Summer of Soul
Friday January 14, 2022
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
By some strange coincidence, we have been privileged twice in the past year, to travel back in time fifty years to the earthshaking year of 1969.
Two recent documentary movies have allowed us to go back in time and have revealed to us two historic musical events of 1969 whose recordings were hidden away and forgotten until now. “Get Back,” a three-part film by Peter Jackson, gives us front row seats at the final composing, rehearsing and recording sessions of the Beatles which took place in January 1969. And “Summer of Soul” documents a concert series that took place over the course of six Sundays from June 29 to August 24 of that year in Mount Morris Park, now Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem, New York City. The Harlem Cultural Festival.
I have been challenged by a friend in the congregation to offer a sermon about the Beatles, and I will do so some time…while I am still 64. But tonight, on the Shabbat of Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the time seems right to reflect on everything we might learn from “Summer of Soul,” the award winning, blood pumping film about the “Black Woodstock,” which should have been one of the most talked about musical events of the 20th century, and yet was completely unknown to the outside world….until now.
“Summer of Soul” was created by the black musician and musicologist Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and co-founder of the hip hop band Roots. Questlove is considered one of the foremost experts in Black music and yet, like most of us, he had never heard about the series of concerts in Harlem in the summer of 1969, until he learned of the 40 hours of video tapes which had been made by the filmmaker Hal Tulchin. Tulchin had made the video tapes hoping to produce a TV special with them but never succeeded in finding a TV studio to back his project. So the tapes sat in Tulchin’s basement for fifty years. “Summer of Love” is the astounding result of Questlove’s project to reveal to us a pivotal and moving moment in American musical history.
The camera pans over the crowd. On a typical Sunday afternoon in the park that summer there were 50,000 people. Little children, grandparents, men, women, virtually every face in the crowd is black. The film opens with a drum solo by 19-year-old Stevie Wonder. 25-year old Gladys Knight and the Pips. BB King was there in his glory at age 44. Sly and the Family Stone showed up, just before playing at the other Woodstock. The Fifth Dimension singing their hits The Age of Aquarius and Let the Sun Shine from the Broadway musical Hair. David Ruffin of The Temptations singing “My Girl.” Intensely spiritual black gospel choirs, Motown sounds, the music of the Civil Rights struggle and the anti-war movement. The African superstar Hugh Masekela. Nina Simone pushing and urging the crowd “are you ready Black people?” and in what may be the single highlight of the entire film, 30-year old gospel singer Mavis Staples together with her mentor and idol Mahalia Jackson, singing “Take My Hand Precious Lord” which Jackson had sung a year earlier at the funeral for Dr. Martin Luther King.
The camera keeps going to the crowd. All those kids and families and old folks, smiling and singing, clapping and dancing. The film captures a moment of exaltation in the history of Black America, just one year after Dr. King’s assassination. A moment of crossing the Red Sea.
We read the story of the Red Sea parting in the Torah this week, which takes us back much, much further than fifty years. This story takes us back more than three thousand years, to our people’s moment of redemption and exaltation. That was our moment of freedom and of song. You know the story. We read last week of the Passover night, the 10th and final plague, in which the firstborn of every Egyptian household dies while the Children of Israel huddle inside their homes, marked with blood over the door. Brokenhearted, the Pharoah, King of Egypt finally allows us to flee and we leave in haste, a great crowd of hundreds of thousands of runaway slaves. After three days the Pharoah changes his mind, again, and assembles his army and hundreds of chariots, and they take off in hot pursuit, determined to capture and bring back their population of slave labor.
Which brings us to this week’s story and the scene at the Sea. Our people has come to the end of the road out of Egypt, and we find ourselves trapped, between the sea in front of us and the Egyptian chariots behind us. It is a moment of despair, of terror, and of bitter crying out against Moses, who led this disastrous adventure. Then the miracle begins.
A wind comes up out of the East and drives the waters of the Sea apart, creating a path through the Sea, with a wall of water on the right and a wall of water on the left. The Children of Israel walk through the Sea; we walk singing into the wilderness. The water closes behind us, crashing down upon the Egyptian army and drowning them all. The door has closed, and we find ourselves free. Bewildered. Elated. Awestruck. And enraptured. At this moment the prophet Miriam, Moses’ older sister, takes a tambourine, and leads the women, singing, in a circle dance.
What is the connection between liberation and song? What does the Torah mean when it says “the people saw, and they feared, they believed in God and then they sang?” What is that religious mystery called “faith?”
The film “Summer of Soul” returns us to a moment of immense uncertainty in our nation’s life. It had been a decade of murders and assassinations. President Kennedy, and Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Shwermer, Malcolm X, Dr. King, Robert Kennedy and many, many others. There was violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and rioting in many American cities after Dr. King’s murder. New York City was an exception, at least in part thanks to the liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay who walked the streets of his city the night after Dr. King’s murder, to express his grief and solidarity with the black community. Lindsay appears on the stage of the music festival, in the film, where he was introduced to the crowd as “our blue-eyed brother.”
Before the festival began, the New York Police Department refused to provide security, concerned about possible confrontation. So on the first day, it was members of the Black Panthers who provided security, and like every other day all summer long, the festival was completely peaceful. Unlike Woodstock, there was no public sex or psychedelic drug use.
One of the sub-plots of the film surrounds the moon landing, which took place in July that summer. After showing a clip of Walter Cronkite announcing the great achievement, and a few images of white Americans around the country hailing the moon landing, the filmmaker asks one festival attendee after another, “what are your thoughts on the moon landing?” And to a person, one after another after another responds “well for the astronauts and everyone that’s involved, it’s beautiful. But me? I couldn’t care less.” The interviewer asks “this festival means more to you?” And the consistent response: “Much more. The cash they wasted, as far as I’m concerned, in getting to the moon, could have been used to feed poor Black people in Harlem, and all over the country. Never mind the moon; let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.”
The crossing of the Red Sea did not transform the Children of Israel, nor did it deliver our people to the Promised Land. In many ways, the journey had just begun….in fact, our Jewish journey continues today. Obstacles, disappointments, persecutions and murders, our wanderings, detours and exiles continue to this very day. But that moment at the Red Sea gave us a taste of redemption, a moment of exaltation and belief in God. A moment of song.
In much the same way, the Harlem Cultural Festival in the summer of 1969 was not an arrival at destination for Black America. There was and there still is such a long journey ahead. But it was a moment of redemption. In that time and place, our black brothers and sisters saw and walked through a parting of the waters. They sang and they danced, and they believed in God’s redemptive power. Yes, they sang. “Oh Happy Day.” Shabbat shalom.