Last Thursday the celebrated pop musician Meir Barnai died at the age of fifty-five. Banai, a member of what might be termed the royal family of Israeli rock, never became religiously observant, as did his brother Evyatar and cousin Ehud (also highly successful recording artists). But like them he was at the forefront of a movement among secular Israelis to rediscover the Jewish religion, as Daniel Gordis writes:
Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah and dozens of others of the giants of early Zionism were raised in Orthodox homes and—to one degree or another—abandoned the rigors of that way of life. They sought sanctity not in the synagogue but in their ancestral homeland. They replaced prayer with labor. They ached not for ritual purity, but for the dirt of the land of Israel and the messiness of state-building. Early Zionism was, in many ways, a rebellion against Judaism. . . .
Somewhere along the line, though, Israelis’ infatuation with secularism began to crack, and their anger at the religion of their great-grandparents began to give way to curiosity. . . . [B]y the late 1970s, and with increased energy thereafter, younger generations of Israelis . . . wanted to be part of the conversation that had been Judaism for centuries. . . . Meir [Banai] was . . . swept along by the interest in religion and issued albums like Sh’ma Koli [whose name was taken from party of the Yom Kippur liturgy] that included songs like “L’kha Eli” (“To You, My God”), the words for which were composed by the medieval Jewish sage, Abraham ibn Ezra.. . . .
Banai’s life and work was a reminder that it is never too late to ask ourselves what the Jewish state is all about. There are many ways to answer that question, of course, but the move from the secularism of Israel’s early generations to the heartbreak of 1973 to the religious inquisitiveness of recent decades suggests that more than anything, Israel is the place where Jews have come to reimagine what Jewish peoplehood might mean when it resides in its ancestral homeland and is coupled to sovereignty.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/222128/how-musician-meir-banai-reflected-israeli-cultures-recent-return-to-jewish-tradition