The lullaby I use most regularly with Helen is the song "Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna", one of the few songs I remember from my own childhood. I remembered the lyrics surprisingly well when I started singing it to Helen, so I think my mother may have sung it to me as a lullaby too.
This was orginally a song from a Yiddish musical performed in New York in 1940-41 — Wikipedia has the details — but the version I know is
Joan Baez's.
(There are other performances.)
The interpretation of the song is debated: is it a metaphor for Jews in the Holocaust, perhaps "a political statement in Israel during WWII to encourage resistance vs. Nazi racism", or a mystical parable? My guess is that the song is a Diaspora expression of relief at having left Eastern Europe, along with a general fear for those left behind: a Yiddish performance in New York seems unlikely to have been Zionist, while the Holocaust per se only started to become known in the US in late 1941.
Courtesy of YouTube, I discover that this song is popular in Vietnam, there is not only a Vietnamese version, but a French one (directly translated from the Yiddish). And there's a version by an Indonesian singer. And of course a Yiddish version.
I can see a very youthful Bob Dylan.
the message is: don't be like sheep, you can carry sheep to the butcher, they will not protest; in the contrary: try to escape, fly like a swallow ignoring all fences and frontiers... - our Jewish friends who escaped from Nazi Germany to New York 1940 sang this tune together with us - "we shall overcome" is another message of Joan Baez one could compare with Donna, Donna...
related:
https://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/donna-donna-protest-song/
and
https://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/donna-donna-meaning-of-a-song/
and
https://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/donna-donna-history-of-a-song/
and my own playing at
https://soundcloud.com/fingerstyle_guitar/donna-donna-protest-song
This story dates back to the Talmud.
The speaker (a Talmudic sage, whose name escapes me) saw this calf being taken to the slaughterhouse. He called out to her, not to complain. She was born to be slaughtered to feed hungry families.
Despite the fact that he may have been technically correct, it was cruel for him to say this, to the suffering calf.
For saying this, he is punished with an unbearable ear-ache for 13 years. Only when he sees a fly, caught in a spider's web, and sets it free, has he learned his lesson. And his suffering is gone.
For he has learned the importance of Mercy over hurtful "facts."
In today's world, what we mistake for "Truth," is merely data.
Truth is valued by what illuminates our lives.