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Sing a New Song, and You’ll have the KeyAmy-Jill LevineCASPA 2016The Bible consistently, almost conventionally, speaks of singing new songs: Psalm 33.3 exhorts, ‘Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.’Psalm 40.3 proclaims, ‘He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.’Psalm 96.1 encourages, ‘O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.’Psalm 98.1 advises, ‘O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things.’In Psalm 144.9, the psalmist exults, ‘I will sing a new song to you, O God; upon a ten-stringed harp I will play to you.’Isaiah 42.10 picks up the chorus, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the end of the earth!’In Judith 16.1, the heroine exhorts, ‘Raise to him a new psalm; exalt him, and call upon his name,’ and she herself proclaims in 16.13, ‘I will sing to my God a new song: O Lord, you are great and glorious, wonderful in strength, invincible.’ In Revelation 5.9 and 14.3 the redeemed continue this chorus. There is an abundance of irony here, for these biblical songs are no longer ‘new.’ If we sing these Psalms, in one sense we are not singing ‘new songs’ but very old ones, composed thousands of years ago. Nor, at least for the Hebrew songs, are we singing with new notes – the tropes, the cantillations, for the Psalms, were put in place sometime in the 9th-11th centuries CE. Then again, Eastern European (Ashkenazic), Syrian, Iranian, Egyptian, Spanish-Portuguese, Moroccan, and North African melodies all differ. Change the synagogue, and you’ll hear the same song in a new key. Nor again is any song fully new – just as stories have a limited number of plots, so songs have a limited number of notes. The arrangements are variable, but the number of notes, at least the ones we can hear, are static. We do not sing in the key of R flat, or T sharp. Every song echoes other songs, in words, in music, in mood – so every song will have an echo of something that is sung before, and every song itself will provide the echo for songs yet to be sung. Yet, every time we sing, we sing a new song. Just as we never step in the same river twice, we never sing the same song again. Every song we sing is new: our voices, the pitch, the timing, the accompaniment, the audience, the mood, invariably change. Even the well-known songs performed by professional singers, will have variations. (I have a fondness for Meatloaf – the singer, not the food – and despite some problems that he had here in Australia, I can still appreciate pretty much every performance of ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’ Meatloaf did, by the way, apologize for his comments about the AFL.)More, there are songs that we cannot hear – just as our eyes cannot see the full spectrum of light, so our voices cannot reach the full range of notes, and our ears cannot hear the full range of sounds.There are also songs we cannot sing, for some of these songs are not of human making.Chronicles 16.23 records, ‘Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Tell of his salvation from day to day, and 16.33 affirms ‘Then shall the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.’Job 38.7 asks if we remember ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?’The Psalms have their own orchestration. Psalm 96.12: “Let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.’ Psalm 104.12 listens, “By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation; they sing among the branches.’As Canticles – the Song of Songs - magnificently sounds, ‘The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land’ (2.12)The world even began with a song – Genesis 1.2 tells us, in the New Revised Standard Version, ‘The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” What a non-melodic translation. The deep, Hebrew tehom, is the ocean, and the ocean sings; sometimes it roars; the sound, the song, is there, even if no human ear can hear it. That wind, that ruach, that pneuma, is also breath and spirit – its whoosh can be heard as well as felt. The term for ‘swept’ in both Hebrew and Greek is better understood as hovering, and those vibrations, too, are a song. Before light, there is music, a very very old song, an archaic song. The world is filled with song, with vibration, even if we cannot hear it. There are also songs yet to be sung, with voices that come alive again. Isaiah 26.19 promises, ‘Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead.’Isaiah 35.6 assures, ‘Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. This shall be a chorus of all of G-d’s creation.’ Isaiah 49.13 shouts, ‘Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.’ This initial music tells us something else about songs – we hear the music of the universe in different ways. At Vanderbilt, I co-teach a course on the Bible and Classical Music with my colleague, the composer Michael Alec Rose. We begin the semester with settings of Creation by Josef Haydn, Jean Sibelius, Aaron Copland, and Duke Ellington. We then ask our students, ‘which composer ‘got it right’?’ When we listen closely to these texts, we hear not only the emergence of order out of chaos, we also realize that chaos itself, or infinity, can be beautiful; Haydn’s chords do not resolve, as the waves continue to crash. The beauty and majesty of nature are heard through the music. The various settings do more than appeal to our aesthetic tastes. They immediately move our students from literalists to artistic interpreters. Even the most theologically conservative student comes to realize, through music, that the Bible must be open to multiple interpretations. Judaism teaches shiv‘im panim laTorah (Numbers Rabbah 13.15-16), there are “seventy faces to the Torah,” and thus that every verse is open to myriads of interpretations. Each performance is distinct, and each is connected to what has been performed and what will be performed. To hear only one sound is to fail to have ears to hear. Indeed, one metaphor for teaching might be singing new songs. We present old material in new ways –each generation has a different set of ears, and expectations, and the pedagogical tools that worked decades ago may no longer work. I cannot, for example, presume that if I mention ‘John, Paul, George, and Ringo’ that my students will have any clue who the Fab Four were; then again, I cannot presume that if I mention ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’ that my students will know these are evangelists rather than the newest boy band. I seem to have lost my sense of popular music sometime around 1986, when my first child was born. We help our students, as if in a master class, claim their own performances, sung in their own voices. At the same time, we sing our own songs, adapting them in each setting to new acoustics, new expectations, changes in our own voice. One starting point for our compositions should be the songs of the Bible. We start with composer’s notes and then turn to what may be the most famous of the songs – Mary’s Magnificat (ironically, never called a song), and then hear what new performance notes might be gleaned. (In May I had the privilege of responding to a paper by Professor Anthony Godzieba of Villanova University on music and the Spirit for a conference at KU-Leuven. The full paper will be published by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where many of you have also studied. The initial three ‘Composer’s notes’ here draw from that response.) Composer’s notes, point 1: Songs have a base lines and keys; change the base line and the key, and the song will be a new song. For the church, the baseline is the Christ. But what if the baseline shifts to the Old Testament, whose songs underlie all the songs in the New Testament – do we hear something different in the music? The New Testament riffs on these pieces: the Sermon on the Mount draws from Mt. Sinai’s teachings; Mary’s Magnificat is a reprise of Hannah’s song; John’s prologue and the Christ hymn of Philippians echo songs praising the journey of Chochmah/Sophia from heaven to earth. The Spirit that blows through the Gospels first hummed over the deep in Genesis.Today, these anterior pieces are often heard only in the lectionary and played only in service to a predetermined score. Thus singing a new song should also prompt us to ask: What is the role of the Old Testament (I use this term to distinguish it from the Tanakh) in Christian hermeneutics and discipleship? Does its inclusion change the score? Should it be heard, at least at times, without the Christian overlay (the world behind the text; the world of the text) and with Jewish interpretive accompaniment (the world in front of text, but a world different from that of the church)? Composer’s notes, point 2: Songs often have a history. To be faithful to the song one sings, one should also be faithful (defined variously) to, or at least cognizant of, how the tradition has performed the song before. For example, can we sing the same song, but in a different language? Pentecost tells us that the people in Jerusalem could hear the same message, but in their own languages – so do we adopt? How far can we change the music – the lyrics, the instrument, the timing - without the song becoming unrecognizable, or false? The church moved out of Latin and into the vernacular: what was lost, and what was gained? Does the hymn sound the same in English, and in Swahili or Gaelic? When we hear a song in a new language – Maori for example, which was new to me – what do we hear, and what do we lose? Can we sing the song if we have the words given to us, but we don’t know what the lyrics mean? In the USA, we are frequently hearing, in churches, songs in Spanish and Korean and Swahili; what are the people in the congregations thinking as they sing, or don’t sing, these songs? And how does the vocalist change the impact? We hear music in churches played on organs – the instrument through which the wind –that is, the spirit – moves. What would happen if we used a different instrument that operates by wind, such as a didgeridoo? Composer’s notes, point 3: timing is important. Everything today prestissimo and fortissimo, and we lose the rest (so the Epistle to the Hebrews) and the still small voice (so Elijah’s experience on Mt. Carmel). We do not stop to listen; we do not stop to ask ‘what good news?’ Just as light requires dark and we require time to recharge, so music require silence, and rest. We could also inquire as to what is of greater import; the words or the tune. The answer may well depend on whether the response comes from the lyricist or the composer. We can even ask what makes music musical or a song something to be sung. In some biblical cases, we do not know if we have a song, or a poem, or a psalm, or a hymn. We speak of the Christ hymn in Philippians 2, but might this be a creedal statement rather than a hymn? Is the Nicene creed music? The ‘Our Father’? Was the magnificent opening to the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the word,’ first sung, or chanted, or orated? Does it matter? Can we turn prose into a song, and if we do, how do we hear it differently? What makes music sacred is another question worth pondering: Gregorian chant, tone-poem, punk rock, jazz. What is noise to one person is music to another; what is boring to one is transformative to another. Here I want to put in a word for the wordless song: these songs, known in Jewish mysticism as niggunim, singular niggun (meaning ‘tune, melody’), capture spirituality without words. They also evoke an old Jewish story, the origins of which have been lost. It goes something like this: A young shepherd boy was passing by a synagogue and heard people inside praying. He came inside to join them. The only problem was they were all praying from prayer books. The shepherd boy was illiterate, though he did know how to say the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Not knowing what else to do, he stood in the back of the synagogue and yelled out ‘Aleph! Bet! Gimmel!’ until he finished the entire alphabet. Two of the congregants, finding the boy disruptive, went over to him to tell him to be quiet. But the rabbi told them: ‘Stop! That boy's shouting was more precious than any other prayers said here today! His prayer went straight up to Heaven!’ He then prompted the boy to explain, and here’s what the boy said: ‘I thought I’d just say the letters of the alphabet, and I’d like G-d put the words together.’ The wordless tune, sung to G-d, has its own meaning. Do we find ourselves humming? Singing along but missing, or inventing the words? With missing or wrong words, does the song still have the same meaning? (My favorite, Credence Clearwater Revival’s ‘There’s a bad moon on the rise’ becomes ‘There’s a bathroom on the right.’ Nor should we forget the Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet dreams are made of cheese.’)Next, how do we address dissonance, a necessary part of music? There are times when dissonance – being off-key – is required, and is itself beautiful. Not all songs fit the circumstances at hand. Jesus struck numerous discordant notes: he favored singleness and celibacy in a culture that generally promoted marriage and children; he favored loyalty to a fictive kinship group over that of the natal unit; he encouraging divestment and thus dependence on others; he spoke against worrying about the future and so not laying up treasures on earth; he forbade oaths, and divorce; he announced that he held the keys, indeed he was the key, to salvation…. If religion is to afflict the comfortable, as noted in our discussion earlier about the parables, then some discord should be expected. Before we leave the question of dissonance, we also need to note that there are some songs that perhaps should not be sung, some songs whose words, or tunes, reveal how sinful, or how tone-dear, humanity can be. The Horst-Wessel Song, composed by Stumführer Horst Wessel, a Brownshirt commander, became the theme of the Nazi party. The song is now banned in Germany. In the USA, when I was in primary school, we sang ‘Dixie,’ and I, a child in Massachusetts, thought nothing about the lyric ‘Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, Old times there are not forgotten.’ Those old times included slavery. For one more example: Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” is not, at least for that famous chorus itself, clearly a celebration of the birth of the Christ child. As Professor Michael Marissen has argued, the chorus is hallelujah-ing rather the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and thus the end of Judaism. If he’s right, do we stop singing? The website of the ‘Catholic Church in Australia’ () includes a listing of ‘recommended hymns and songs approved by the ACBC’. The criteria – textual, musical, and liturgical – made sense to me. I also wonder what songs failed to make the list.Along with questions of baseline and notes, instrument and dissonance, we do well when we listen to the conductor, and a conductor is necessary for any ensemble work. We can sing on our own, but a choir requires a conductor.This question brings us to Mary’s Magnificat, because if the conductor is the Empire, or any system that shuts down our music, then we need to think of new ways of singing the old songs, lest those songs become coopted. We need to try new instruments, or find new lyrics, or use a new key to unlock the revolutionary potential that every song has. Tbe. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmom Temple and thus the end of Judaism. hter one-dear, humanity can be. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmomMary’s Magnificat (Luke .46-55) is not called a ‘song’ and Luke does not say that Mary ‘sang’ it, but a song it is, whether hymn or chant or psalm. It is both a new song, and a very old one. Tbe. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmom Temple and thus the end of Judaism. hter one-dear, humanity can be. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmomMary evokes the songs of Miriam and Deborah, Hannah and Judith. Tbe. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmom Temple and thus the end of Judaism. hter one-dear, humanity can be. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmomThese are songs of victory, of revolution, of new life, of celebration. They Tbe. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmom Temple and thus the end of Judaism. hter one-dear, humanity can be. The Horst-Wessel Song, cmomare songs of proclamation and teaching. The women who sing them are not silenced but celebrated, as women’s voices should be. More, Mary gives voice to those who might find themselves voiceless: the slave, the oppressed, the hungry, the forsaken. Her song alone has power. Knowing the composer adds to that power. We don’t in fact know who composed the song: a number of biblical scholars think Luke wrote the various canticles of the Gospel’s first few chapters; others think they came from the Jewish first followers of Jesus; still others think they had their origin outside of the circles gathered in Jesus’ name. We will never know. But since Luke attributes the Magnificat to Mary, we’ll proceed with the view that it should be, intimately, associated with her. We could spend weeks talking about Mary of Nazareth, because to know something about the song requires knowing something about the original singer. As some of you who have worked with me earlier know, when I was a child, Mary made me very nervous. My friends told me that when Jesus returned, it would be by a birth to a Jewish virgin, and I was the only one in the neighborhood. I had very scary thoughts about an angel appearing in my bedroom and announcing to me that I would become the virgin mother of G-d. I simply wished to finish second grade. With some relief, and as the 30+-years-married mother of two children, I note that this is no longer a physical possibility. Understanding of Mary changes for any who encounter her. She, much like Jesus, is a screen on which we project our own concerns. She is also a figure of history, and so we can ask what it means that Mary makes this old song new. We’ve already seen in the Scriptures of Israel that new songs are sung by nature as well as humanity, women as well as men. What does it mean that Mary is a woman? For example, does she represent the feminine part of that heavenly mystery, or manifestation of the divine, that in Judaism had been associated with the Holy Spirit -- who is grammatically feminine and so understood as a woman in Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic? In Greek, the term for ‘spirit’ (pneuma) is neuter in Greek and it is masculine in Latin (spiritus). Alternatively, Mary may represent the refugee, the mother whose child is in danger. She is a first-century Jewish woman and the medieval Christian Queen of Heaven; she is the woman of the Gospels and Acts, of the early Church that developed her story, and of the Qur’an and Hadith. Each iteration changes the way her song is heard. Even how we understand her name impacts how we hear her song. ‘Mary’ is a variant of ‘Miriam,’ and it was that original Miriam, the sister of Moses, who led the women in song at the Red Sea. Her name also evokes Mariamme, Herod the Great’s Hasmonean wife, whose family represented the last period of Jewish autonomy in the homeland until 1948. Thus by her name alone, Mary recalls the songs of liberation from slavery, of political autonomy, of freedom. I am reminded by the Magnificat, as well as by the Song at the Sea in Exodus, of national anthems. When we hear them or sing them – at the Olympics when a gold medal is awarded; in the USA right after the terrorism of 11 September 2001, when citizens were gathered at concerts, or athletic events – we can be united. Songs can bring us together. And yet I wonder: when I heard the Australian national anthem here, I did not hear a strong sense of community loyalty. More, I am in churches often, and although the congregation has the music, and although the cantors tell the people in the pew when to sing, there is rarely much emotion displayed by the congregation. Perhaps we have become inured to the power of music to transport us; perhaps we have lost the ability to rejoice with music and sing those new songs. We can continually speculate about Mary, and so locate the Magnificat in many settings. It may be, given our limited time, to begin rather with the Magnificat itself, and then determine what it tells us about Mary, and about us. The Magnificat comes after Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary (Luke 1.26-38). For this passage, let’s just speak briefly about (1) the timing, (2) the setting, and (3) what we know of the performer, since timing and setting and singer are intrinsic part of any song.Luke 1.26-27 tells that, ‘In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city (Greek: polis) in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.’ Timing here is of import, for part of singing a new song is getting the rhythm right. ‘The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy’ an odd way of keeping time, of dating. Luke thus asks us about our own timing: From what dates do we count time? We could, religiously speaking, count the date from the birth of Jesus and so regard ourselves as living, more or less, in 2016. The date of Jesus’ birth, determined by the sixth-century monk Dionysius Exiguus – which could be translated ‘Dennis the humble’ but I think more accurately ‘Denny the short’ – is wrong (a point Pope Benedict XVI has also noted), but I think we’re stuck with the error. Or, we could date from the creation of the world, as we do in Judaism – it’s 5776. I think we also got wrong, scientifically speaking, but we’ll live with this date as well. Luke’s passage prompts the question: how do we tell time? What are our markers for time? For educators, the beginning of the semester? The year we graduated? The year we married, or entered religious life, or had our first child? How we mark time tells us something about how we compose our lives. Next, Luke calls Nazareth a city (polis). Luke is being generous. Nazareth was a small village; it is not on any ancient map. Mary travels to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who lives in the ‘hill country of Judea’ – no place name, just a region. Elizabeth is not in the capital, but in the hinterlands or, by extension, the Outback. Thus the Gospel prompts another question: on what stage do we sing our songs, and does it matter? The focus is on the singers and the words, not on the size of the audience or the opulence of the venue. As for the singer herself: Mary’s background is not given. We are told, at least from the New Testament, nothing about her parents, her childhood, her interests, even her piety. Do we judge the song differently if we know something about the singer? Does the singer’s age matter, or gender, or ethnicity, or economic status? Following her chat with the angel Gabriel, Mary sets out, quickly, ‘to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.’ We’re now in Luke 1.39-40, the visitation, the actual setting of the performance of the Magnificat. Luke tells us that ‘when Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”’ There is a very old song here, of two women – one elderly and one younger, and all invested in one way or another with pregnancy. We have heard the song before: with Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, Peninnah and Hannah, Ruth and Naomi. Luke is riffing, as a good jazz musician does, on these other scenes, and the riff is one substantially of refusal: refusing the rivalry; refusing to display the women as on competition but showing them working together; refusing the sense that infertility is a punishment from G-d – we should already have learned this from the other passages in which women seek children: there is no sin involved in the infertility of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Samson’s mother, Hannah, the woman of Shunem, or Elizabeth. At the same time, Luke acknowledges that infertility is an issue for women and men who want children. Luke is also teasing if not setting up a funny situation, for while Elizabeth exults and Mary will sing, Zechariah says nothing; he can say nothing. Earlier in the chapter, when Zechariah encountered the angel Gabriel in the Temple, and Gabriel predicted that he and his wife Elizabeth will have a son, Zechariah doubted the angel’s word. The priest says to the angel, ‘How will I now that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years?’ – that is, she’s been through menopause and I’m, well, not as vigorous as I once was. Gabriel is affronted. ‘The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.’” In other words, ‘I’m an angel, I’ve got credentials, I know what I’m doing.’ ‘But now,’ Gabriel continues, ‘because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.’ This muteness, this silence, is immediately a problem, since, as Luke informs us, ‘Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah, and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. When his time of service was ended, he went to his home.’ How does one signal that one has had a vision? More, how does one signal the contents of the vision? Pantomime? Just imagine what this would have looked like. The muteness has another impact: when Mary comes to visit Elizabeth, we have in the home two pregnant, and talkative, Jewish mothers, and the man cannot speak a word. There is a certain irony here: Paul says that women are not to speak or have authority – too bad he never read Luke chapter 1. I might dare to say the same thing about anyone else who would silence women, but that is another lecture.Luke 1.43-45 sets up the Magnificat, as Elizabeth exclaims, ‘And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ A number of Latin Manuscripts attribute the Magnificat to Elizabeth – and so anyone can sing this song, because everyone has a soul, everyone can magnify G-d, everyone can rejoice in G-d the savior. We can all sing Mary’s song. And when we do, we are blessed, as we’ll see. Mary then sings her Magnificat. That is, she takes the time to sing, and we take the time to listen. The song is not plot driven; rather, it takes time, it fills time. It’s like an aria in an opera: the song less moves the plot forward than it deepens it. The Magnificat gives us time to think, and to savor. We pay attention to each word. Mary sings, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.’ She is singing anew the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2.1-10. Hannah, centuries earlier, announced, ‘My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God.’ As Mary sings, ‘He has destroyed/brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly,’ so Hannah Hannah centuries earlier, proclaimed, ‘The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.’ Some lines need repeating, with new words, but the same tune. The historian Fran?ois Bovon notes that in the Magnificat, with the exception of Mary’s opening statement that future generations will call her blessed, G-d is the subject of each verse. This makes Mary a theologian. She is also one of the people, for as she sings, ‘he has looked with favor [the same term can be translated ‘care’ or ‘attention’] on the lowliness of his slave. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.’ The verse raises the artistic question: can we separate the singer from the song? Here is my chance to quote from William Butler Yates’s ‘Among School Children,’ which begins, ‘I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies…’ and which concludes, ‘O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer. Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance. How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ When we take the song and make it our own, we are both song and singer, inseparable, unique, beautiful. We also must determine if we need to change the words. Mary refers to herself as a ‘slave’ (Greek: doule). The term evokes the tradition of the Exodus and so Miriam’s Song. Thus the Magnificat already signals its political dimension. And yet, at least in the USA, we might be wary of words that appear to approve of slavery in any sense. The scars of slavery are still livid. Yet again, only free people in the Bible refer to themselves as slaves, and this self-identification shows that they acknowledge that G-d is their Lord. Mary’s comment about ‘all nations’ signals as well a potentially ecumenical import. Not all generations have called Mary ‘blessed.’ Mary was collateral damage in the Protestant Reformation, and the Protestant churches do not accept various Marian doctrines: the Immaculate Conception; the Assumption. Yet the Magnificat could be a place at which all Christians as well as Muslims could agree: she is blessed, for various reasons, including her song. I wonder if we Jews might also at least recognize in Mary, singing anew the songs of Miriam and Deborah, Hannah and Judith, another Jewish woman’s voice proclaiming justice and freedom. We might do more with Mary’s voice: what would the Magnificat sound like if it were sung by a man? Biblical characters should not be restricted to particular genders, as if only women identify with Mary and Sarah and Miriam, and only men identify with Jesus and Abraham and Moses. I’ve found in working with women’s groups that women identify with Jesus in his suffering but not in his leadership; women can identify with the Good Samaritan or the fellow in the ditch, but men rarely identify with Martha and Mary. Luke 1.49 continues the song: ‘The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’ The Greek, if we take it very literally, could also be read as ‘he does great things in me.’ Hence the song celebrates the body, as songs should. To sing is to use the body. The rest of Magnificat both echoes the earlier songs and gives them new meaning. Each word evokes old associations, and the combinations create new ones: Mighty One, holy, his name, mercy, generations, strength… ‘Mary remained with [Elizabeth] about three months and then returned to her house,’ and as she returned, she sang of peace and joy, reunion and reconciliation, justice and judgment. We do not have to invent new tunes, new lyrics, or new rhythms to pray, to rejoice, or to lament. We can borrow, or adapt. Our task is to make each song new as we sing for celebration and for struggle, for inspiration and for challenge. ................
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