Yerushalayim Shel Zahav by Naomi Shemer
In my painfully limited and and intellectually restricted opinion, never before Naomi Shemer has a voice encapsulated the stoic realism of war and compromise so purely.
Born on a kibbutz on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Shemer would serve in a paramilitary entertainment troupe as part of the Israeli Defense Force, before studying music at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. She moved to Tel Aviv and began composing musical versions of famous poems, such as Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!
Shemer would become the voice of a fraught, fresh, disturbed citizenry, a painful but true sentence to write, as it would always be better to avoid hagiography.
In 1967, at the request of Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, Shemer wrote Yerushalayim Shel Zahav for a live song competition taking place at a music festival on Israeli Independence Day — right before the onset of the Six-Day War, when Israel fought a coalition of Arab states that included Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, formerly known as the United Arab Republic. After the war ended, or Israel ‘won,’ Shemer would add a final verse to the song referencing the reunification of Jerusalem, transforming the forlorn hymn into a celebratory chorale paying tribute to the end of the city’s 1949 Armistice Line.
A song that is simultaneously filled with sorrow and joy, shame and hope, Shemer first found herself too close to the lyrics and melody to play it live. She would enlist a 20-year-old soldier named Shuli Nathan to sing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, before eventually, after some distance, performing it herself.
I believe the question becomes whether it’s possible to enjoy songs of national sentiment in a manner that is devoid of their political context. And the answer could be that it is possible, so as long as you don’t think or look too far into anything, which is the best way to enjoy music and the most dangerous way to live life.
Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York (written by John Kander and Fred Ebb), oddly a similar ode to a city’s valor, is, by contrast, not necessarily seen as political. But how could any song regarding a city or state, with all the emotion entailed, be apolitical? Yes, New York, New York didn’t necessarily involve a bloody ideological war, but it does, however, heavily respect a very capitalist notion of endless reinvention within the center of global industry, a promotional concept arguably even farther along the lines of emboldened ideology. Could one dare to compare American Exceptionalism, manifest destiny, to the nature of territorial disputes in the Middle-East?
The writing of music, both the melody and the lyrics, is often very political. Once a song comes into fruition, for better or worse, the result transcends ideology, principles, doctrines, and ideals, states, nationhood, all that, and becomes a pure aesthetic to be consumed, giving way to consequential feelings that cannot be avoided.