Composition and audio © Alexander Massey 15 March 2021
Genesis lists 70 descendants of Noah after the crisis of the Great Flood, and from this, Jewish tradition has it that there are 70 nations of the world, and that we all come from one family. This nigun has 70 notes. We, the Jewish people, are one of those notes, one of the 70 nations. On Yom HaShoah, we sing this melody first as a solo line, commemorating the aloneness, suffering, and murder of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their enablers. The second voice, with its continuous single note, then enters, and this time we sing our pain, held by the whole human family, our family.