"Please, Lord, watch over him... When, my boy, will you return to me?"
Netta Barzilai takes an old Israeli Mizrachi love song and turns it into a haunting cri de cœur. Plus a Purim photo that, in retrospect, is no less haunting.
We begin, first, with a Purim photo.
These are “tatzpetaniyot,” the Israeli soldiers, mostly women, who sit at computers all day and all night and monitor cameras along the border on infinite screens. There are tatzpetaniyot along the Gaza border in the south, the Lebanon and Syria borders in the north. And elsewhere.
These are the tatzpetaniyot of Nahal Oz, celebrating Purim.
It’s sweet, no?
No, not really. Because these are the tatzpetaniyot of Nahal Oz last Purim, when they were still alive. On October 7th, tatzpetaniyot took the brunt of the hit. For days, some of them had warned of strange activity on the other side of the border, as is now well known and as will surely be thoroughly investigated, but they were ignored. “It’s nothing,” they were told. “Calm down.”
Except that it wasn’t nothing. When Hamas shot out the cameras they were monitoring, they were left blind. They had no way to know what was happening around them, And when the barbarians got to their army bases, situated just over the border, the bases were barely staffed. There was no one to protect these women (here’s that father we posted recently, screaming at the commander, asking where he was when the “girls” needed him). Many of them did not live to see this Purim. Of those who didn’t, some were shot, some were burnt alive.
Take a look at the joy, the fun, the camaraderie, the youth, the lives just beginning. Who could possibly have imagined?
Yesterday, we sent out an incorrect link for the SECOND lecture in the Haviv Rettig Gur series. The correct link is here, and below, we’ve listed it again with a clickable YouTube thumbnail. Apologies.
WEDNESDAY (03/27): Israel’s national archive, strangely, is offline and closed to the public. Why is that? Is it really a technical snafu? Or is something else at play? We speak to the former director of the Israel State Archives, Dr. Yaakov Lozowick, to discuss not only this specific issue, but the Archive in general, how it started, how it works, and what challenges it faces. We’ll post an excerpt for everyone, and the full conversation for our paid subscribers.
THURSDAY (03/28): In this time or crisis and immense heartbreak, Israelis and world Jewry have come together in a big way, especially to volunteer on the ground in Israel. Today, we share a conversation with the co-founders of Sword of Iron - Israel Volunteer Opportunities, Yocheved Ruttenberg and Hagit Amar. Related to the issue of volunteering, we will also share a conversation I had with Dr. Steven Frank, a radiation oncologist from Houston, TX who came to Israel to volunteer at Rambam hospital in Haifa.
FRIDAY (03/29): A new series of videos called “240 seconds” is making its way around Israel. They’re four minutes long, mostly about the need for a change in government, but also, in many cases, interesting and illuminating about moments in Israel’s past. Today we’ll sample one with one of Israel’s preeminent historians, Professor Anita Shapira, on how David Ben-Gurion thought when his Israel was under attack.
This is one of those “everybody knows somebody, who knows somebody….who knows somebody….” Israeli stories.
It begins with a famous Israeli song that’s almost forty years old. By the Mizrahi singer, Margalit Tzan’ani or “Margol”, it was released in 1986. It’s one of those now classic Israeli Mizrahi love songs, with the Middle-Eastern influence easy to hear.
Here are the words and then a performance from years later. In the performance, you’ll see the Israeli phenomenon of the crowd singing (see 00:50 and on) so that the performers actually step back.
Here are the words, a classic broken-hearted love song:
I waited for him all night there at the station He promised that he would return and a year has already passed At dawn he did not come When, when will you come back to me Road dust in his curls Please, Lord, please take care of him I gave him everything he loved I embroidered it with gold thread I will keep as a keepsake my love Oh, my boy, when will you return to my house? I will keep as a keepsake my love Oh, my boy, when will you return to my house? You braided a bouquet of roses for him from garden flowers A crown and glory for the bridegroom's head At dawn he did not come when, when will you come back to me Road dust in his curls... He said that he would return and promised that he would love Your heart every day goes out only to him East and West what is the distance Dust remains from the memories He said that you gave him everything again He has been wandering around the big world for a year now And your hands are limp and soft How long can you wait? Road dust in his curls...
And here’s a performance of the original, to give you the sense…
Now we get to the new version. The drummer for Israeli pop star and Eurovision winner, Netta Barzilai, is Tuval Haim. Tuval is the older brother of Yotam Haim z’’l. On October 7th, Yotam was kidnapped from Kfar Aza. On December 15th, he was tragically and accidentally killed by IDF troops in Gaza City as he escaped his captors. We shared the incredible strength and compassion of his mother, Iris, in a post later that week.
Prior to December 15th, Netta Barzilai and four of Israel’s leading drummers Zohar Barzilai, Sharon Petrover, Tal Cohen and Tuval Haim (who first appears at 00:31 in the video below, and is then identified at 3:03) came together to perform Na’Ari Shuva Elay (“My Boy, Return to Me”), the song above.
This time, though, they did it a cappella. This time, it’s not a celebration of love, but something much more harrowing. Same words, same melody. And nothing at all the same.
This video has the words, in English, already subtitled:
I saw this car in a parking lot yesterday, in Givatayim. Someone plastered their entire rear window with this:
“No stopping until they’re ALL returned".
#BringThemHomeNow.
For some of the women in that photo at the very top of this post, it’s too late. For some of the hostages, though, it’s not.
Not yet.
Once again, the correct link to the SECOND Haviv Rettig Gur lecture at Shalem College is this. Apologies for the error yesterday.
Impossible Takes Longer is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
Haviv's presentations are amazing and helpful. Please share whatever he did at Shalem with the rest of us!
When the international women's groups refused to acknowledge the rape, the torture, the dismemberment, etc. of Israeli women, that was a monumental betrayal, but it happened because the "Jews are the white oppressors who run the world and Israel is the greatest oppressor nation and the cause of all international misery" trope dehumanized these women. They didn't have human rights because they weren't human. But that was not the first dehumanization.
The fact that Israeli men didn't listen to the women, didn't care if their warnings were evidence-based, came from the same kind of dehumanization. "Calm down, sweetheart," because nothing a woman says really needs to be taken seriously. This is a huge problem in our culture. Not just the Jews, but almost every culture on the face of the earth disrespects women. The war we're in right now is the direct cost of this disrespect. The Israeli leadership betrayed the women first, and all the deaths are the consequence.
Of course Hamas and its entire messed-up value system and narrative are who committed the atrocities, but there have been so many enablers. The international condemnation Israel has suffered for having been the victim of genocide, for the DARVO gaslighting that Israelis are the committers of genocide, we can kind of expect that. But among our own, you'd think we'd find allies. Those women never had allies. Even our own never really considered them human.
We should learn from that.