Should a Nation Dwell Alone? Eurovision and Yuval Raphael

King David plays his harp-Byzantine mosaic, Israel-photo by Geoffrey Clarfield

Israeli popular singer Yuval Raphael recently came in second in this year’s Eurovision song festival. She deserves our heartfelt congratulations during this dark time for Israel and the Jewish people.

Yuval has a fine voice. She is a consummate performer. She won various Israeli singing contests before receiving the backing of the Israeli arts establishment who did as much PR as possible to help her on her way to fame and stardom, through legitimately earning second place in this internationally prestigious festival.

But what makes Yuval phenomenal is that she is a survivor of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 She hid for eight hours under dead bodies to live. This is the kind of story we hear in Holocaust history and sadly, the State of Israel and its marvelous military and intelligence organizations failed the Jewish people as they were either unable or unwilling to come to the rescue in time.

Many investigations will eventually tell us the story of this intelligence and military failure which I suspect was based on projection. The naïve belief of secular Israelis that their Arab Muslim neighbors in Gaza simply want to “just get on with their lives,” like most Israeli citizens. Clearly this was and is not the case as the Muslim Arab population of Gaza is dedicated to Jihad.

We should also note that unlike Nazi Germany not one citizen of Gaza has yet done anything to help an Israeli hostage escape from the cruel bondage of Hamas in Gaza as they are still holding many Israeli hostages in inhuman conditions.

I have listened to Yuval’s song a number of times and watched her video. She is a good-looking Mediterranean maiden and surrounded herself with pretty and handsome young men and women who, in the video, celebrate life in a bucolic Mediterranean picnic setting. Hers is a song of hope, and the lyrical theme is that one should not stop loving, as we wait for tomorrow.

It is a touching and heartfelt song. It will be heard by millions of listeners in Europe and around the world and is just one more example of the values that Israelis live by. And so, one must hope that this song can and will help breakdown widespread medieval stereotypes in the Christian and Muslim world that Jews and Israelis epitomize evil.

Although Israel is the Jewish state par excellence, there is no explicit Jewish content in the song or lyrics of Yuval’s piece, nor any Jewish literary or visual symbol. There are no quotes or paraphrases from the Bible, the Talmud or the remarkably poetic books of the Kabbalistic Zohar, and no stars of David, nor historic or Biblical sites of Israel shown in the video. Part of the song is sung in French.

There was also a conspicuous absence of an Israeli flag in her video which would have been appropriate and dignified given the horror that Yuval has undergone and the triumph of her performance success. Nevertheless, the values of the song are those of Judaism-love and hope for the future. And so I was touched by her song. Yet I was also left with lingering discomfort.

When Theodor Herzl wrote his charter for the political and cultural rebirth of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel he wanted a state like any other state. He did not insist on Hebrew being the national language and imagined a future independent Jewish state as a kind of secularized Austria at the turn of the 19th century, like the one that he lived in without the rampant and widespread anti semitism.

Later Herzl was opposed by Ahad Haam who argued that a renewed Jewish state without a renewed Jewish culture based on three thousand years of Jewish creativity would be an empty shell. Sadly, Yuval’s song could just as likely be sung in Spanish, French, Italian, or even Turkish to the same effect. And this makes one ponder.

It is a sad fact that all and anything an Israeli does in public is grist for local, national, and international political commentary and often, heavy handed interference. And so one of the results of this is that the Israeli arts community, at every level is divided between “right” and “left,” that is to say those Israelis who believe in a united Israel that includes Jerusalem and the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, and those who believe that only an Israel based on the Armistice borders of 1948 will allow Israelis to participate as equals in Euro American culture. Otherwise they will be banned, cancelled, or ghosted.

Israeli singer Achinoam Nini is just one example of the latter. She is not a bad singer and frames herself as a kind of Israeli Joan Baez, leftist politics included, which includes the requisite performances abroad, periodic criticisms of the Israeli government and appearances at Davos events which shows her Globalist aspirations. She is the poster girl of the Israeli left and benefits from globalist sponsors like the well-funded aforementioned Davos crowd. She wants to join the government funded transnational elite of politically correct performers.

As it stands today Israeli writers, painters, musicians, and dancers can only get an audience in Europe or America if they “de Judaize” and “de Zionize” their creativity. Given the explosive rise of today’s cultural anti Semitism (part of the BDS movement) even those few opportunities are disappearing. Which makes one think.

Israel and Israelis are mistaken in putting so much time, energy, and money into trying to blend in with the blandness of top-down European government curated pop culture.

Most good musicians (especially in the Anglosphere) know that Eurovision is the soulless artifact of EU Brussels bureaucrats, who have turned European culture and music into a farce. None of the great singers of 20th century France emerged from Eurovision and thank God, the Beatles did not even try.

Every country who pitches a singer to Eurovision must fund that singer at the taxpayers’ expense. The competitive costs of doing so often run into millions of dollars. If I am wrong and Yuval Raphael’s exercise of Israeli “soft power” makes some European youth less anti-Israel, I have yet to see any evidence of this. This question can be answered through before and after surveys. Is this being done? I doubt it.

If songs like Yuval’s do not change public opinion, then all that financial support is a colossal waste of Israeli taxpayers money for, although Israeli citizens may not be aware of it, they are the ones funding Yuval.

Decades ago, a modest Ashkenazi Israeli government official by the name of Yitzchak ben Zvi established in Jerusalem an institute for the study of non-Ashkenazic or what was then called “Oriental Jewry” meaning mostly those Jews who came to Israel from the Islamic world.

He believed that unlike the secularized Russian influenced music and culture of the Zionist founders of the Jewish state, in contrast these communities were culturally rich and spiritually deep. He believed that the future culture of the Jewish state would be revivified by the spiritual and artistic traditions of these communities.

Anyone who has worked or lived in Israel knows that it is a nation of ethnic Jewish communities-Ashkenazi, Spanish, Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Georgian, Bukharin, just to name a few. Each of these communities has remarkable Jewish music that is well represented in the National Archives but rarely if ever broadcast on national radio or featured in the schools.

Some of these traditions such as Oriental Piyyutim (para liturgical sung poetry) are alive and well but they are not given public support or funding. Others inform independent “singer song writers” such as Yair Dalal, whose channeling of his Iraqi musical heritage has not only gained him a large following in Israel, but he has maintained that audience into his middle ages as he is an authentic Israeli poet, oud player and singer.

There are many others like him, and I have met and spent time with them. They are a modest group and very much in touch with their inner voice as musicians. They are inspired but not limited to Jewish tradition and are admirable for that. Most do not get government grants, and they have no chance of going to Eurovision.

To be honest, I doubt that any of them would want to. They are content to work within a rich, multifaceted three-thousand-year-old tradition of poetry and music that outshines and that I am certain will outlast any of the songs that Israel pitches to Eurovision.

Although Yuval Raphael may have done Israel a noticeably short term and ephemeral PR favor, I do not think that her songs will enter the national memory such as those of Shalom Chanoch, the poet Rachel, or the expatriate Rabbi, the late Schlomo Carlebach whose songs are now part of national consciousness.

I may be wrong, but I doubt it. I do wish Yuval a successful career in the piano bar music of urban Israel which is the genre she has chosen. That could change. I hope it does, as she has talent.

When I was in high school in Canada my music teacher Ben Steinberg was also well known as a composer of Jewish music. He was a gifted musician. At the beginning of each academic year he would ask us, “What kinds of music are there?” He would then answer his own question, “Music to remember and music to forget.”

I doubt that Yuval Raphael’s song will be sung by Israelis in twenty years’ time. And so, one must ask if all that taxpayers money could be given to artists who do not mind having an exclusively Israeli audience?

King David did not write his songs for a foreign audience. No, he sang and played his harp for a nation that is fated to dwell alone. We still sing his songs today, three thousand years later.