In a service like this one at EHRS we deliberately use tunes for sung prayers in our service which are very well known. One such tune is when we end the Amidah with Oseh Shalom Bimromav.
There are so many beautiful tunes for this prayer for peace but the best bet is this one written by the Israeli composer Nurit Hirsch for the 1969 Hassidic Music festival.
Ten years later Nurit Hirsch conducted her own song A Ba Ni Bi – which won the 1978 Paris Eurovision Song Contest for the first time for Israel. Our favourite Oseh Shalom was written by a woman who also won the Eurovision Song Contest!
The next year the Eurovision Song Contest was held in the home of the winner – in Jerusalem, Israel. The Israeli entry for 1979 was a song using the words that we sang today earlier in our service when we chorused our Psalm for Shabbat. They were the words sung by the priests whom Jonah told us about – Hallelujah, sung at Eurovision by an appropriately biblically named group, Milk and Honey. And, would, you believe Israel won again.
So what happened the year after? Well apparently it cost so much money to the Israel Broadcasting Authority to host the Eurovision in Israel that much like a family having nearly bankrupted themselves paying for Bar Mitvzah simchah they said never again! Of course, Jonah after Ethan’s Bar Mitzvah, your family loves you so much that they said we must do this for Jonah.
So the 1980 Eurovision was held in Holland, and Jonny Logan’s ‘What’s another Year’ won it for Ireland. Israel did not even take part that year as the contest was scheduled for Yom HaZikaron, the day when the Jewish state and Jews around the world remember Israel’s fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism.
Israel was back in Eurovision in 1981 and has competed almost every year since, winning twice more so far. This year Yuval Raphael will represent Israel in the Eurovision finals tonight in Switzerland singing ‘A New Day Will Rise’.
Yuval is a young woman who was at the Nova Music festival on 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked. She hid inside a shelter near kibbutz Be’eri with 50 other people, and sustained shrapnel injuries from grenades thrown into the shelter. She was one of 11 survivors, having hid under dead bodies for eight hours. An impressive symbol in her own life of Israeli resilience. She had to endure disruptions of her rehearsals earlier this week by anti-Israel protesters.
It’s not difficult to feel pride here in the Diaspora at the success of Israel in contests like this, to feel pride that Israel stands with the world in music. It’s also not difficult to feel pride in the resilience of our friends and family in the Jewish state who have to cope day after day with rocket attacks throughout the country from Houthis in Yemen and renewed again this week from Gaza. It’s not difficult to feel pride and amazement that these attacks are knocked out of the sky by Israeli technology, though as Stacey Saadi, an Israeli woman living with this reality writes: “the interceptions don’t make the rockets disappear – shrapnel and debris from the impact rains down, damaging buildings and sometimes injuring or even killing people.”
When I was in Israel in December a Houthi rocket aimed at Tel Aviv, which sent all in our hotel to the shelter, fell on a children’s playground in Jaffa after interception, creating a deep crater and ruining the playground.
The daughter of a friend of mine who has lived in Israel for many years, Rachel Myerson Ribko, wrote what her Israeli reality is like, a couple of weeks ago:
”Yesterday, on the eve of Yom HaZikaron, my son (age 5) said: “I don’t want to be a soldier because they die.” It isn’t the first time I’ve had to have a hard conversation with him since October 7, and it won’t be the last. That’s ok. I try to be as clear as possible, and give him lots of hugs.’”
I want now to share more of Rachel’s message:
“And now I’m going to be as clear as possible to you — my non-Jewish friends, my Jewish friends outside Israel, my Israeli friends — because the Middle East is a mess and lots of people have died and there are hostages still in Gaza and, surely, it’s enough.
I wish my non-Jewish friends understood:
- Israel is the size of Wales. Tiny.
- Israel has military conscription. The majority of Israelis serve, and the military is part of daily life.
- There are barely two degrees of separation here. Everyone knows * at least * one person who’s died in war or terror. Everyone knows, or knows someone who knows, a hostage.
- Like every country, Israel has extremists. Though some serve in the current government, they’re a minority and, for the past two-and-a-half years, tens — sometimes hundreds — of THOUSANDS of Israelis have protested against them each week, despite the threat of missiles.
I wish Jews outside Israel understood:
– The majority of Israelis would end the war to bring the hostages home. At the same time, we support the soldiers.
– The majority of Israelis believe Netanyahu should step down.
– Protestors aren’t “niche,” “anarchists,” or “traitors.” They’re a piece of everyone: hostage families, reservists, doctors, lawyers, high-tech CEOs; all ages, from the centre and the left and, occasionally, the right.
I wish Jews would understand:
– If we want to be “a light unto the nations” we need to be good, fair people led by good, fair people. Even if others are not good or fair to us.
– If we want Israel to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” we need to defend our democratic systems.
– For claims of “apartheid” to be false, we need to curtail the current [settler] lawlessness of the West Bank.
– If we want there “to be no army by the time our kids are 18” we need leaders offering an alternative to endless war.”
Those are Rachel, an Israeli’s, words.
But perhaps like me this week your pride in Israel has been severely tested by the continued blockade of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza ordered by Israel’s current government. If so then you and I are not alone.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs is President of the Union for Reform Judaism in America. I last met him in Israel in February last year at a hotel accommodating people evacuated from Kibbutz Azza on the Gaza Border. This leader of 1 ½ million Jews wrote on Monday in the Washington Post: “Among the terrible lessons of Oct 7th 2023, it became perfectly clear Hamas is willing to sacrifice the Palestinian people in its war to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. Israel must not help Hamas by sacrificing its own morality….[risking] starving Gazan civilians neither will bring Israel the ‘total victory’ over Hamas it seeks nor can be justified by Jewish values or humanitarian law…. Of equal concern far-right Israeli politicians see the aid blockade as part of a broader plan to permanently push most Gazans from northern Gaza and replace them with Jewish settlements.”
That was Rabbi Rick Jacobs. I was told this week by Yehuda Shaul from Israeli NGO Breaking that Silence the word being used in Israeli newspapers for ‘permanently push’ is the chilling lircaz which literally means ‘concentrate’ – it’s echoes are unconscionable.
As Rabbi Rick Jacobs continues: “Hamas is willing to sacrifice thousands of Palestinians by hoarding humanitarian aid. Israel must not. Depriving Gazans of food and water will not make Israel safer or hasten the return of the hostages. Each of us who loves Israel must say so – and urge Israel to change this policy.”
We are not Israeli civilian voters in Tel Aviv, we are not able to protest outside the Derech Azza residence of Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem, we could not join the thousands of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis at the People’s Peace summit in the Binyanei HaUmim last week. We are sitting in a Shul in Edgware.
So what to we do if we are moved to stand up for a moral Israel with Jewish values that we can be proud of.
Plenty: 1) Make sure in the coming three days, if you haven’t already, that you register to vote in the World Zionist Congress Elections and then vote of the pluralist, democracy and peace supporting ‘Our Israel’ slate. All the instructions are in our EHRS Our Week Ahead e-mail, or speak to any of our Synagogue staff team to help, and you can vote for the diaspora voice that the Israeli government will hear.
2) Join me in helping our Member of Parliament David Pinto-Duchinsky, or yours to hear that we diaspora Jews will not support the current Israeli government’s NGO bill which would tax to 80% contribution from foreign governments, including Britain’s, so that the Israeli civil society organisations which welcome help from abroad will be starved of funds unless they are directly supported by the current far right Israeli government.
3) Be proud that the EHRS High Holy Days Appeal Committee has selected for us this year three brilliant Israeli organisations which foster Jewish and Arab co-existence and equal rights and contribute when its time.
In our Haftarah the Prophet Ezekiel spoke about what to him was an ideal for an Israel which he hope to see restored after the Babylonian Exile – with the values of the Torah priesthood returned. It is the same for us Diaspora Jews.
Our pride in Israel grows when it is true to Jewish values of care for the stranger as well as ourselves, when the song we sing is of peace, when the future we build together allows Israel and her neighbours to thrive. Support the Israelis on the ground who share that vision.
