The 16th Sheep: Music for the death of democracy?

When art reflects life, it can get complicated. The much-vaunted reunion of Israel’s legendary ‘The Sixteenth Sheep” band – comprised of four of the country’s greatest-ever singers, reuniting now for the first time in decades – turned out, at least in yesterday’s concert at Tel Aviv’s Charles Bronfman Auditorium, to be simultaneously joyous and absolutely devastating. It was an unforgettable concert that, within the context swirling all around it, went right to the heart of a question being fearfully asked by many Israelis yesterday – will Israel, as we know it, survive?

‘The Sixteenth Sheep” is the name of a 1978 album of children’s songs, musical settings of stories by the writer Yehonatan Geffen, whose brainchild the project was. He gathered four of his contemporaries, who just happened to become four of the stellar names of Israeli music – David Broza, Yoni Rechter, Gidi Gov and Yehudit Ravitz. To say the album was a success is to understate it. Every Israeli child since then has grown up knowing every song on that album by heart (3,000 of them – now grown – at last night’s full-to-bursting reunion concert proved it, singing lustily along with their heroes, never seeming to drop a word). In some ways, it became a foundational text for what Israeli music was and is. More, in its evocations of kibbutz-style kinship and bursts of imagination, creativity and optimism – for what it means to be Israeli.

In their announcement of these shows, last October, the artists called it “an effort to make Israeli audiences a little happier after more than a year of war.” One suspects, though, that an equal motivation for bringing the album to Israeli stages after so many years, is another too-long absence. Eight years ago, Yehudit Ravitz stopped performing, for what seemed like a mix of personal reasons and her feeling of a loss of spontaneity on stage. As the years without her lengthened, it came to seem like she might have retired for good. But then, the misery of the Gaza war appeared to slowly, slowly shake her out of her reclusion; she started to pop up, singing to diners in a restaurant here, making a guest appearance alongside Gov on the popular TV satirical series “Zehu Ze!” there. Eventually, there was even a new album.

When these shows were announced, part of the excitement (such was the demand for the scattering of dates, that the ticket-booking website seemed to periodically stop working, and all seats were rapidly snapped up) was undoubtedly the return of Ravitz. And in last night’s concert, her three colleagues seemed eager to encourage and celebrate her. Though not to completely cede the limelight, as each of the four – especially towards the end of the evening – seized solo moments of jaw-dropping artistry. Gidi Gov is now 74 and looks like he can barely walk, but he can certainly rock with the best of them, alternating sonorous melodicism with forays higher up the stave into howls of startling power. Yoni Rechter at the piano juxtaposed dextrous finger-work with songfulness of deceptive-seeming simplicity. David Broza, whose history with ‘The Sixteenth Sheep” included, he told us, being presented by Geffen with an actual sheep he had to take care of, spent much of the time gamely accompanying, and then would let fly with dizzying flamenco-inspired syncopations.

And then there was Ravitz who, still, has one of those voices you just love to listen to. It’s indefinable and riveting, and she seemed to be enjoying herself as much as anyone. After inspiring the first (of many) mid-show standing ovation of the night, she put her hands over her heart and said, “You make me feel dizzy with love”.

Singer Yehudit Ravitz receives a lifetime achievement award during the 2022 ACUM Awards ceremony for Hebrew Song near Tel Aviv on September 7, 2022. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

The whole, beautifully produced, show, starting with the children’s songs and proceeding to the artists’ more mature hits, could not have been more of a triumph. And I, and I think others, spent a good portion of it feeling miserable, tears in my eyes.

Because I had spent that morning marching around Jerusalem, alongside tens of thousands of others, protesting against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on Israel’s democracy. We had much to protest, as we walked in icy rain and wind so fierce that it had destroyed my brand-new umbrella within minutes. This is a week in which a government losing in all mainstream polls, in office for the worst disaster in Israeli history, decided to fire the Shin Bet head presiding over a major investigation into the Prime Minister’s Office (the ‘Qatargate’ affair) and perhaps – we’ll see – replace him with a yes man who might give the PM political access to the Shin Bet’s array of surveillance tools. A week in which the judicial overhaul in its latest, barely-improved version was progressed at speed toward law in its parliamentary committee stage. And a week in which the governmental ravens were gathering to presage the termination (if the Prime Minister gets his way) of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. All of these measures would lead to the the removal of all meaningful checks and balances on government power, and enable a Prime Ministerial dictatorship including the degrading of elections (and this government already tabled a motion to take direct political control of the Central Elections Commission, before withdrawing it, presumably deciding the moment was not yet quite ripe).

This was the third straight day of mass protests around the country, and what has this to do with the concert? ‘The Sixteenth Sheep’ begins with “How a song is born”.

Listening to this naively charming number about a birth of creativity, sung by a quartet who are all not that much younger than Israel, that most creative of nations, one couldn’t stave off the most morbid of notions. Was what we were hearing a kind of closing of a circle? It was a day on which some protestors were assaulted (including the knocking to the ground of Democrats Party leader and October 7th hero Yair Golan, by a police officer); Prime Minister Netanyahu was welcoming back a former convict who celebrated a mass murderer to the role of minister of police; and the PM was scorning both the public outcry and his own Attorney General’s legal statements. Was this song about birth in fact marking the death of the dream of a democratic, united Israel that Geffen and Co. once had and that all Israelis shared? Will we ever have another generation of singers who feel able to create something so simple and beautiful and hopeful?

I could go darker still, and cite yesterday’s warning from former Chief Justice Aharon Barak that these divisive measures and pushing Israel ever-closer to civil war, a thought seemingly echoed by an uncharacteristically lacerating televised address by President Herzog. None of these thoughts were lost on me as I watched this show. Nostalgia is fun, and beautiful, but when it might just also be a lament for a lost future, it is as painful as music can get.

By the evening’s end, such morose ideas were, I’ll happily admit lost to the overwhelming joy of celebrating music itself with four of the greatest artists Israel has ever produced. As we all stood, whooped, danced, and jumped, we were all, including the stellar quartet, having a ball. We needed it, and we were grateful.

And then the concert ended, and we drove home to the news. And to face a fearful future, courtesy of our criminally irresponsible, uncaring government.