, Noa Baum and Joshua Nelson demonstrated respectively during a day of learning sponsored Sunday, Jan. 22, by San Diego’s Agency for Jewish Education.

Baum retold the stories of her Israeli Jewish family and of a friend’s Palestinian family during a performance of the one-woman A Land Twice Promised  in the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center.

Baum, who today lives near Washington D.C., said her first war was the Six Day War in 1967 when she was a child.  Her mother taped the windows of their apartment so that the glass wouldn’t shatter when the bombs fell.  She and other children helped to clean the furnace room—which served as the bomb shelter for her apartment building.  She remembered splashing water into the room, playing in the mud formed from the soot and water and thinking childishly,  “hey, the war effort is cool.”

She came down with a fever the next day, and was staying with a neighbor—a Mrs. Levine—when she heard the shrill piercing sound of air raid sirens. Later, after going to the shelter,  she experienced the long screaming sounds of a falling bomb and an explosion.  Later, the bombs sounded more like a “barking cough”—far from their apartment, Israeli forces were retaliating.

In the evening, she remembered hearing the sounds of adults snoring inside the bomb shelter, but when she closed her own eyes, she heard the sound of boots—the black boots of the Nazis so often described by her mother, a Holocaust survivor  She woke up in her father’s arms who comforted her by saying that there are no Nazis, never again!

On the fourth day of the war, Baum's mother awakened her exclaiming, with tears streaming down her face, that they were part of history!  On this day Israeli troops had liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, and were praying at Ha Kotel. Baum recalled coming out of the shelter and being blinded by the light.

Again, childishly, she exclaimed that war had turned out to be great fun—having a sleep over  with all the neighbors. But a boy on whom she had a school girl crush gave her a strange look: “Yeah, if all our boys weren’t killed—who knows how many?”  The girl “felt my face flush in shame.”

A Palestinian acquaintance, the mother of a friend whom she got to know while living in Davis, California, also had a 1967 war story to tell—and now Baum switched from an Israeli accent to a Palestinian one.

When the shooting began, the mother took refuge with a neighbor in her West Bank village—a neighbor who told her she was welcome to anything in the kitchen, except the coffee.  The neighbor “couldn’t live without the coffee.”  The friend’s mother thought of going to her own apartment to retrieve some coffee, but it was too dangerous.

Her husband was away at the front, and as the news came over the radio that the Jews were winning the war, the mother cried to her daughter in despair, “it is a good thing your father died; he did not live to see this day.”  Jews, she had heard, are murderers, and their own family’s fate might be the same as those of the villagers of Deir Yassin in the last war (1948).

Some of the villagers decided they had better flee down the mountain and through the desert to Jordan, but a village elder, Abu Salim, urged them not to go. Never again, he said, should their people become refugees, living in camps, removed from their homes, dependent on others. “If we are going to die, let us die with dignity.”

The mother said she wondered if she would see a Jew if she opened her window.  "What do they look like?  Some people say they have horns and tails, but I don’t believe such  nonsense."

Then, one day, a Jew who had known Abu Salim before the last war came to visit him.  Everyone in the village stared at him.  He stood up, spread his arms, wiggled his fingers. “What are you staring at?” he inquired. “I have two arms, two hands, ten fingers.”

On another day, the mother saw men covered with dust trudging up the hill.  Khalil, her husband, was among them.  He had survived!  She ran to him.  “Thank God!” Khalil said.  “You did not leave.”

The suffering of non-combatants is wartime is universal, yet each person has stray memories—hoarding coffee, hearing the snoring of strange people—that demonstrate our common humanity/

* *

Joshua Nelson serves as director of music at Hopewell Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, and also teaches Hebrew school at Temple Shari-Tefilo in nearby south Orange, N.J.  He combined the liturgy of his temple with the gospel sounds common to black churches to create what he calls “kosher gospel.”

It didn’t take very long for the Limmud audience to get into his sound, aided by  a pianist, guitarist, drummer, and a tambourine section that included two female and one male back up singers. Nelson launched into a well known song, with some very different lyrics.

Give me that ol' time religion...

Walk to shul on Shabbos   

Next he performed the Hebrew song Romehmu, advising the audience to “clap with neshama” to the lyrics extolling God.  Then came a rockin’ rollickin’ version of Adon Olam, with individual riffs on piano, guitar and drums and a display of Nelson’s own  piano virtuosity.

Himself a member of a black synagogue, Nelson told the audience that he teaches at a Reform temple, and attends services on festivals at a Sephardic Orthodox congregation.  Sometimes, he added, he drops by a Conservative congregation as well as a Reconstructionist one.

In introducing his "kosher gospel" rendition of Shalom Rav, the performer said "we are trying to have Jewish revival, and also build bridges to our allies."  He started with the Debbie Friedman version of the popular song for peace, commenting with approval as students in the audience began waving their cell phones to the rhythm of the song. The phones' illuminated display panels had an effect similar to glow sticks in the darkened theatre.

"We're spreading peace through light," enthused Nelson, whose music though contagious did not affect everyone similarly.  A little girl in front of me kept her fingers to her ears through the overly amplified concert, and some elderly women behind me also found the beat just too noisy.  But most in the audience were transfixed by the performer, cheering him on as he held a note on the "o" in the  Hebrew word l'olam (the world). When he concluded his solo, he received cheers and a standing ovation from many.

At his synagogue, he said, there were 800 kids and sometimes, especially during the year from High Holidays to High Holidays, the light of observance sometimes flicker. Other times, as when the Jewish community responded to the needs of the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Hurricane Katrina, "that was what being a Jew was all about."

He taught the audience the lyrics to his next song:

I wanna be a more observant Jew.

Pray to God in Hebrew

Sing a song of Zion

No mournin' nor crying'

I wanna dance the hora

Sit with the rabbi, study Torah.

"Who's the local rabbi here?" he asked, and picked the name of Rabbi David Kornberg of Congregation Beth Am from the chorus of responses.  Thereafter the verse became "Sit with Rabbi Kornberg and study Torah..."

He brought some children onto the stage, who quickly got into singing or dancing with him.  One girl named Heather was heartily applauded when she she braved the footlights to fill in the end of the verses: 

I wanna be a more observant--

--JEW

Pray to God in--

--HEBREW!

Nelson credited soul artist Aretha Franklin with the tune for the song, Mi Chamocha, which once again brought the audience to its feet, even luring Center for Jewish Culture luminaries Jacqueline Siegel and Jackie Gmach onto the stage for some impromptu dancing with children.

Oseh Shalom, which featured responsive singing by the audience, was another crowd pleaser. 

Nelson suggested that when Reform Jews created their liturgies, they adopted the quiet prayer styles of the Methodists or the Presbyterians, perhaps hoping to fit in with the rest of America.  But, he suggested, the sounds of Judaism don't have to be sad.

Demonstrating, he took the bittersweet Hebrew song, Eli Eli, about sounds and sights we hope never to forget, and transformed it into a jazz melody, including a portion which he hummed as a niggun (melody without words).

Next, women and men competed in singing a traditional melody of H'nai Matov which began with the traditional melody.  But Joshua Nelson and the Kosher Gosepel Singers concluded the concert by adapting the song about how good it is for brothers to be sitting together to the melody of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Talk about an upbeat ending for the Limmud Day of Learning!  We all seemed to march with smiles on our faces from the Lawrence Family JCC to our cars!