Watching the River Flow 5783-84 (with Oud)

As personal and collective history happens, how does it feel?

This is my brand-new old song, whose words I wrote (or stole), and whose lyrics I sing. You can either press the link to the YouTube music video and listen to the funky blues piano, Guns N’ Roses electric guitar, virtuoso solo oud and children’s choir directly, and hear it and judge for yourself. Or you can first read the literary background to the poem, and then watch the video and listen to the song.

“Watching the River Flow 5783-84 (with Oud)” is a combination of Walt Whitman’s 19^th century “Song of Myself”, Yehuda HaLevi’s 12^th century poem “My heart is in the East, and I am in the far far West”, and Bob Dylan’s 20th century Robert Johnson-style American blues song, “Watching the River Flow” (1971).

Yehuda HaLevi, (born Tudela, Spain 1075, died Jerusalem 1141) was perhaps the most famous Hebrew poet of the Spanish Golden Age. He lived much of his life as a physician in Andalusia, the then-Muslim ruled southern part of what became, after the Reconquista, Catholic Spain. Though HaLevi wrote many poems of longing for Zion and Jerusalem, he only reached the land of Israel at age 66, after a long sea voyage from the Far West of Spain, via Alexandria and Cairo, to the gates of Crusader-held Jerusalem, where Yehuda HaLevi met his death in 1141.

But while he wrote his poetry in Hebrew, HaLevi wrote his philosophical work in his native tongue, Arabic. His book, “The Kuzari: in defense of a despised belief system” was a philosophical and historical defense of Jewish civilization against then-current attacks by Islamic imams, Christian theologians, neo-Platonic philosophers, and even the fundamentalist Jewish breakaway sect of the Karaites.

However, though written in English, my new song, “Watching the River Flow 5783-84 (with Oud)” is based on HaLevi’s most famous Hebrew poem, “My heart is in the East, and I am in the far far West”.  The original Hebrew text (ca. 1130) is framed by the two English translations of Peter Cole (2007) and Hillel Halkin (2010):

My heart is in the East –

and I am at the edge of the West.

How can I possibly taste what I eat?

How could it please me?

How can I keep my promise

or ever fulfill my vow,

when Zion is held by Edom

and I am bound by Arabia’s chains?

I’d gladly leave behind me

all the pleasures of Spain –

if only I might see

the dust and ruins of your Shrine.

לִבִּי בְמִזְרָח וְאָנֹכִי בְּסוֹף מַעֲרָב

אֵיךְ אֶטְעֲמָה אֵת אֲשֶׁר אֹכַל וְאֵיךְ יֶעֱרָב

אֵיכָה אֲשַׁלֵּם נְדָרַי וֶאֱסָרַי, בְּעוֹד

צִיּוֹן בְּחֶבֶל אֱדוֹם וַאֲנִי בְּכֶבֶל עֲרָב

יֵקַל בְּעֵינַי עֲזֹב כָּל טוּב סְפָרַד, כְּמוֹ

יֵקַר בְּעֵינַי רְאוֹת עַפְרוֹת דְּבִיר נֶחֱרָב.

My heart in the East

But the rest of me far in the West –

How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?

How, in the bonds of the Moor,

Zion chained to the Cross,

Can I do what I vowed to and must?

Gladly I’d leave

All the best of grand Spain

For one glimpse of the ruined Shrine’s dust.

*               *               *               *

“How could it please me?”

“How can I savor this life?”

These are the exact questions that seven centuries later the American poet Walt Whitman asks in his Song of Myself: “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person”. Whitman (born Huntington, Long Island 1819, died Camden, New Jersey 1892) writes with a sharp focus on “me” and “I”. His “Song of Myself” poetically experiences the reality of the world through his personal subjectivity:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself…

And what I assume you shall assume…

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass…”

Yet his work combines the intensely personal with the intensely collective. His four poems on the death of President Abraham Lincoln – including his famous “O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done…” reflect (like HaLevi) a deep engagement with history.  Whitman adds the eye of realism to his romantic gaze.  In addition to being a carpenter, Whitman was a professional journalist.  In an earlier age of American journalism, he travelled the country and captured the historical moment. Yes, Whitman focused on “I, Me, Mine”, but also on “We, the (American) People”.

He combined romanticism with realism, the personal with the collective; he was at ease loafing, observing a spear of summer grass, and at work, engaging with as-it-happens American history. This and That. I and We. Now and Here. No wonder he says of himself, in one of his most widely quoted lines:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

*               *               *               *

“I Contain Multitudes” is the title of the first song on Bob Dylan’s 2020 album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways”.  Like Song of Myself, Dylan’s “I Contain Multitudes” channels Whitman’s “One’s-self I sing”, reporting on what is happening from the internal front lines to celebrate Dylan’s contradictions.

A century after its first edition launched Walt Whitman’s epic “Leaves of Grass”, the spirit of Whitman was born again in Allen Ginsberg and his fellow beats, who in turn passed Whitman’s baton to another American original, a poet singing of the personal and the collective, Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, Duluth, Minnesota 1941.  Hebrew name: Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). “Considered to be one of the greatest songwriters in history” Dylan rose to fame writing and singing original songs in a prophetic mode,  such as “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964).  But though Dylan’s songs were initially based in the folk song tradition, and Robert Johnson-style blues, “Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it “with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry””.  Yet for all the literary superstructure, as a personal songwriter, a central Whitmanesque question that Dylan asks, both of the listener and of himself, comes from the first line of the chorus of his famous 6:13 minutes 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone”: How does it feel?

Like Whitman,  Dylan is a poet of his own “personal mythical”, singing out loud, to all, of how his intimate individual experience feels. But Dylan is also a poet of the collective.  The same 2020 album that begins with “I Contain Multitudes” contains “Murder Most Foul”, a long poetic ballad of American history, centred on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Just like Whitman’s poems triggered by the death of Abraham Lincoln, this song expands from the events in Dallas in November 1963 and what immediately followed, to a road trip through subsequent American cultural history. Here Dylan is a Whitmanesque reporter, observing history as it happens, and the music lets you know how it feels.

*               *               *               *

Eight and a half centuries after his death at Zion’s gates, Yehuda HaLevi’s poems have been set to music in rebuilt Jerusalem, with electric guitar and piano and darbuka and Oud, and sung by Eti Ankri, the native Hebrew-speaking daughter of an Israeli policeman who was born in Arabic Tunisia. Bringing it all back home.

*               *               *               *

In 2023-24, I combine HaLevi’s “My Heart is in the East” and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” by channeling the American blues.  To me, as history happens, how does it feel?  That’s the question I am trying to answer in “Watching the River Flow 5783-84 (with Oud)”.