Last Saturday night, Motzei Shabbat, El Al flight 318 took off from London Heathrow. I was on it together with a number of British Reform and Liberal Rabbis. Colleagues I have known for decades and now we were all committed – heading to Israel in the middle of a war. I sat back in my seat and selected a film to watch, possibly not making the best choice to calm my nerves.
I put on the film that was released in the UK on October 6th 2023, exactly 50 years to the day after the events that it describes. The film was Guy Nattiv and Helen Mirren’s Golda – chronicling dramatically the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during and after the Yom Kippur War.
If the intelligence had been read properly, would there have been the loss of life that took place? How did Israel survive this threat to its very existence? Was Golda to blame for any failures on the way? And, since this was 1973, how could anyone stay alive smoking as many cigarettes as she did?
There was a classic song of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, written by Naomi Shemer whose song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav is also the classic song of the 1967 six day war. This song is sung in most Reform Synagogues on Sukkot morning – Lu Yehi. Rabbi Ofek Meir, Principal of the Leo Baeck Center in Haifa, reminded us of it.
‘Before the war, Naomi Shemer decided to write Hebrew words for the Beatles’ song “Let It Be”. She did not like the translation of the song’s name to “Shihyeh” which could be understood as “Whatever,” and thought that it should be given the name “Lu Yehi”.
Her version is not a translation of the Beatles song but a hopeful prayer for a quick end to the war and for the safety of IDF soldiers (“This is the end of the summer, the end of the road, let them come back.”)
Mordechai Shevitz, Naomi Shemer’s second husband and poet in his own right, who had just returned from reserve military service, declared: “I will not let you waste this song on the tune of strangers, this is about a Jewish war and you must write a Jewish melody.” This statement rang true for Naomi and accordingly she changed the tune to fit the Hebrew words.’ (From Israelforever.org/interact/multimedia/Israel songs)
Od yesh mifras lavan ba’ofek
mul anan shachor kaved
Kol shenevakesh – Lu Yehi.
Ve’im bacholonot ha’erev
Or nerot hachag ro’ed –
Kol shenevakesh – Lu Yehi.
Lu Yehi, Lu Yehi, Ana, Lu Yehi
Kol shenevakesh – Lu Yehi.
There is still a white sail on the horizon
Opposite a heavy black cloud
All that we ask for – may it be
And if in the evening windows
The light of the holiday candles flickers
All that we seek – may it be
May it be, may it be – Please – may it be
All that we seek – may it be.
Lu Yehi – fifty years later reflects my experiences in Israel over this past week. It was expressed beautifully by many of Israelis we thirteen British Rabbis met over the past week – ‘In Israel we live in a place that is 95% Gan Eden – paradise and 5% Gehinom –hell’.
On our first day together, this Monday, we visited Nir Oz, one of the Kibbutzim less than a mile from the Gaza border which was attacked by hundreds of Hamas terrorists on October 7th. We were shown the utter devastation by Irit, a Kibbutznik who, thank God, was able to hold the door of her safe-room shut for herself and her daughter with a wedge improvised from an oar and a piece of her vacuum cleaner while the terrorists looted her house and tried to get in.
So many of her neighbours were not so lucky. They were kidnapped or murdered by shooting through their safe-room doors, burned out of their house or out of their lives. From toddlers to senior citizens the Hamas terrorists were relentless in their violence and inhumanity. With all of this horror – the kibbutz was still beautiful; the wildflowers were blooming, the trees blossoming, the view of the fields even into nearby Gaza pastoral and calming. As Irit said the Kibbutzniks of Nir Oz are coming back, if they physiologically can. Hamas will achieve nothing.
We moved onto Re’im the site of the Nova Music Festival. For each of the 364 young people murdered by the Hamas terrorists, including child of EHRS members Jake Marlow z’’l, there is now a memorial pole with their picture, there is a tree planted in their name and the site was full of young Israeli soldiers who are going there to understand what they are fighting for. It’s the end of February so the ground is sprouting Calaniot, the subject of another famous Israeli song, big red wildflowers. Despite death – life.
On Wednesday we met Amir Tibon whose ex IDF General father had literally got into his car in Tel Aviv and driven to his son’s Kibbutz Nahal Oz to rescue his son, daughter in law and two toddler grandchildren from the terrorists. The story of how he, seven police officers and a few soldiers succeeded is just extraordinary and heroic. With Amir, when we met him, was Reform Rabbi Yael Vurgan, Rabbi for the Kibbutzim and Moshavim near Gaza, who spoke so movingly to us here at EHRS in the first week after the Hamas attacks.
We went to see Lee Siegel, brother of Keith, the hostage whom we especially remember at EHRS. We met Keith and his wife Sheli at his Synagogue, Birkat Shalom Reform on Kibbutz Gezer. It was harrowing to hear Lee’s testimony and what he had learned from Keith’s wife Aviva who had also been taken hostage and released a few weeks ago. Among the extraordinary things Lee told us was that Keith and Aviva were taken from the Hamas tunnels to be captive in the home of a Gazan family with three small children. When the family took one of the children to a doctor to treat his earache – the family left the other two children for Keith and Aviva to look after. Hamas’ hold on so many Gazans is such that it is somehow normal to keep war hostages in your home.
Beyond these encounters, near Gaza, in Jerusalem we went to an event with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog whose own son has just returned from 120 days as a soldier in Gaza. We met with Israeli Reform Rabbis and Rabbinic students to share their experiences and we went to Haifa, to meet with the Rabbis and students of the Reform Leo Baeck Center and Schools who are looking after some of the many thousands of evacuated families now living in hotels throughout the country.
This was the most intense time I have ever spent in Israel, immersed of course in the issues of this war. But as we landed in Ben Gurion what was so noticeable was how normal everything was. 95% paradise, 5% hell. The bars and café’s of Tel Aviv were as busy as they ever are. The traffic was as crazy as normal. The skyline throughout the country is full of cranes and new building. The supermarkets and the street markets are bustling. I went for a 5k run along the Tel Aviv promenade at sunset and it was as beautiful as ever. You can visit Israel and you will be appreciated for your visit and it will be good.
But – it was also not normal at all. Our train station was Tel Aviv ha Shalom, near the IDF headquarters and every time we got on a train there hundreds of young Israelis in uniform streamed off. I have never been more aware that our Jewish state lives or dies by the willingness of Israel’s parents and grandparents to see the children that have just graduated from high school going off to war and returning to the army whenever they are needed. The site of the Nova festival may well now be set up as a memorial to the murders committed by Hamas terrorists but as we stood there, walked among the photographs and stopped to pray we heard boom after boom from Gaza just a couple of miles away. Artillery fire that shook the ground where we stood as the Israeli army committed to the terrible actions which all hope will end the threat of such horror happening again in Israel, or in Gaza.
On Wednesday night as a large group of member of EHRS joined me for a Zoom session reporting from this experience in Israel a questions was asked about the Kibbutzim and open woodlands so close to the Gaza border. ‘Was it not a provocation that these Kibbutzim were established right across the border from Gaza?’ That question had been answered earlier in that day by Amir Tibon who told the story of his Kibbutz Nahal Oz, established in 1958 by 19 and 20 year old soldiers who had been encouraged by David Ben Gurion to begin farming, building homes and factories right there just by the border with then Egyptian controlled Gaza. A military base can easily be closed down, Ben Gurion reckoned, but families would never just abandon their homes, fields and workplaces. Further to this whoever criticises France for having towns bordering Switzerland or Germany, or Ukraine for there being villages on the border with Russia? Israel the Jewish state within the Green Line is a country with every right to exist on its territory.
Where next? We left Israel with a mixture of 95% hope and 5% despair. We left with the hope represented by the Arab-Jewish community garden in Haifa that we visited where Jews and Arabs look after their allotments together. We left with the hope represented by the hostage families’ conviction that their loved ones will return. We left with the hope of the Leo Baeck High School students that they will continue to build relationships across all the barriers that might seem to exist in Israel. We left with the despair at the loss of life in Gaza until Hamas surrenders and is disempowered together with their allies Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Rabbi Ofek Meir in Haifa taught us that In Naomi Shemer’s Lu Yehi she quotes this line from earlier in our Torah portion Ci Tissa this week as Moses sees the people of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf: ‘When Joshua heard the sound of the people in its boisterousness, he said to Moses, there is a cry of war in the camp. But Moses answered, “It is not the sound of the tune of triumph, or the tune of defeat; it is the sound of song I hear.”’ (Exodus 32:17-18 )
We must continue to join the sound of song in Israel, not despair, keep our connections, keep visiting, keep supporting the people of Israel’s right to live in peace with their neighbours and Amir Tibbon and Irit of Nir Oz’s right to live back in their Kibbutz homes, speedily in our days.
