I spent the evening in a large auditorium packed to the gills with a huge crowd periodically singing or shouting out Hallelujah, The Lord Is One and calling upon God in prayer.
No, I was not at a religious revival, women's spiritual event or Orthodox gathering.
Just your run of the mill Israeli folk and pop nostalgia concert performing songs by secular song writers with a secular band for a mostly secular audience.
That's what happens when your national language is Hebrew and all this biblical and Jewish stuff is just part of the general culture and frame of reference, so say, making a pop song based on Ehad Mi Yodea from the Haggadah makes sense when just about everyone at least knows the original from kindergarten and likely also their family seder.
Like the other day when I heard a song by Israeli rapper Subliminal where a quote from Jewish sources is juxtaposed with the F word (used for emphasis) and in a weird way it makes sense in the context of modern Israeli culture in a way that would be completely bizarre and out of context in English.
Call it ruminations of someone who absorbed Zionism with her mother's milk, but these kind of things just emphasise to me how good it is to be home and how blessed we are to have this home.
No comments:
Post a Comment