As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7 and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavanot will focus on Israeli poetry and music.
Each week in Ulpan, our Hebrew language class, we would listen to a news report. All of us – even in the higher Hebrew level – waited for the mezeg avir, the weather report. It was easy to understand – we knew shemesh, sun, or later in the year, geshem, rain. The soccer scores were fun too – usually it involved Israel, efes (zero).
My first year of rabbinical school was 2001-2002. While on paper it seems unremarkable, other than being longer ago than I might care to admit, the reality of those dates means that I lived in Jerusalem through what many would agree was the worst year of the second Intifada. From September 2000 through August 2002, 260 Israelis were killed and over 2,200 wounded in suicide attacks all over the country. I remember almost all of them; three in particular stand out. The Dolphinarium nightclub was bombed in June 2001, literally the day before my flight left for my year in Israel. Sbarro was bombed the day before my birthday in August 2001, and the cafe directly under my apartment – Cafe Moment – was bombed on March 2, 2002. It did not take long, it turns out, before another section of the news reports became clear to us. Over and over in that year, we heard the words mechabel, pigua, niftzaim: terrorist, attack, injured.
My Hebrew has improved since that year in Israel (I credit the Hebrew Immersion program at Aaron Milken Center), and so I often listen to Israeli radio. I listen to Galgalatz, the army’s pop music station, on Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut – always fascinated by the way that Israelis use their music to express national emotions. And I have been listening almost daily since October 7. I needed, viscerally, to hear what our music director Dr. Tali Tadmor calls Shirei Yom HaZikaron – Memorial Day Songs. I call it sad Israeli music, and as on Yom HaZikaron, the radio station played only these songs of grief and loss for days after the October 7 attacks. The music has shifted now, there is more of a balance, and yet my 2001-2002 vocabulary continues to come in handy as the announcers, with their calm voices, are calling out red alerts and sirens, or reading off the names of Israelis killed or injured.
In addition to Galgalatz, I have been returning to an Ofra Haza song – Le’Orech HaYam. She sang it at the public memorial for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 12, 1995, and I heard a beautiful version at the Tekes Yom HaZikaron held here at Wise in May, sung for the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The lyrics were painful then; they remain so:
Tell me how to stop the tears
Tell me where there’s another world to live in
When people run into an inferno as if into the sea
I would run into the fire,
If only they would return from there
Tell me how you live with death
Hiding the tears every night –
Tell me, how much longer?
I know that incredible art and music will come out of this time, out of this unimaginable pain and grief. Some already has. But for now, I am turning to the old ways, the sad Israeli music, and the songs that express our loss and our hope. Tali curated a playlist for us, and I invite you to listen.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer