The Beatles, the Yom Kippur War, and a Song Still Beloved by Israeli Soldiers

In the summer of 1973, the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” which had been released three years prior, was a mainstay of Israeli radio, leading the songwriter Naomi Shemer—best known for her “Jerusalem of Gold”—to compose a Hebrew version, to be sung to the same tune. Then the Yom Kippur war broke out, and the song she had written no longer seemed appropriate, as Lahav Harkov writes:

Shemer changed the lyrics to a prayer expressing hope for the battles to end and for IDF soldiers to return home peacefully. . . . Shemer wrote the song for the singer Chava Alberstein, who had wanted to perform it at an event for pilots’ wives. . . .

At first, [Shemer] kept the Beatles’ tune, but her husband, Mordechai Horowitz, on a reprieve from fighting in the war, said: “I won’t let you waste this song on a foreign tune. This is a Jewish war, and you should give it a Jewish tune.” . . .

That day, Shemer was asked to perform on television, and she came up with an original tune for the song in the car on the way to the studio, a tune that she described as [capturing] “the sigh and distress of the war.” The song was broadcast the next day, and a day after that, Alberstein performed it on Army Radio. Shemer’s “Let It Be” became the unofficial song of the Yom Kippur War, played and sung by soldiers on duty.

[According to Shemer], the then-IDF chief of staff David Elazar first heard the song after the war ended, and it made him cry.

A video of Shemer performing the song—whose title, Lu y’hi, means “may it be”—can be found at the link below. Lyrics in Hebrew and in English translation can be found here.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Arts & Culture, Israeli music, Naomi Shemer, The Beatles, Yom Kippur War

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society