My post-October 7 Offering of Reconciliation & Homecoming
I wrote these lyrics almost ten years ago, set to an old Dylan tune. But only after October 7 did I feel the compulsion to sing it, record it, and set the song as soundtrack for an animated video.
This YouTube rock video is of the English version of the “Ballad of Jacob Isaacson”. My Hope (Tikvah, תקווה Yamal, أمَل ) is that this English-language Biblical ballad from the People of the Book will be translated into poetic Hebrew (as הבלדה על יעקוב בן יצחק) and into poetic Arabic (as أغنية يعقوب ابن إسحاق). And then, using the same instrumental backing track of oud, electric guitar, keyboard and drums, different singers will sing Hebrew and Arabic versions, each of which will be an alternate soundtrack of the same animation. A trilingual YouTube rock video.
The lyrics are a contemporary ballad treatment of the Torah story of Jacob, including, especially, his relationship and ultimate reconciliation with his twin brother, Esau. After October 7, 2023, as the Shabbat weekly Torah readings moved from Jacob and Esau’s birth in Toldot through Jacob’s twenty year sojourn in Haran in Va-Yetzei to Jacob’s return to Canaan in Va-Yishlach, and as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza intensified, completing this project, which I had been working on for years, suddenly felt for me not just relevant, but urgent.
I believe (naively, but believe nonetheless) that this Torah narrative of Jacob and Esau, non-identical twin sons of the same father and mother, with bad blood between them, who eventually reconcile, provides a Biblical-based alternative vision that might make a positive contribution to the terrible conflict in Israel and Palestine, and the tension worldwide between Jews and Muslims.
“Ballad of Jacob Isaacson” is a tale of reconciliation. But this being the Hebrew Bible, it is also a Zionist narrative, a tale of homecoming, and of transformation. So it also tells of Jacob, after his long night of struggle with – an angel? a man? his twin? – transformed, from “Jacob” to “Israel”. Israel, from whom are descended the Children of Israel: Bnai Yisrael; the Jews. That all-night “wrestling with beings, human and divine” renames “Jacob” – for 2000 years Jewish minority communities wandering the world in Exile – into “Israel”, a sovereign majority living in their historical Biblical homeland.
The ballad is a psychological/literary retelling of three Torah portions (Toldot, Va-Yetzei and Va-Yishlach), the last of which was read, in 5783, on Saturday December 2, 2023. So I chose to release this initial English-language rock video three days before, on November 29, ק׳ט בנובמבר Kaf Tet b’November, commemorating that day in 1947, just two years after the defeat of the Nazis and the liberation of the concentration camps, when the UN voted in favour of the Partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. And there was dancing in the streets of Jerusalem.
I hope that this song, drawing on Biblical authority, may in some way make a contribution to brotherly reconciliation and to securing the State of Israel’s place among the family of nations.