Author of "Embracing Auschwitz" and "Mensch•Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi - Wisdom for Untethered Times." Winner of the Rockower Award, the highest honor in Jewish journalism and 2019 Religion News Association Award for Excellence in Commentary. Musings of a rabbi, journalist, father, husband, poodle-owner, Red Sox fan and self-proclaimed mensch, taken from essays, columns, sermons and thin air. Writes regularly in the New York Jewish Week and Times of Israel.
Can we still dream of a better future during dystopian times? From the Bible to the voters of Eurovision - the closest thing we have to an international closed-ballot election - the answer is yes.
In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The results from the Eurovision contest could not have been more stunning, when Israel’s entry, the song New Day Will Rise, sung by Yuval Raphael, came from way back to nearly seize victory. And half a world away at almost the exact same moment, the resilient stallion Journalism came from nowhere to win the Preakness.
Someone Somewhere was smiling down on the embattled field of journalism yesterday and at the same time telling us that the people of the world are yearning, above all, for a new day to rise. As this (apparently AI generated) video review states, the song is “an anthem of hope forged in the crucible of adversity.” Blending Hebrew, French, and English lyrics, it symbolizes unity, healing, and strength.
The chorus, although coming from a place of one person’s - and one nation’s - particular pain - Yuval is an October 7 survivor - could not have been more universal, and that is precisely the chord that was struck in the voting among the international viewers, though not among the official juries consisting of a small number of elites from the participating countries.
After the national juries’ votes were tallied, country by country, Austria had 258 points, while Israel was way back in the pack with 60. But when the general public chimed in from home, real people who could vote anonymously and without representing anyone other than themselves, Israel won that category going away, scoring 297 points for a total of 357 when combined with their 60 national jury points. No other country came remotely close to that 297. Estonia was closest, at 258. Then Sweden at 195 - and their sauna routine, with sweaty, half naked Swedish bodies - was heavily favored, understandably. Austria was next in the public voting, with 178, for a total of 436.
By the rules, when combining the two scores, Austria clearly won, but Yuval’s song - and her story - won the hearts of the world’s viewers. In a world where politics can easily get enmeshed in the jury deliberations, and many wanted Israel expelled from Eurovision to begin with (and Belgian and Spanish broadcasters aired anti-Israel messages even during the performance), Israel didn’t stand a chance in the jury voting. Had Yuval’s song simply held its own among the national representatives, it would have won going away. See for yourself. Jury is in blue, public in red:
The tally is not purely by popular vote, which would disadvantage smaller nations. It’s sort of like the Electoral College, in that each nation is given proportionate weight, but it’s not winner take all.
So, let’s take the UK for example - never Israel’s best friend. They had 58 points to divide up among all the nations, in jury votes and in popular votes. Israel got no jury votes (that’s zero in blue), but in the popular vote (in red), it got 12 from the UK - more than any other nation. The highest possible amount is always 12.
Among the top 25 nations,1 Israel was the highest scoring country in over half of them - 13, and scored 10 points (for second place) in six others. It placed first or second in two thirds of Europe (plus Australia). Among the nations where Israel topped the list are countries that have massacred, exiled and otherwise been not very nice to Jews over the centuries, including France and Germany, and those who have been hyper-critical of Israel more recently, like Spain and Ireland.
Let me sum it up: Eurovision is the closest thing we have to a closed-ballot international election. The feelings about Israel turned out to be much more positive than one might expect if we read the front pages, ADL surveys and Israel’s own propaganda machine. While many people love and admire Israel - but what they really voted for at Eurovision, was hope. Humanity and hope. Both were embodied in that song.
The Israel that comes through in Yuval’s song and story is one that I would vote for too. That’s not Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel. Bibi’s Israel was the one rejected by the national juries (and he knows all about juries). But the real people, the voters who had no one looking over their shoulders, were sophisticated enough to be able to tell the difference.
See “We’re Big in Europe: Why Israel Won the Eurovision Audience Vote” (Jerusalem Post): “The message is crystal clear: While the elite staff of the public broadcasters may despise Israel, audiences around the world either enjoyed the song, were touched by Raphael’s story of survival, or both. As author and commentator Hen Mazzig put it on X/Twitter: “#Eurovision public vote is saying: social media is not real life.””
The song, written by renowned Israeli musician Keren Peles, includes words from the biblical Song of Songs - a book bursting with universal yearning and hope - and it also makes indirect reference to the loss and grief of October 7 - which Raphael survived by pretending to be dead beneath a pile of bodies. The official music video makes the Nova festival connection more explicit.
The biblical verse (8:7), circled in yellow below, forms a dramatic bridge, as Yuval sings it the original Hebrew while standing on a balcony2 high atop a circular stairway with waters cascading around her.
In the performance, the verse is accompanied by powerful visuals of rushing water. But the prior verse in the text, circled in blue, although not included in the performance, is Song of Song’s most famous line: “Love is as strong as Death.” Ironically, the Hebrew word for “strong” here is the same as the Hebrew word for Gaza3, and the imagery of floods (see the clip below)4 recalls the waves of terrorists on October 7. Even with overpowering waves coming at me - love will win.
It’s a remarkable song, especially for a contest famous for keeping things kitschy and light. Raphael is not exactly singing ABBA’s “SOS” in her own SOS from the killing field.
While Yuval sang of metaphorical storms, Pro-Hamas protesters tried to storm the stage.5 They were stopped. No one watching on TV saw them. And she won the hearts of the world. It must really distress Hamas and its sponsor Qatar that all their millions of dollars of anti-Israel propaganda accomplished was to scare off a few elite juries.
The message here is that the real people are yearning for a new day - Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Americans, everyone. The governments - the leaders - are too stuck in their cycles of cynicism, fecklessness and greed to pause for a moment and hear the voices of their people yearning for a better tomorrow. These regular folks are banking on the power of love, combined with a modicum of hope - to get there.
It’s hard to feel encouraged right now, which is precisely why we need visions of hope to come from the darkest places.
I sat in my kitchen on Friday, tuning into the intimate, hopeful kitchen conversations with journalists and healers that have become Substack’s version of FDR’s old Fireside Chats, much like the broadcasts from the royal palace in London during the Blitz.
Then I listened to Yuval Raphael’s song.
And then read an article about sprouts peeking through the ground, this piece from last weekend’s Ha’aretz on how border Kibbutzim are coming back to life.
Amber waves of grain can now be seen peeking through the earth in the devastated communities of the north as well.6
These glimpses of hope are far from being realized in other areas, to be sure, like burnt out parts of L.A. and parts of the Carolinas and West Virginia devastated by floods - and Kentucky tornadoes this weekend - with FEMA and NOAA hollowed out, and Gaza itself facing another wave of destruction - though with a glimmer of hope that Hamas is on the verge of surrendering and freeing the remaining hostages. We can only hope that the death and destruction will soon end.
The prophet Amos wrote:
What does it mean that the plower shall meet the reaper? According to the commentator Rashi, there will be so much wheat that they will not finish harvesting until it comes time to plant again.7
That’s what hope is.
For Jews, hope is not the thing with feathers or that floats. Hope is the thing that grows from the ground. Hope is a flower or a sheaf of grain sprouting on bloodstained earth. Hope makes preparation for the wheat harvest in ten days on Shavuot. Hope is when the fields of the Nova festival grow red anemones again.
Reminiscent of the field at Flanders after the First World War, the red anemones are a symbol of resilience in Israel - Maya Alleruzzo/AP
Hope is when battlefields turn into wheatfields. This vision of hope was echoed in another popular song written after October 7. (click for full translation8). The chorus goes, “The battlefield will turn into a wheatfield. You’ll see that and we’ll return and raise children here.”
Amos was not a happy prophet. Yet even for him, and even for the survivors of October 7, hope was able to emerge from the ashes.
A number of years ago, I wrote a sermon about my astonishment upon visiting Mount Saint Helens after its devastating eruption9. I discovered that a whole new ecosystem was emerging before our eyes. Peter Frenzen, the chief scientist at Mount Saint Helens, put it best, "Volcanoes do not destroy;" he said, "they create."
Now I know how we Jews developed our ability for confronting destruction with renewal. We inherited it from God, the One who renews Creation each day. Never was that more evident to me than at Mount Saint Helens - and now in places like Be’eri and Kfar Azza.
Hope is when a 24-year-old Gen Z amateur singer comes out from a death shelter near Nova on October 7, when only 11 of 50 survived the grenades thrown into the shelter, she testifies before the UN and then, rather than running away from the threats and her own fears, comes onto the biggest stage in the world and warms the hearts of millions, gaining more votes than anyone else in the world.
Yuval’s message of hope is precisely what voters all over the world were choosing when they cast their vote for Raphael’s and Keren Peles’s song. Whatever their feelings about Israel, it was the universal human cry of hope that millions heard, one that transcends national boundaries.
The inescapable symbolism of a balcony over the water in Basel recalls the most famous photo of Theodore Herzl, taken during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, who after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 said, “In Basel I founded the Jewish State,” precisely half a century before the State of Israel was born. Herzl also coined the ultimate harbinger of hope, “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Some question whether Gaza and “strength” are truly etymologically connected, based on different formats for the letter ayin. But you can see the supporting evidence here.
But of all the artistic responses to catastrophe, none can match what I saw just a month ago in Washington state. The canvas was Mount St. Helens and the artist - the artist was God. On May 18th, 1980 the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in southwest Washington changed more than 200 square miles of rich forest into a gray, lifeless landscape. The devastation of the blast is almost unfathomable. The lateral blast swept out of the north side at 300 miles per hour creating a 230 square mile fan shaped area of devastation reaching a distance of 17 miles from the crater. With temperatures as high as 660 degrees and the power of 24 megatons of thermal energy, it snapped 100-year-old trees like toothpicks and stripped them of their bark. The largest landslide in recorded history swept down the mountain at speeds of 70 to 150 miles per hour and buried the North Fork of the Toutle River under an average of 150 feet of debris. The massive ash cloud grew to 80,000 feet in 15 minutes and reached the East Coast in 3 days, circling the earth in 15 days. 7,000 big game animals, 12 million salmon, millions of birds and small mammals and 57 humans died in the eruption. Before the blast the mountain stood 9,677 tall. It now stands at 8,363 feet. A thousand feet of mountain is no more. Talk about destruction!
So when we went there last month, I expected to find an eerie moonscape. But I saw something absolutely amazing instead. The land around the mountain is slowly healing. There is new growth everywhere, trees and moss and animal life. In fact, life returned to Mount St. Helens even before the search for the dead had ended. National Guard rescue crews looking for human casualties during the week after the 1980 eruption found that flies and yellow jackets had arrived before them. Curious deer and elk trotted into the blast zone just days after the dust settled. Helicopter pilots who landed inside the crater that first summer reported being dive-bombed by hummingbirds, which mistook their orange jumpsuits for something to eat. A whole new ecosystem is emerging before our eyes. Peter Frenzen, the chief scientist at Mount St. Helens, put it best, "Volcanoes do not destroy;" he said, "they create."
Now I know how we Jews developed our proclivity for confronting madness with artistry. We inherited it from God, the One who renews Creation each day. Never was that more evident to me than at Mount Saint Helens.
Wonderful piece giving us all hope Thank you Rabbi
If there’s even a dime to be made off Tapper’s trash, they won’t.