Postscript – written after, but placed as an introduction to, today’s post. Today (Tuesday) is Yom Hazikaron, that most painful day in the Israeli calendar when the nation unites to remember its fallen. This year, the nation is also holding its collective breath, to discover whether the social fabric will actually hold over today, and tomorrow, Yom Ha’atzma’ut. In the 20 hours since I wrote the rest of this post, that social fabric, the essential core of the country, as exemplified on two very different WhatsApp groups of which I am a member, has been sorely tested. I have felt compelled to leave one of the groups, and may possibly leave the other. If I were writing this post today, rather than yesterday, the tone I would use would no longer be as light as it is. However, I have decided not to change the post, because the content already belies the lightness of the tone.
I urge you, in the words of Psalm 122: שַׁ֭אֲלוּ שְׁל֣וֹם יְרוּשָׁלָ֑͏ִם – Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
For the benefit of those on whom the reference in the title of this post is lost, the long running BBC domestic radio programme Desert Island Discs each week invites a different celebrity to select which eight recordings they would want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. At the end of each programme, the presenter traditionally asks them: ‘And if you could only take one recording, which would it be?’
This Wednesday, on Israel’s 75th Independence Day, Israel’s state broadcaster’s popular music radio station will be announcing which song its listeners have voted to be Israel’s ‘Song of 75’. While I would not claim to be anything of an expert on Israeli popular song, the choice seems to me obvious. So obvious, in fact, that I am going to stick my neck out and go public with my prediction, so convinced am I that this is the only real contender.
In fact, I’ll be very surprised if at least some of you do not react, when I share my selection with you, by saying: ‘Well duh, of course that’s going to win.’
But just before I do let you know my choice, let me reflect on another, more official, symbol of the last 75 years – Israel’s national flag. The months since the present Government announced its intention of rushing through a far-reaching program of judicial reform have been marked by consistently large mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv and all other major cities, and many minor locations, throughout Israel. There have been several notable features of these protests.
First, the numbers attending did not fall off after the first flush of protest, nor did they fall off in the bad weather of late winter. Instead, the demonstrations have continued to attract consistently large numbers. Second, both the demonstrators and the police have, by and large, maintained a civilised relationship over the past weeks and months. Third, the demonstrations have attracted not only the to-be-expected secular, middle-class, left-wing Tel Avivians, but also a much broader cross-section of Israelis, across the religious, social and political spectrum.
Fourth, the demonstrators seem to have reasserted their identification with the Israeli flag. In recent years (in recent decades), there has been a tendency for the political right to ‘appropriate’ the flag to a certain extent. In the last couple of months, the flag (together with the Declaration of Independence) has been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the demonstrations. It has also been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the counter-demonstrations that have been gathering momentum. It seems to me a sign of national strength that both sides of a dispute that has threatened to rip the country apart should continue to identify so strongly with the national flag.
Indeed, there have even been stories of what has happened when those opposed to the judicial reform programme leaving the demonstration cross the path of those supporting the programme arriving for a counter-demonstration. The latter reportedly asked to use the flags of the former and, according to the reports, the opposers handed their flags to the supporters. (I have no first-hand evidence of the accuracy of these reports, but, even if they are only apocryphal, the fact that the stories are repeated so widely and have gained such traction in itself reflects a very positive aspect of the national mood.)
This embracing of a cultural symbol by opposing sides leads me neatly to my choice of song. There are few, if any, Israeli songwriters more beloved, or better able to capture the national mood, than Ehud Manor. I have mentioned him before as a remarkably skilled translator of English-language musicals into Hebrew (he translated over 600 such works), but he was also, indeed primarily, a chronicler of Israel through over 1200 original song lyrics.
In 1968, Manor’s younger brother was killed while serving in the Israel Defence Forces during the War of Attrition. Manor wrote a song – אחי הצעיר יהודה, My Young Brother, Yehuda – which became very popular, In the mid-1980s, he wrote another song, reportedly also in reaction to the loss of his brother – אין לי ארץ אחרת – I have No Other Country – which was perceived as a protest song by those opposing the First Lebanon War, and has continued to be embraced by those who are unhappy with the direction the country is taking, but who nevertheless fiercely identify with the country.
Sadly, Israel’s first 75 years have been characterised as much by such patriotism and dissent as by any other national emotions: from the disdainful and patronising treatment of the immigrants from North Africa and Iraq by the ruling European Jewish ‘aristocracy’, through the ‘occupation’ of Judea and Samaria in the wake of the Six-Day War, through the first and second Lebanon Wars, the first and second Intifadas, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Remarkably, every successive wave of dissenters and protesters has heard, in Manor’s song, the resonance of their own feelings.
For the benefit of the two or three of my readers who don’t know the song (and for the rest who do), here it is as originally sung by Gali Atari. I’d like you to listen to it first, and then I’d like to reflect on what seem to me the secrets of the song’s enduring success.
Here are the lyrics, with my tweaking of the translation given on the video:
אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי
לא אשתוק, כי ארצי
שינתה את פניה
לא אוותר לה,
אזכיר לה,
ואשיר כאן באוזניה
עד שתפקח את עיניה
אין לי ארץ אחרת
עד שתחדש ימיה
עד שתפקח את עיניה
אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי
I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire.
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home
I will not be silent, because my country’s
Face has changed.
I will not give up on her,
I will remind her,
And I will sing here in her ear
Until she opens her eyes
I have no other country
Until she renews her days
Until she opens her eyes
I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home
The first thing to say is that the range of both the words and the music is very limited; there is very little variation in the song. It is obsessively focused on the main message: ‘I have no other country’. I have omitted, in the lyrics above, one complete repetition of the opening 12 lines. This means that, in a three-minute song of 35 short lines, the opening line ‘I have no other country’ is sung four times, each time to the same seven notes, in a musical motif that is closely echoed throughout the song, I believe, 28 times. The Hebrew vocabulary is not complex, and the syntax is very straightforward.
When the song is sung these days, it tends to be sung more slowly, with more raw emotion in the voice of the singer. However, there is something in the slightly flat, almost matter-of-fact treatment of the song by Gali Atari that emphasizes that the fact that the songwriter feels he has no option is a given, something to be taken for granted.
Note also what seems to me a deliberate ambiguity in the following lines: ‘I will not be silent, because my country’s / Face has changed.’ Does this mean: ‘The fact that my country’s face has changed is not a reason to be silent’? (If I may be allowed to ‘translate’ this into the situation Israel is in, that can be paraphrased as: ‘The fact that the country has changed is not a reason to move abroad.’) Or does it mean: ‘The reason I will not be silent is that my country’s face has changed’? (‘The fact that the country has changed is the reason why I feel compelled to take action.’)
One further reason for the power of the song is the following. The emotional and physical state of the songwriter is very specifically described in lines 3–5: ‘Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through / To my veins, to my soul / With an aching body, with a hungry heart.’ However, the specifics of the way in which ‘my country’s face has changed’ are not mentioned at all; it is, of course, precisely this which has allowed so many disparate groups over such a long time to hear in the song their own anguish, and their own determination not to give up.
Let me quote from the tribute to Ehud Manor when he was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew Song: ‘Ehud Manor never wanted to be a shaliach tzibbur – (in other words, to speak on behalf of others). In his poetry there is usually no place for the phrase “we”. According to his view, no lyricist can speak except for himself. Indeed, he brought to Hebrew song his private voice, an intimate, revealing and sensitive voice, but miraculously his song of the individual became the song of many.’
It feels, in these days, as though the lyric of this wonderfully simple, simply wonderful song has never rung truer. However, I know that it has felt like that in each successive social challenge that the country has faced. Like all great art, the song speaks to each generation in its own voice. That is why it is my choice as the song of the 75th anniversary. I’ll let you know next week whether the great Israeli public has got it right!
Meanwhile, Tao and Ollie are enjoying the comforts of the tipee (including sofa with integral oven), while Raphael also went camping last weekend.
