Byron's Passovers and Nathan's melodies - Lord Byron and Isaac Nathan

Judaism, Wntr, 2002 by Jeremy Hugh Baron

The early songs are Nathan's settings of Byron's poems; the others are poems by Byron to fit melodies given to him by Nathan. Nathan comments that, "At the time his Lordship was writing for me the poetry to these melodies, he felt anxious to facilitate my views in preserving as much as possible the original airs, for which purpose he would frequently consult me regarding the style and metre of his stanzas. I accordingly desired to be favoured with so many lines, some pathetic, some playful, others martial, &c." (12)

I shall discuss one song from each group.

Nathan opened the book with Byron's favorite "She Walks in Beauty," said to have been inspired by the sight of Byron's cousin's wife Mrs. Wilmot in a spangled black mourning dress at a party at Lady Sitwell's on 11 June 1814--that's before Byron had met Nathan.

The poem begins thus:

She walks in beauty--ike the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow'd to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

She walks in beauty--like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies. (13)

This poem is not only an ode to feminine beauty. It is also, as Burwick and Douglass emphasized, an "invocation to the muse of... twilight," (15) a theme Byron used in seven songs. The poem is in iambic tetrameter, and if Nathan had wanted to choose a Jewish synagogal melody of identical length and rhythm he had a wide choice, including one of the oldest and best known, the closing hymn of Sabbath and Festival services, Adon olam asher malakh/B'terem kol ye-tzir nivra. Instead he chose a melody for Lekka Dodi, a mid-sixteenth century poem by Solomon ha-Levi Alkabez, whose eight initial Hebrew letters begin the first eight of its nine stanzas. (16) Exactly as in Byron's poem, the opening couplet is repeated at the end of each stanza, and has been translated as "Come, my beloved with chorus of praise;/ Welcome Sabbath the Bride, Queen of our days." (17)

In the sixteenth century Safed Kabbalists were at the center of Jewish mysticism. (18) On Friday afternoons Rabbi Isaac Luria and his disciples used to go out in white garments to the fields. On a high place they surveyed the beauty of the countryside and then welcomed the feminine principle of the deity, the Shekhinah, as the Sabbath. They sang Alkabez's hymn with their eyes closed, perhaps because the supernatural light of the Skekhinah came from the other heavenly spheres (Sefirot). In the Friday evening services for the Reception of the Sabbath in synagogues, both in Nathan's time and today, this hymn is chanted, and at the beginning of the last stanza the congregation, who have been facing east, turns round to look west towards the entrance,

Come in peace, thou crown of my husband, with rejoicing and cheerfulness

Come my beloved with chorus of praise

In the midst of the faithful of the chosen people, come O bride, come O bride. (19)

For Kabbalists like Luria souls are said to derive from the unity of the Tiferet (masculine) and Shekhinah (feminine) principles of divinity, and this unity takes place on the Sabbath. Scholars of Jewish mysticism (21) have traced this divine dyad to the male-female Near Eastern God-pair. "Dimly we perceive behind these mystical images the male and female gods of antiquity, anathema as they were to the pious Kabbalist." (22) To Nathan any melody of Lekhah Dodi, of which he gave tow (23) (and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different tunes) conveyed invocations to both twilight and to feminine beauty, the same two invocations of Byron's poems.