Naomi Shemer’s Soundtrack of Israel at 77 Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Harbin Institute creating better conversations about the essential questions facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day on Thursday, April 24th, 2025.

I spent Pesach in Israel with my family. We had many memorable experiences, but there was one moment in particular that I will not forget for a long time. If you’ve been to Israel any time in the past 18 months, or if you’ve listened to my chronicling of the emotional atmosphere that I’ve witnessed and experienced during my many visits there since the war began, you’ll know that there’s a lingering darkness in the air around the war and its aftermath, around the residual pain of October 7th and its suffering, around the mounting awareness of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, even if Israelis are ambivalent about how much to care about it, and around the widespread anger that Israelis hold against their own government.

There’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of pessimism, there’s a lot of sadness. There are still 59 hostages left in Gaza, and I think no Seder table throughout the country felt complete. Our family traveled around Israel during the week of Chol HaMo’ed, the intermediate days of Passover, together with most of the rest of the people in the country who get awfully restless during this one shared vacation week and who honor a festival of freedom by getting themselves stuck in traffic on highways, trying to get to even more crowded beaches and vacation getaways.

As you’re driving around, you can’t miss the signs for the hostages on every highway in Israel, and you also can’t help but notice the vast numbers of young men walking around with canes or in wheelchairs, the obvious product of the significantly under-reported number of injuries that Israeli soldiers have suffered while at war.

The moment in particular I’m thinking about took place on Thursday night of that week. We were at the Mahaneh Yehuda Shuk in Jerusalem, wandering around after dinner, and we stumbled across a restaurant filled with what seemed like one big multi-generational family, and they were just having the time of their life. They were dancing and singing. It was a raucous party. There were canes leaning against tables, and grandmothers who have doubtlessly known sorrow throughout the war, still dancing with reckless abandon with their grandsons. We were not the only group of people who just were standing and watching this scene in a restaurant of what seemed like frenzied joy amidst this impossible time. I think we were not the only group that felt a little dumbfounded.

Now Israelis are not the only people in the world who know how to live lives of joy amidst suffering, who laugh while crying, and who sing and dance during periods of affliction, but they are a people that I know and a people who I find to be uniquely good at it. I think maybe it’s a merging together of classic Jewish habits of resilience, that skill that we’ve honed over thousands of years and characterized by our people’s unique reliance on humor and on ritual moments. It’s some of that together with something new, something born of Zionism that has always understood its project as something of an uphill battle.

Something about that moment in the restaurant reminded me of those famous images of the dancing that broke out in the street upon the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, which we celebrate 77 years ago this week. Many of those dancing in the street at the time were survivors of a catastrophe that had just ended. Many were widows and orphans. They all knew that they were already in a war for their survival and would face massive violence there in Israel for the foreseeable future, but it didn’t stop them from dancing.

There’s a whole Israeli musical tradition on this theme, actually, from the folk song popularized in 1975 by Yehoram Gaon, which says that even as the taxes go up, even as the doors of exit for the Jews and the Soviet Union remain behind bars, we do not stop singing, “lo naphsik lashir.” Continues to the recent present in Hanan Ben-Ari’s song, ha’chayim shelanu tutim, which lists a series of grievances about contemporary Israel, but keeps going back to a refrain that nevertheless life is a bowl of strawberries.

Perhaps most poignantly, the phrase that appears all over Israel that we will dance again, even after the massacre at the Nova Festival, “We will dance again.” That’s what I saw that night in the restaurant. The music never stops. We’re marking this year in Israel’s history on our show today with the music that has formed and forged its story with a tribute, one of the songwriters who shaped the sound of Israel’s evolution as a country, full of both pathos and hope, with a balance of optimism and realism. It’s the kind of music that if Israel ever had a Forrest Gump-style movie about its formative years, this music would constitute the bulk of its soundtrack.

I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Shemer, a singer and songwriter who turned 18 years old at the founding of the state and died just 20 years ago, right after the tragedy of the demise of the peace process. I confess, in my parents’ household, my parents were not themselves hippies, but they sure listened to a lot of hippie music. In our household, Naomi Shemer’s music was a regular fixture, and I knew most of the words of her great songs from childhood. I think that the peak of my childhood uncoolness was that we had an Israeli folk song slideshow and sing-along at my bar mitzvah. Needless to say, most of my friends went to play outside while it was happening. And I don’t blame them. They were probably right and I suffered for it.

But now, 35 years later, I’m glad to have gotten access to that musical heritage when I was a kid. And we’ve done musical episodes on our show before. We did one on the history of Jewish music. We did one on Israeli music after October 7th. Most recently, we did one about Jews and the history of Christmas music. But I hope on this one in particular, you’ll turn up the music and sing along. It’s one of the ways to be part of the Israel story. Singing and dancing is a little bit about what we do.

And I’m joined today to go on this journey with you by my friend Moti Zeira. Moti is a founder and president of HaMidrasha, the Educational Center for Jewish Life in Israel. He’s a leader of this movement, this idea that’s called “Simply Israeli Judaism,” the effort to make Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish spirituality, a sense of community accessible to all Jews, to bring pluralistic Judaism to the mainstream.

Moti, together with my colleagues at the Hartman Institute in Israel, partnered in forming this wonderful program called the Israeli Rabbinate, the movement for a new rabbinical school and system to bring Judaism more accessibly, more pluralistically, more democratically to Israeli society through the training and development of rabbis. Moti has authored 11 books and a lot of articles, I think most recently, a biography, the official biographer of Naomi Shemer. He was born in Haifa and lives with his wife on a Kibbutz with their children and grandchildren, which is as Israeli as it gets.

Moti, thank you for being here today. And I just want to start by telling me a little bit about your Naomi Shemer story. We’re going to listen to a lot of her music and you’re going to us a lot of background about her. But what’s your particular attachment to the music and story of Naomi Shemer?

Moti: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. Okay. It’s very interesting because for me, being born in Israel, I’m third generation born in Israel, Naommi Shemer was, she was always there. I mean, I was born with her. I used to sing her the songs in the kindergarten, then in school, in the youth movement, in the army, and then in the kibbutz. And you know what? Even, I was born in 1956. It means that my formative experience was the Yom Kippur war. I was 18 years old, still not a soldier, but you know, the whole environment was surrounding me.

It was kind of, how would I describe it? All these anthems of the Israeli songs, the Zionism, we were a generation that felt that something is missing. Something is not complete. Something is even, has not enough contents and roots. So just hearing this level of songs from Noam Yishemer wasn’t enough for me. I was fed up with that and most of my friends. So it took me, I think 20 or more years to reconnect to Jewish, to the songs of Naomi Shemer.

And I think that it has to do something with my Jewish search, with my understanding and even discovering, all of a sudden, that in these songs that I used to sing for so many years, there is Jewish content, with very profound roots and to discover that. So this kind of connection… so I didn’t expect that it will be, and so in a way I was reconnected to Noami Shemer’s songs and then I discovered that nobody wrote her biography. So I said, I’m going to do it.

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s amazing. So in other words, what you’re describing is that, maybe for our listeners who are not yet familiar with the music of Naomi Shemer, I think many of them will be. And even if you don’t think you’re familiar with it, you probably will hear a song on this show that you’re like, yeah, okay. But what you’re describing is that it was almost like Kitsch, right? That Naomi Shemer’s folk songs were like Kitsch and it took you till you got a little older to recognize that sometimes what appears like Kitsch is actually canon.

Moti: Yeah, yeah, of course. Nachon. I think that some things that we as, you know, indigenous Israelis experience is that something in the Israeli, I don’t know, atmosphere wasn’t enough for us. And the question is what did you do with that? And I think that Naomi Shemer’s songs is kind of one of the vehicles where you can rediscover or find a new perspective, point of view to reconnect to Jewish sources.

Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, it reminds me of something that I think is, I think what you’re describing is a bigger thing than just this particular piece of music. You’re describing in some ways the journey over the last 77 years for the secular Israeli reclamation of Judaism, which has been your core project, which is, and the way our colleague Shay Zarchi talks about it is right, that we upon arrival in Israel, you’ve left all of your baggage at the foot of the mountain in order to be able to climb the mountain and build this radical new civilization. And then over time, you start to realize you miss your stuff and you go back and look for it.

So I think that story also of recognizing that these musical pieces may feel dated, but gradually you start to say, but who would I be without them? Right? Is a big piece of this story. So where do you want to start? Let’s go start. We’ll start by listening to a short clip of Shiro Shel Abba. And then we’ll use that as a means of introducing a little bit of who Naomi Shemer was and what this musical heritage is ultimately about. So here is Shiro Shel Abba by Naomi Shemer.

Moti: You know Yehuda, I remember that we were sitting at your home, your father and mother’s and we started to sing this song, and I saw, all of a sudden, I was astonished. Everybody knew the songs! So, and that’s what you said in the beginning. It was kind of, you know, drishat shalom from Israel.

Yehuda: Yeah, look, my family and friends and network in Riverdale, New York is not fully representative of who American Jews are. So we were a captive audience when we did that learning together in your home. So tell us this is, for those unfamiliar, the phrase Yibaneh HaMikdash is a traditional phrase, right, about building the temple, even though the words that she introduces are not actually about tradition. So it starts to get us into a little bit of this dynamic between tradition and something new. So tell us a little bit about this.

Moti: Yes, absolutely. Yes. Listen, okay. So Naomi Shemer was born in Kibbutz Kineret, one of the first kibbutzim that on the shore of the Kineret sea. And her parents were you know, Jewish Zionist pioneers who came from Vilna. They knew Hebrew because they were learning in a school, Hebrew school, in that the language was Hebrew in Vilna. And they came to build a country, to be halutzim. And then she calls this song, Shiro Shel Abba, my father’s song. And she means it, why? Because in Kibbutz Kineret, the children were sleeping with their parents. It wasn’t so typical for the kibbutzim later on because the children were separated from their parents. It’s living in the beit yeladim. Okay?

But in Kinneret, the children were living with their parents. And when they were going to sleep, her father, Meir, her father used to sing, you know, how you call it, lollipop…?

Yehuda: Lullaby. Lullaby.

Moti: Lullaby. Lullaby songs. And he used to sing a song that he heard. He was, you know, let me remind you, he was secular, socialist, Zionist, speaking Hebrew, but when he want to to help her daughter to sleep, so he used to sing “Yibaneh hamikdash bimhera biyameinu,” in an accent of Vilna, a Vilna accent. Kind of Hasidic accent.

So for her, this song is part of her childhood, but it was not so typical, because around them there were things, you know, like these Zionist songs about building the country.

When he passed away, he was only 59 years old, it was 1965, she wrote this song. And in this song, she quotes this, the traditional song, from, you know, from the Mameloshn in Vilna, and combined it into a very secular Zionist content of building, for these pioneers that were were raised in a very traditional framework. I mean they were all dati’im yeah in the beginning of the 20th century, and they became secular. But they had the language and the terms. They used the traditional terms in order to express the new phase of the Jewish nation. So when they used the term Beit Mikdash, they used the term third, the third Beit Mikdash, the third temple. It was the first, the second, the demolition, and then the third one. What is the third one? Zionism. We rebuilt the Beit Mikdash of the Jewish nation, which is Zionism.

Yehuda: So they’re not, this is not actually religious fundamentalism. We want to build the third temple. It’s actually channeling the language of Jewish tradition to actually do something radical. And it reminds me of something David Hartman wrote years ago, which is that one of the strange moves of Zionism was that it was about a reinvention of the Jewish condition, but in precisely the atmosphere where the Jewish condition was originally born. And he says it’s analogous to a teenager who gets so mad at their parents that they go, they,

Moti: They go to the grandparents.

Yehuda: No, no, that he goes to the front door and slams the door but stays in the house. Right? So there’s something about that too. Where was, where do you see Naomi Shemer living in herself in that dance? She’s using the musical tradition, she’s using the ideas, but what was, what was she religiously in the story? Was she ever a religious woman?

Moti: No, she was not a religious woman at all. She was a very secular Zionist, but she understood intuitively as a child and then as an adult, that the connection to Jewish tradition, not tradition, the Jewish roots, the Jewish language, the Jewish terms, the Jewish vocabulary, the Jewish lifestyle and all. She understood that this is part of her, you know, situation in the world.

So she didn’t she didn’t participate in this split the that her parents generation did. Judaism is something that belonged to the Orthodox. We left it in the diaspora. And we are now Zionist, secular and this is our new Jewish civilization, if you want.

So she didn’t feel it. She felt, I think because of the atmosphere in the very, very private and intimate home, that there is a connection, the chain is connected, it’s not disconnected, because her father sent to her the Hasidic melody. So for her it was something very, very natural.

Yehuda: Yeah, let’s stay on this theme of the use of Jewish content and Jewish topics for a different song that is actually also well known to, I would say, quote, traditional Jews. But I think that the melody is best known from Naomi Shemer. And it may not even be obvious to people who are religious Jews that they’re singing Naomi Shemer’s song. So we’re going to sing, we’re going to hear a clip from Shirat Ha’asavim.

Moti: This song is very, very interesting, because, in a way, it demonstrates the whole, I don’t know even how to describe it, the moving between different perspectives and different… The song was in… it was a kind of a commercial… in the 70s…

Yehuda: Performance?

Moti: That is based on the story of Mendele Mocher Sforim. It’s about… It’s a whole story about a Jew that goes from Europe and arrives to Israel, to Israel and then to China, a whole story. And it’s based on Mendele, who was a very important Jewish author, of the beginning of the end of the 19th century, and in order to make it more commercial that people will come, they applied to Naomi Shemer and said to her listen write some songs for the show. So she wrote 13 songs. The show was a whole complete disaster nobody came, but we earned great songs. One of them we heard right now it’s based on a phrase from Rabbi Nachman.

Yehuda: Right, Hasidic, Hasidic Rebbe.

Moti: Hasidic Rabbi, it was written in a very, very poor Hebrew, so she shaped it and she cleaned the Hebrew and then she adjusted the music that she composed. And it became, the show was forgotten, nobody remembered that it came from a show. But the song started from there, and it make the move from out back to the synagogues. I mean, you said you probably know the melody from the Jewish whatever. No, it was a kind of an Israeli song that was composed in 1976. And then it turned into kind of a traditional, very, very traditional from the second temple or something.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean you can find clips on YouTube of cantors singing this in American synagogues. And by the way, they’re singing it because it’s Rabbi Nachman. They’re singing, in some ways, like that’s the play here, right? They’re singing it because it’s a traditional Jewish song based on a teaching by a Hasidic rabbi.

But here also the other thing I find so interesting about this is it is a beautiful expression. It’s a song about the grasses, right? And describing every grass has its words, its song, every shepherd, right? There’s something very fundamental. It’s theological, but it’s also very earthy. It actually lends itself weirdly to being a kind of Zionist, earth-based spirituality. It’s actually very portable for diaspora Jews who care about environment and climate. So it’s got all these different pieces together, right?

Moti: Yes, it’s very, very interesting because you know in Israel, in a way, it was the song… we heard it in the radio, I mean we heard the song, but I think that when the all these movements that you and me share in Israel, of the, you know, the Jewish Renewal and then the Israeli Judaism, so on, so the song of Naomi Shemer just waited to be heard again, reheard, because this is a praying. This is based on the traditional text. It says something about here and now, it’s with the amazing, wonderful music of Noami Shemer. So it’s all together.

Yehuda: Yeah. So let’s do one third song, which has very, strong Jewish themes right at the outset. I will admit when you sent in the list of the songs you want to talk about, this is the one Naomi Shemer song on the list that I’d never heard of before. I played it for my wife Stephanie last night. We went through the whole playlist and she was like, we, she never heard of it either.

Moti:Which one?

Yehuda: So between the two of us, we’re going to listen to Akedat Yitzhak, the song, The Binding of Isaac. So let’s take a few minutes to hear a little bit of Akedat Yitzhak and then I want you to tell us a little bit about it.

Moti: It’s interesting. This is one of the most important songs of Naomi Shemer. She said, she said that this is the most important song that she ever wrote. And it’s very interesting because there is a very historical background here, which is very important. Let’s first of all talk about the text. She quotes from Bereshit, but, from Genesis.

Yehuda: Genesis, yeah, yeah.

Moti: But we have to be very careful what kind of changes she is doing. We heard it just now in… She said in Genesis, it’s, you’ll translate it. “Hinei ha-aish, ve-hinei ha-etzim, ve-ayeh hu haseh le’olah.”

Yehuda: “Here’s the fire.” This is a story about the binding of Isaac and it sounds a lot like the biblical version of the phrase. In the Hebrew it says, “Here’s the fire and here’s the wood and where is, right, Abraham?”

Moti: No, in Genesis it’s where?

Yehuda: In Genesis, in Genesis, Abraham asks, where is the offering, right?

Moti: And Naomi Shemer writes, “Hinei ha-aish, ve-hinei ha-etzim, ve-hinei hu.” And here is…

Yehuda: Right. Here is the child for the sacrifice.

Moti: And what is the story here? It was written in November 1967. One of her best friends, from Kibbutz Degania, which is the neighbor of Kibbutz Kineret. His name was Yitzhak Artzi. And he was a pilot. And he was killed by the Egyptians. And for Naomi Shemer, it was kind of a shock. That’s the time, listen, 1967, that’s the top of, you know, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. This is the most known…

Yehuda: We’ll come to that in a second.

Moti: Yes. But at the same time, where Yerushalayim Shel Zahav spreads all over the globe, she writes this song. She uses the phrases, the quotes from Genesis, but she changes it, because she said it’s kind of a demonstration against whoever. She says, here is the Akeda. Here is the the price that you have to pay. Yitzchak, Yitzchak my friend, Yitzhak Arti, was killed, died, sacrified, was sacrificed to save the Jewish nation, the Jewish state. So for, it was, in a way kind of protest again, whatever you want to think, so, and she wrote the words and of course, she quoted from the, from the Bible and she wrote the music. You can hear how kind of dramatic music it is, that, you know, you, get this, it’s so dramatic. And in Israel, it’s identified with Yom Hazikaron, which you know, is the memorial day.

Yehuda: This is such a deep and troubling idea in Israeli society that has been around for a long time. Perhaps the most famous poem in the history of Israel, Natan Alterman’s Silver Platter, which describes the young man and the young woman coming back from the fields, having fought the wars, and who say to their parents with a dose of pain, it’s not, and there’s a biting quality to it. We are, you know, we are the silver platter, the state didn’t come on a silver platter, we are the sacrifice you have to make.

And I feel this a lot, especially since October 7th, to see this kind of constant cycle of parents as though sacrificing their children and that all of this relies on 18 to 22 year olds in Israeli society.

Moti: Yes, yes, it’s very painful. Listen, it’s a question that you can’t even, you have no ability to avoid it, because I have three children, I have grandchildren, I lost my brother in the first Lebanon war. So it’s very personal in each home in Israel. The question, do we sacrifice, are we
sacrificing our children for the sake of whatever? And it’s not, you know, we don’t think in the Hartman Institute of the Midrashh just, you know… It’s our lives. So it’s something that it’s very, very painful.

Yehuda: It’s not theoretical.

Yeah, and I think by naming the fact that it’s personal for Naomi Shemer, the language that she uses to articulate this pain comes across through music, but then that music gets set to Yom Hazikaron, to Israeli Memorial Day, makes it not really a song anymore. It’s not an entertainment piece. It’s actually, it’s closer to liturgy, right?

Moti: You are right. You are right. This is one of her liturgic songs. And in Israel, you hear this song. It’s not so known in Israel too. But when you hear it, you hear it in the context of Yom Hazikaron.

Yehuda: Yep. So let’s stay in 1967 for a moment, for probably Naomi Shemer’s most famous song, I think it’s fair to say. We’re gonna listen to Jerusalem of Gold, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, as we’ll talk about, released a month before, or performed for the first time a month before the 1967 war. We’re gonna listen to a clip of Yerushalayim Shel Zahav now.

I have to say, Moti, before you introduce it, when I heard this version playing here, I was like, wait, this is the most famous Naomi Shemer song, but it’s most famously sung by not her, right, by Shuli Natan, who’s the first to perform it. So tell us a little bit about the history of the song and the significance of the song.

Moti: It’s very interesting that till the Six Days War, the were almost no songd about Jerusalem. In the very large and rich scene of Israeli songs, in Israel. Very interesting. So, when there was the first festival of songs at the national festival in Jerusalem, so the mayor of Jerusalem, very famous mayor, Teddy Kollek said that he wants that there will be the competition and all these singers and that’s great, but he wants that there will be a song about Jerusalem. So, but there weren’t so much, so the idea was to come to some, to apply to some writers, you know, things of writers and others, and to write songs for Jerusalem. And Naomi Shemer said, I’ll write. And she said, she was sure that it will take her two minutes to write the song. And it took her something like three months. And then she decided, she said that she can’t write the song.

Why? Because she was very connected to Jerusalem. Part of her childhood, her parents had a very good friends in Jerusalem and every summer for the vacation she used to come and to spend month or two in Jerusalem. She learned in the Academy of Music in Jerusalem when she was 18 years old. So she had an experience of Jerusalem, it was part of her biography. So she was sure that it will take her a moment. She didn’t find the exact, you know, entrance to the song.

So she said, I have no song. It was two weeks before deadline. And then she decided to make another, you know, another experience to go. She went to one of the farms near Tel Aviv. She drove a horse. She used to drive horse, and while she’s driving, how do you say, riding the horse?

Yehuda: Riding the horse, yeah.

Moti: Riding the horse, she, all of a sudden came to her memory an Aggadah, a legend that she heard from Chazal, she heard from her teacher in in the elementary school in Kineret. And she remembered that the story was about Rabbi Akiva and his wife that waited for him for so many years that when he was learning for, you know, learning Torah, and he when he came back he brought her a very nice… Tachshit, how do you say tachshit?

Yehuda: A piece of jewelry.

Moti: A piece of jewelry in a kind of silhouette of Jerusalem, something like that. That’s the story from the Talmud. So, now she had the idea and she wrote about Jerusalem of Gold, is the name of the… That’s how it was called in the Talmud, this kind of jewelry. So she wrote it. She wrote it before the SIx Day War. And then, one of the, how do you say, bayit of the song?

Yehuda: The stanzas.

Moti: One talks about Jerusalem empty of Jews and the old city, no Jews, no, you can’t go from the Jerusalem to the Dead Sea because there is a border there. That’s she wrote. And then all of a sudden, six days of war, oh! We have Jerusalem. So she was someplace in Sinai desert with the soldiers and she was sitting some place in the desert and she wrote…

Yehuda: A new stanza.

Moti: And then she said about Jerusalem and you know, there is joy and joy is full of light. And we have this song that says about how beautiful is Jerusalem. So when it was heard the more I remember it I was 11 years old. I remember Shuli Natan, a young woman, she was a soldier then, 19 years old, with guitar singing this song and all of Israel were just crazy, because we could hear it everywhere and it became the most popular song of Naomi Shemer. I can tell you as a biographer, not official biographer of Naomi Shemer, that it was very important for her bank account because she was poor before that and after Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, she could build, she could buy a house.

Yehuda: Well, so what’s so interesting about the history of that song where it literally, May 1967, it has one set of words, which is, and the song therefore is a lament. It really is a lament. It’s hard to remember that it’s a lament about Jerusalem as the place of aspiration, of dreams, of the return. Between ’48 and ’67, the old city of Jerusalem is devoid of Jews, kicked out by the Jordanians in ’48, and therefore rooted in the kind of same tragedy that Jerusalem had inhabited for 2,000 years, a place that Jews had been banished from and couldn’t go back to.

It’s so interesting to me musically to think about it as a song of triumph. It goes overnight from being a song of lament to a song of triumph, but that also invites a certain politics associated to it. So what was that about for Naomi Shemer herself?

Moti: Yes. Listen, when this song became kind of an anthem, and then was the Six Days War, and one of the soldiers that fought in the old city in Jerusalem, and from his unit, from 60 soldiers in his unit, 37 were killed in this war, he heard the song, his name was Meir Ariel, which is a very important, a singer-songwriter in Israel, passed away 20 years ago, no, less. And he couldn’t stand it.

So he wrote different words of a soldier on the melody of Yerushalayim Shel Zahav and he talks about dead and about widows and about killing and all of that. And Noam Shemer was shocked and they had a kind of conversation and they both decided that it’s okay, but she didn’t like the idea that somebody is going to use her song.

From another point of view, Amos Oz, very, very famous, one of the most important authors in Israel, he was a young reporter in one of the newspapers in Israel. And he wrote, what do mean when you say that Jerusalem, in the song, that Jerusalem is empty? Jerusalem is not empty. There are civilians there, Arabs. So she said to him, and he wrote a whole article, two pages about that. So she said to him, she responded to that and she said, for me, when there are no Jews in Jerusalem, the city is empty. So in a way, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, Jerusalem of gold is a kind of, it became something that expressed the general atmosphere of, you know, from from galut to geulah.

Fom a fear, the fear in israel before the Six Day War, was a fear for a new holocaust, and in six days, we are now, you know, the top of the world. So, in a way, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav expressed that.

Yehuda: It has all pieces of it. And I love the description of the way that it was controversial in its own time from the perspective of other artists and writers who are thinking about all of the implications of the sentimentality of the song. The song is relentlessly sentimental. I find it sometimes hard to listen to. But precisely for that concern that the use of sentimental music has very significant social and political consequences.

Moti, when you think about her, who’s the analog in the folk music scene in America? Who would be the cultural equivalent when you think about who’s the American, that’s a funny question, who’s the American Naomi, who’s the American Naomi Shemer?

Moti: Yeah. It’s a very good question because all these, you know, the names that I can think about, had in a way, and how do I say it, a scent of, you know, nichu’ach a scent of protest. Bob Dylan, you know, even Pete Seeger…

Yehuda: Yeah, Joan Baez, yep.

Moti: And Joan Baez. So it’s not Noami Shemer. So I don’t know who is this. It comes from the folk but I don’t, I can’t say exactly who, because she had, at the same time, she had kind of naive or very, how do I describe it, something… She really believed in what we do here, in Zionism, in settlements, and protecting Israel. So in a way, the protest that I just described about Akedat Yitzhak, it was something very not typical for her, because she, in a way, expressed, you know, the young state that now is rebuilding the Jewish nation and everything is great and we are all, you know, good and young and so I can’t find this one, but perhaps you know, I don’t know enough the…

Yehuda: No, I just think that’s an interesting insight, that on one hand, you can hear it musically, it’s part of the same family of music, right? She’s playing with the same stuff. In fact, actually she has a song which we’re not going to play now, which I didn’t surprise she never got sued for, which is Kolech Min Hasufa, which is literally “blowing in the wind.” It’s just the song “Blowing in the Wind” with Hebrew words attached to it.

Moti: You are right. Yes. Yeah, she translated it. She translated it.

Yehuda: Yeah. So she’s in that same family of work, but she is not a protest musician. She’s in some ways a lot of ways an establishment musician.

Let’s go to the, I would say the second most famous Naomi Shemer song, which also has political significance and overtones to it, is Al Kol Eilah. Let’s hear a clip of Al Kalila.

Yehuda: What’s amazing about this song is that on its face, I’m gonna do the pshat version, the simple version, you’re gonna do the drash. On its face, it’s a gratitude song. Gratitude for everything I have, on family, on love, on domesticity. But that’s not really the entirety of what the song is about. So maybe you unpack a little bit more.

Moti: Listen, first of all, there is a, even in this song also, we have a very personal background, because she wrote this song as a response to the death of her sister’s husband. It was when he was 60 years old or something, just drowned in some place in Eilat or in Sinai, I don’t remember well and everybody in the family was so depressed and she wrote this song as a kind of comfort to encourage her sister, Rutka, and that was the only meaning of the song for her when she wrote it it was 1976 or something like that.

But as it happens in Israel, it became the anthem of the right wing in the political mapm when started the whole peace process with the Sadat in Egypt and it was this, you know, idea of evacuation settlements from the Gaza Strip and the Yamit, the cities were established there.

Yehuda: And the Sinai, yeah.

Moti: Yeah, and Sinai, and there was a whole movement against withdrawing from Sinai and they used the song especially the phrase, “Al na ta’akur natua.”

Yehuda: Yeah, don’t uproot that which is planted.

Moti: And it became, you know, the sisma, the slogan of this movement. And beginning, she was very not, she was upset of that, but then she decided, okay, this is my contribution to the fight, to the, you know, to the quarrel. We were going, I give you this, my song in order that it will be part of the effort to stop the evacuation, stop the withdrawing from mainly Sinai. So in a way it became a very political statement. And she was identified with that completely.

Yehuda: She personally identified with the use of the song?

Moti: Yes, yes, something very interesting happened to her politically. She was born and raised and even had the ideology of the Labor movement. I mean the halutzim from Kineret, from the kibbutz. After ’73, after the war, she said that the most important mitzvah of Eretz Yisrael is to yishuv Eretz Yisrael to settle, to establish settled land, established settlements and she said, we, the pioneers and the second generation, third generation of the pioneers, we became tired. We did enough. We did Degnia and Hanita and all these, you know, the myth of establishing the state. We fought in the independence war and now we’re a little bit tired. So somebody else going to take the lapid, the, how do you say the lapid?

Yehuda: The torch.

Moti: The torch. And this is Gush Emunim that was, you know, raised after, established after the Yom Kippur War, in the right side of the map, the Zionist Orthodox. And she was identified with them and she supported her struggle for changing and leading the right direction and she even paid a little bit of price about that, because most of her friends came from the liberal side of the map, from the left side of the map and they didn’t, they couldn’t understand how come the kibbutznik from Kineret, the kibbutznik kid from Kineret is going to change her political views, but she, that’s what she believed, yes.

Yehuda: That’s what she was saying. Yeah, I mean, this is the hard thing for me as a lover of her music. I mean, it’s not my politics. And also it’s just hard to think about what it means to be the folk anthem writer, apropos we were talking about earlier, the folk anthem writer of her society who ultimately aligns with the right is a very crazy thing. The price she pays also, she loses young Moti Zeria and his friends for decades, right?

Moti: Absolutely, absolutely, of course.

Yehuda: Like, what do you mean? What do you mean? Your nostalgia, your sentimentality is producing a kind of regressive version of what the liberal utopia was supposed to be.

Moti: You know, yeah, so that I, at the beginning, that for me to, rediscovering Naomi Shemer, in a way, it’s a parallel to what happened to me with the Jewish, with the no, the Jewish sources. For me as a typical Israeli, it was kept for me. I didn’t learn it in school and of course didn’t enter to synagogue and so on. So to be connected, to reclaim my place in this tradition, in a way, the same about Rabbi Akiva, and about Naomi Shemer, it’s the same. For me, it’s, this is a Jewish source that you have to make a midrash and to reclaim it. The Naomi Shemer songs. So in a way, it brought me back to Naomi Shemer.

Yehuda: Yeah. Let’s do one last song.

Moti: Which one you are going to choose?

Yehuda: I think Machar.

Moti: Yeah? I want to say a word aobout Lu Yehi.

Yehuda: Okay, so let’s do one last song and let’s do Lu Yehi.

Moti: Machar, I love it because this is a little bit of optimism here. We need it, but…

Yehuda: Yeah. All right. So let’s do Lu Yehi and then we’ll do Machar. Go ahead. Go ahead with Lu Yehi.

Moti: Listen, Lu Yehi, this song is identified with the Yom Kippur War. And in a way, exactly as happened with Yerushalayim Shel Zahav in Six Day War, Lu Yehu became the symbol of the Yom Kippur War with its you know, tragedy, with all this pain and shock that we experienced then.

And when I wrote the biography, let me share with you one personal story. When I wrote the biography, I was allowed to read all the letters that were written to her during the war. And she got hundreds of letters. One of letters, one of them was from a woman, young woman from Haifa that was just married and her husband was taken to to Miluim, to reserve force to fight in Egypt and he was in, he was absent, I think the word is absent, nobody knew whether he was killed or was captured by the the Egyptians, Egyptian army. So she didn’t know what to do. So she wrote to Naomi Shemer, every night when I go to sleep, I sing to myself, lu yehi, let it be, kind of pray. And every morning when I wake up, I sing to myself, lu yehi, let it be.

And her husband came back to Israel, he was captured by the, he was a prisoner of war in Egypt and he came back. So for me, it was another important understanding, that when you talk about pray, when you talk about tefillah, it’s not something that is identified only with one sect in the Jewish arena. We pray, you pray, I pray. Lu Yehi is a pray song. It’s liturgy, one of the greatest liturgies in Israel.

Yehuda: Is it true, the apocryphal story that’s told about Lu Yehi that she composed it to the music of Let It Be by the Beatles and then changed the music in the back of a cab in New York?

Moti: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. She, the first, yeah, the first time she was to translate, let it be of the Beatles. But it was great. You can sing it and it sounds great. Yeah, it sounds great. And then she changed the music. You know why? Because she was invited during the war. She was invited to the Israeli TV and she was, you know, rehearsing at home, and she planned to sing Lu Yehi in Hebrew songs, but in Hebrew language, but on the music of Paul McCartney! So her husband came from the reserve force and he said to her, you know, playing on the piano and he said to her, “In a Jewish world, are you going to sing a music of a Goy?”

Yehuda: Oh my goodness.

Moti: So it was two hours before she has to go to the studio. So she went to the car, to the taxi down the road, and it took, you know, 12 minutes between her home and the studio in Herzliya. In these 12 minutes, in the taxi, she composed the music of Lu Yehi.

Yehuda: Amazing. We’re going to hear a clip of Lu Yehi here. We’re going to go straight to a clip of Machar, and we’re going to talk about a little bit of optimism to close out our show. Go ahead.

Moti: This is the original recording from the studio because she said, “Lu yehi, lu yehi, lu-uuu yehi.” Now we used to sing it now, “Lu yehi, lu yehi, ana lu yehi.” Okay.

Yehuda: Yeah. Let’s hear Machar and conclude with a little bit of optimism for Israel at 77.

Let’s use the vision for… not just tomorrow in the prosaic sense. This is not, we’re gonna have a great time tomorrow. Tell us what, what’s Naomi Shemer’s vision, ultimately, and what’s this rooted in for her?

Moti: Listen, first of all, I think that we need Naomi Shemer urgently, to think in Israel and to express these complex feelings that we feel. She was amazing with that, but to feel what we feel and to give it kind of expression. And we miss it. We miss it.

We have so many songs after the 7th of October, and I don’t feel with each one of them that they can hold the complexity of the situation. So I think that by coming back to Naomi Shemer’s songs, especially to hear that there is in her songs the desire for peace, the desire for a better future for the region, the nations, the two nations, for all of us, we have no option but to be optimistic and try to bring tomorrow, if not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, but I prefer tomorrow.

Yehuda: Yeah. Last question. You know, when we were preparing and I was, I went through the whole canon of Naomi Shemer, basically, last night and I was like, oh my God, how are we not going to do? Every morning, I don’t know if I told you this once, my father, when I was a little kid, would to wake us up every morning would sing hachagiga nigmeret because the phrase, lakum bachar baboker im shir chadash halev, to wake up in the morning with a new song. I remember that.

Havlei Mashiach, a song about Mashiach, which I love. Chorshat HaEkaliptus, which my parents walked down the aisle of their wedding to. O’dlo Ahavti Dai. And one of my personal favorites, which is more obscure, which is Lechem Ha-Ohavim. I just love all these songs. So we’re gonna put all of these in a Spotify playlist and we encourage people, it’s a great Yom Ha’atzmaut activity. Just keep it in the background. Moti, what’s the song you’re gonna wake up singing this year on Yom Ha’atzmaut?

Moti: Of Naomi Shemer? I think Lif’amim Hachagigah Nigmeret, you know what, because there is an understanding that the situation is very very difficult. But you have no choice but to wake up every day and to start from Bereshit. So in a way, it encouraged me, that there is a chance, that we can come, and start from Bereshit. And there are so many things in the Israeli society now that need to be rebuilt from Bereshit. I find it very, very encouraging to hear this song.

Yehuda: Thank you so much, Moti. Thanks for doing this.

Moti: Thank you very much.