On Tuesday, the Orange County Register published an article under the headline “Why chants like ‘Free Palestine,’ ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’ and ‘From the river to the sea’ are divisive.” The second of these is a very well-known Jewish song, meaning “the people of Israel lives,” and it should come as no surprise that there are sharp divisions between those who want the Jews to live and those who wish them dead. But the song itself is a relatively new creation. Gary Rosenblatt tells its story:

It was composed by Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994), a popular hasidic “singing rabbi,” at the request of Jacob Birnbaum, the founder of the grassroots Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, who was seeking an anthem for the fledgling Soviet Jewry movement in the spring of 1965. Birnbaum and Carlebach knew each other, as did their grandfathers.

Besides the three words, “Am Yisrael Chai,” [suggested by Birnbaum], Carlebach had added three more words to the song, based on the biblical story (Genesis 45:3) of Joseph revealing his identity to his brothers. He immediately asks about the welfare of their father, Jacob, whom Joseph has not seen in many years: “ha-od avi ḥai?” (“Is my father alive?”)

Carlebach transformed the question into an exclamatory statement of affirmation: “od avinu ḥai” (“our father is alive!”).

This year, Yom Kippur falls on a Saturday, so Jews won’t have to miss work to observe the solemn day. But this is not always so. Tevi Troy tells the story of Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire, who later distinguished himself as an incisive columnist:

During the 1968 campaign, Safire told Nixon that he would miss one of his speeches because of Yom Kippur. Nixon admired Safire’s adherence to tradition: “You go all the way, the cap, the shawl, and everything? Good for you!”

Troy has another Yom Kippur-related anecdote about Safire, who became famous for equipping then-Vice-President Spiro Agnew with such “memorable phrases” to describe the administration’s critics as “‘an effete corps of impudent snobs,’ ‘ideological eunuchs,’ ‘professional anarchists,’ and, most famously, ‘nattering nabobs of negativism.’”

In the fall of 1970, Safire was traveling with Agnew on the campaign trail and returned to Washington to attend [Yom Kippur] services at the Adas Israel congregation. He was less than thrilled to hear the rabbi’s sermon criticizing those who “let our country be divided and polarized by those who use the technique of alliteration.” As Safire wrote of the incident, “the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ was not a sin I had come to atone for.”