Some of My Favorites

MY FAVORITE SONG LYRICS ARE:
 
Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime?
- From Yip Harburg’s Brother Can you Spare a Dime, a song from the Great Depression.

AND:

Well, I'm everybody who's nobody. I'm the nobody who's everybody. I'm just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk and Czech and double-Czech American. . . . I am the "etceteras" and the "and so forths" that do the work. 
- From the Ballad for Americans, first broadcast on CBS in 1940, with Paul Robeson narrating – except that, eighty years after it was conceived and broadcast, I’d add a few to account for Native Americans and more recent immigrants – but I love the idea.

IF I WERE CHOOSING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM IT WOULD BE WOODY GUTHRIE'S: 

This land is your land and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
- Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land

MY FAVORITE PASSAGE FROM THE YOM KIPPUR SERVICE IS:

Not for ourselves alone do we pray, 
not for ourselves alone, 
but for all Your children.
- Quoted from Gates of Repentance, p. 295 (1978). A nearly identical version can be found online here.

BUT MY FAVORITE LOVE SONG IS: Un Bel Dì from Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The story of Madama Butterfly, by the way, is almost the same as Miss Saigon and equally gut-wrenching.