Songs can be powerful forces for change. Think of the impact in the 1960s here in the United States of Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer," and "We Shall Overcome." Abel Meeropol's "Strange Fruit," written in 1937 and made famous two years later by Billie Holiday, brought to light the injustice of racism and the horror of lynching. More than 200 years ago, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle's "La Marseillaise" became the rallying call of the French Revolution and an inspiration for freedom fighters throughout Europe. And Beethoven's 1824 setting of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" served as an inspiration and a powerful symbol for anti-monarchists and partisans of democracy. In 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven's Ninth

Composer William Parker wrote, "It is the role of the artist to incite political, social, and spiritual revolution, to awaken us from our sleep and never let us forget our obligations as human beings to light the fire of compassion." Conductor Robert Shaw wrote, "In a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human dignity, the arts have become the custodians of those values which most worthily define

humanity, which most sensitively define Divinity." And noted author Salman Rush die  wrote, "The fictions of literature declare themselves as fictions--they are lies which admit they are lies and are therefore able, at their best, to tell profound truths. The fictions of politics declare themselves as truths and are therefore, often, just lies."

 

This is the time for us all to be singing "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" and "Ani

Ve-ata Neshaneh Et Ha-olam" and "There Must Be Another Way."