"Lost in the Stars" is one of my favorite songs from one of my least favorite composers. Even Kurt Weill couldn’t resist giving this awesome lyric by Martin Gore a pretty little melodic nest instead of the concrete bunkers that he usually constructed around the lyrics written for him.  All that crap about Verfremdung he inherited from Brecht he proceeded to shove down the throat of songwriting; But the idea of alienating a listener so as to not lose their intellectual attention is one of the more backwards theories ever brought to art. It is the intellect that needs to be subverted at all points; Like some paranoid sentry, the intellect will try to block any access to the more tender places, where a change of heart might occur...

Lost in the Stars
(music by Kurt Weill, lyric by Martin L. Gore)

Before Lord G-d made the sea and the land,
He held all the stars in the palm of his hand
And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand,
And one little star fell alone.

Then the Lord G-d hunted through the wide night air
For the little dark star on the wind down there.
And he stated and promised he’d take special care
So it wouldn’t get lost again.

Now a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim
And the clouds blow over and darken him,
So long as the Lord G-d is watching over them,
Keeping track of how it all goes on.

But I’ve been walking through the night and the day,
'Til my eyes get weary and my head turns gray,
And sometimes it seems maybe G-d's gone away,
Forgetting the promise that we heard him say

And we're lost out here in the stars…
Little stars, big stars,
blowing through the night.

And we're lost out here in the stars…

I admit I am very jealous that I didn’t write the line “Little stars, big stars…” – though the lyric is not without its problems:  we never HEARD Him promise us anything – we weren’t around, and then there the redundancy of that lyric “stated and promised” which just makes my head hurt.  Still, as a Jew, I’ve a special interest in deals with G-d – let’s call them Covenants – and this song speaks to that part of me.  Unlike this song, my sense is that I am not living up to my part of the bargain, and though I’d like to renegotiate my contract, it seems unwise to attempt such a treacherous play when you're batting below the Mendoza Line and committing error after error...