Find Light in the Darkness

When will we ever learn?

The words of that 1955 Pete Seeger song, the one that makes the connection between life and death, men and women, and the cycles of love and war, popped into my head this week last week and played over and over again.

At first, I couldn’t place the words. Were they from a song I sang at my New Jersey Reform synagogue so many years ago?

I finally figured it out with the help of Google. It was a Seeger song later sung by Peter, Paul and Mary on an album my parents loved and played often on the phonograph in our home when I was growing up.

According to Songfacts, Seeger, inspired by Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” about Czarist Russia wrote this song as a call for peace.

It has never been more pertinent. Listening, I feel that the words capture what I increasingly see as human beings’ obstinate refusal to learn from past mistakes, allowing history to repeat itself again and again and again.

Where have all the husbands gone? Where have all the soldiers gone? Where have all the children gone?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

“Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” written in 1973 by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown, about a prisoner who is uncertain if he will be welcomed home, remains a song of optimism for so many marriages rocked by a spouse’s absence in reserve duty – and it promises that there is a chance it will work out, in the end.

But, in Israel today, the most important meaning of the song now is how it has manifested itself in the yellow ribbons tied on nearly every car and gate and pinned to the clothes of TV broadcasters and civilians in the street. In today’s Israel, the yellow ribbon is a sign to the hostages that the people here have not forgotten them, that the people have not forsaken them, that the people want them home. And we hope, it is also a sign to the government. Bring them home.

“Lookie here, the whole damn bus, is cheering, and I can’t believe I see, a hundred yellow ribbons, round the ole oak tree.”

I pray daily–no hourly–that the remaining hostages will be home soon, see the ribbons and know they were not forgotten, know they are loved, and not the opposite, as their Hamas captives would have them believe.

I was a young child during the Vietnam War and not interested at all in politics, but I don’t think that the US government had ministers like Itamar Ben Gvir who, instead of making sure the civilians of Israel, Arabs and Jews alike, are safe, intentionally stirs the pot: praying at the Temple Mount, promising to build a synagogue where Al-Aqsa now stands. Al Aqsa Mosque sits on a site, Islam’s third holiest, that for the Jews is the site of their ancient temples, and Judaism’s holiest. Any attempt to change the status quo, even the most minor, has escalated into major violence. But this 48-year-old minister of national security apparently missed that part of his history lesson, just as he missed the part of his job that includes protecting Israelis, and not putting them in more danger.

Ben-Gvir hailed the May demolition of Bedouin homes this year as “an important move of sovereignty,” according to Haaretz. The homes were torn down in an unrecognized village to make way for Highway 6, and none of the residents were assured of new housing, Haaretz said. Many Bedouins serve in the military and have been killed both in service and in Hamas attacks, their towns lacking the most basic shelter from rocket fire. There are also Bedouins held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. One was rescued just this week.

Ben Gvir isn’t alone in fanning the flames of war and violence. In February, the Israeli government said it plans to construct new homes in West Bank Jewish settlements, The Associated Press reported. The plan was a response to a fatal Palestinian shooting attack and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted by local media as saying that Israel’s enemies need to know any harm “to us will lead to more construction.”

It is hard not to believe that this government wants more and more and more of its people to die. It’s hard not to believe that it seeks to ensure this war will continue for decades. These self-proclaimed Zionists and religious Jews are doing everything they can to destroy the Israel we know and love. “With rising terror and Israel’s right fueling the flames, the West Bank is on the brink of explosion,” Haaretz writer Amos Harel wrote in his analysis this week.

There have been many ups and downs with the Palestinians and the peace process over the years. No one knows that better than this wire-service journalist who worked around the clock for the past forty years covering every development.

There have been times of tremendous optimism (Oslo) and times of deep blackness when it seemed everything would be lost (Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination), not to mention the sporadic, short conflicts with Hamas that somehow convinced Netanyahu that he should allow the terror organization to continue to get Qatari money to “develop” Gaza… with battle tunnels.

I wish I had a phonograph. I wish I had my dad’s old records. There are days when I am tired of the war, tired of the news of the dead and wounded and just want to play the Animals’ “We Gotta Get out of this Place” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver. I know there is Apple Music, YouTube and Spotify. But it is not the same thing as putting a record on a record player. At least, not for me.

I toured an art installation in Tel Aviv this past weekend at the Imperial Hotel. The exhibit involved 54 artists and 37 hotel rooms, each with a personal take on “escapism” – escape from the feeling of futility, from the awful cruelty and blackness of this war.

And to its credit, it attempted to be positive and optimistic.

In one room the walls were crowded with family paraphernalia – a guitar, a rolling pin, a backgammon board, garden shears, sneakers, oven mitts and more – an attempt to evoke evacuees’ effort to turn a two-room hotel suite into a home.

Another room portrayed a man sitting in a bathtub, the entire bathroom covered with poop in all the colors of the rainbow. “The crap is still there, but it’s easier to live with it thanks to the optimistic perspective” of bright color, the artist wrote.

In an installation at Imperial Hotel, one room shows a man in bathtub in a bathroom covered in colorful poop. (Photo: Gwen Ackerman)

And I’ll leave you with the room that held a weapons cemetery, all the guns — the color pink.

The exhibit left me with the guarded optimism evident in Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Hai” and Jasmin Moallem’s “Yihyeh Tov – It Will be Okay.”

“Soon the sun will shine, and we will see better days … everyone will return home … and, please, let there be only good news,” Golan croons.

“Remember,” Moallem sings, “that in the end it will be okay. The flowers will bloom again…. Even from within the darkness the light will ignite.”

Moallem’s 2023 song has the same title as David Broza’s 1975 anthem “Yihye Tov,” written just as Israel was about to enter the 1977 peace negotiations with Egypt. Since then, he has sung his verses more times than he can count. Broza told The Forward that today his concerts are a defense mechanism, a protective shield against an engulfment by the horror around him.

His song, like those of America’s Vietnam War, try to tell us that unless we change, figure out a way to resolve conflicts without guns, history will repeat itself again and again and again.

I pray that the songs of Pete Seeger and the many wonderful songs released by Israeli artists this year will be not just listened to, but heeded. And that art, as it is wont to do, will become a harbinger of change, of a better world.

“I look out of my window, to see if this all is real, I look out of my window and murmur my prayer,” sings Broza. “The wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lay down with the goat ….. and world will be better.”

“I look out of my window. Perhaps a new day is coming.”