From Song of the Grasses to Secular Prayer

Last week, I went to two very different musical experiences, each of which represents fascinating trends in the ongoing relationship between Israeli identity and culture. I am hardly a music expert and am virtually illiterate when it comes to America popular music but I am quite drawn to Israeli popular music both for the pure pleasure of listening (and mostly understanding it) and also for what it says about what are the issues of the day in this complex corner of the world.

Since the First Aliyah in the 1880s, popular music has served as both a mirror and a reflection of Israeli culture and Israeli self-understanding. In those days of pre-post modernity, there was a singular view of what Israeliness should be – the “New Jew”, strong, confident, peace-loving but willing to fight, connected to the Land through love and labor, the antithesis of the pasty, pale, and weak “Yeshivish” Jews from the old country. The songs that embodied this ethos were simply called Shirei Yisrael – songs of Israel. Much of this music drew its lyrics from the great Hebrew Zionist poets of the first part of the 20th century as Rachel (Blumstein), Leah Goldberg, Natan Alterman, and Chaim Nachman Bialik and set them to folk tunes drawn or adapted from European sources. Later generations of singers such as Naomi Shemer followed along a similar vein. Even many artists better known for their songs of social critique and protest, also wrote Shirei Yisrael. These songs celebrate the natural beauty of the Land, the rewards of physical labor, the excitement of Jewish laborers building Jewish cities, the longing for the Land and the price paid to defend it. These are the songs that my generation was raised on and apparently are still taught today as I saw when I went to a uniquely Israeli experience called Shirah Ba’Zibbur - communal singing (literally “singing in public”).

In its original form Shirah Ba’Zibbur took place in social clubs and around the campfires of the youth movements. Almost always, folk singing went hand-in-hand with folk dancing, notably the hora. These iconic images of the halutzim reinforced Israeli identity and also shaped American Jewish conceptions of Israel through decades of Hebrew school textbooks. In fact, American Jews may have locked into these images for much longer than they held in Israeli society itself, but that’s a topic for another day.

While this type of music is still being produced, the phenomenon of communal singing died down after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. However, around the time of the second Intifada, it began to re-enter the cultural landscape. The revival is attributed to a nostalgic pull towards the past as a way of finding comfort during a time of violence, threat, and great uncertainty. The music and the experience of communal singing evokes an idealized time of shared direction and shared purpose, and affirms a connection to Eretz Yisrael and the unity of the Zionist project.

The Thursday evening gathering took place at a local community center. The setting was a large multi-purpose social hall that was set up with a few rows of chairs and a wide expanse of mats and giant pillows on the floor. The song lyrics were projected on power point slides with various Israeli pastoral landscapes as background. At its peak, the room had around 50 people, almost all of whom were Modern Orthodox young adults in their 20s sprawled on the mats and pillows. There were a few couples, but far more common were groups of three or four friends, much more often women than men.

The band played relatively softly as the lyrics flashed on the screen. A few songs seemed to catch the crowd’s full attention but for the most part, the buzz of conversation seemed to dominate more than the voices singing. I was also somewhat surprised that it was predominantly a young and religious crowd. I thought it would draw more middle-aged secular people looking to reclaim a bit of their youth. Maybe that is more of the demographic in places like Haifa or Rishon LeZion, but this is Jerusalem after all and it’s not likely that the young religious set, even if modern, would flock to bars as a way to start their weekend. In fact, the whole experience seemed like the musical equivalent to comfort food. Perhaps that is what the whole nostalgic pull is about –creating a safe space to gather and passively affirm one’s belonging to Israel today through music reflecting an Israel from a better time and place.

While the Shira Ba’Zibbur revival may have something to do with reclaiming Zionism, the second musical experience seemed to have a lot more to do with reclaiming Judaism. This was a concert by Kobi Oz to celebrate the release of his new CD entitled “Mizmorei Nevuchim” (Psalms for the Perplexed). The title reveals a lot about this endeavor. Oz comes from a Tunisian background and was raised in Sderot. Earlier in his musical career, he was the founder of a band whose musical message was one of social commentary and critique. The band was called Tipex, whose name in Hebrew means “whiteout”, in and of itself a critique against the European hegemony in Israeli culture and society. A few years ago, he became somewhat infamous when he was selected to represent Israel in the annual Eurovision musical contest with an extremely edgy song called “Push the Button.” The latest initiative reflects his journey to recover both his North African and his Jewish roots.

This return to Jewish sacred sources is a trend that has been going on for some time now among mainstream secular musicians, many, but certainly not all of who are Mizrachi in origin. These musicians draw from familiar liturgy and also the more esoteric piyyut (sacred poetry). Israeli musicians with North African roots are particularly drawn to piyyut as a way of reclaiming ancestral traditions that were largely dismissed and derided by the dominant Ashkenazi culture-makers of the early days of the State.

Oz’s project is more of a fusion of old and new rather than just a recasting of sacred music in contemporary modes. In a couple of songs, he blends cuts from old cassette tapes of his grandfather singing piyyut with his modern musings on the meaning of secular prayer. In another song called “Longing for Longings” he explores the Jewish condition of never quite being settled in any one place. The music is sometimes playful, sometimes poignant, and always pushing at questions of the relationship between Israeliness and Judaism.

What’s fascinating to me about these two events is that with the Shira Ba’Tzibur evening what I saw was a kind of static holding onto an idealized notions of Zionism that have outlived the times, whereas the Kobi Oz concert was much more about connecting to the past to build a new Jewish future, in even if it’s a perplexing one as the CD title says. In his song, “Elohai” (my God), Oz seems to be expressing his Zionist dream when he writes: “But despite everything, tolerance is bubbling beneath the surface. Look how people are bit by bit leaving behind the tension. And in the end they just want to be united in this great synagogue called Eretz Yisrael.” Amen, sela – may it be so in our day.