(Sons of Safam album cowl)
My Bar Mitzvah tour had a theme music.
This was 1994, my first time in Israel. And I did all of the issues any good younger American Jew must do on a whirlwind journey: I kissed the Wailing Wall; positioned stones on the graves of battle heroes; sobbed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum; recited Torah atop Masada; danced the hora whereas cruising Lake Kinneret; and developed a quick crush on one of many Bat Mitzvah ladies.
By the tip of the journey, our information had your complete bus singing and swaying alongside to Israeli singer Chaim Moshe’s anthemic pop ballad “Todah,” even when most of us couldn’t perceive the bittersweet lyrics:
Todah al ma sheli natata / Al yom shel osher / T’mimut v’yosher / Al yom atzuv she-ne’elam [Thank you for what You’ve given me / For a day of happiness / Innocence and honesty / For a sad bygone day that has vanished].
I hadn’t thought of “Todah” since I used to be a teen. Till one frigid winter evening, again in 2017, I fell into considered one of my listening rabbit holes. Starting with some Israeli jazz and people music, YouTube’s algorithm serendipitously led me to “Todah,” earlier than alighting on one other blast from the previous: “World of Our Fathers,” by the Jewish-American group Safam.
Right here it was, my musical madeleine. Instantly I used to be transported to the again of our outdated household Toyota, my brother Andy sitting throughout from me. We have been on considered one of our frequent Pittsburgh road-trips, and my mother and father have been asking which Safam cassette we needed to listen to. It was often Sons of Safam, although we’d have insisted on beginning with the B-side, so our favourite music “World of Our Fathers” would come quicker.
Listening to Safam once more for the primary time in a long time, I instantly broke down crying. Although it doesn’t take a lot for films or music to make me weepy, this reconnection with Safam was one thing totally different, much more highly effective: it felt like coming dwelling. However what was I coming dwelling to?
***
Safam (Hebrew for “mustache”) was based in Boston in 1974 by Boomers Dan Funk, Alan Nelson, Robbie Solomon, and Joel Sussman—buddies from the Zamir Chorale, Boston’s celebrated Jewish choir. Although a labor of affection, the band was at all times a facet venture; solely Solomon would pursue music professionally, as a cantor and composer.
Regardless of their disparate day jobs, what united Safam’s founders, past their mustaches, was a equally observant and loving Jewish upbringing (Funk’s father was a rabbi, and Solomon was raised Orthodox). The music the group recorded and carried out over the subsequent quarter century translated their ardour for Judaism right into a complete imaginative and prescient for Jewish-American life. It was a successful formulation. Within the early ‘80s, Safam loved a meteoric rise into the rarefied orbit of Jewish-American popular culture, not less than within the Northeast. Funk, in an interview on the band’s 40th anniversary, characterised Safam in its heyday as a “Jewish supergroup.”
(Safam “On Monitor.” Picture supply: Spotify)
What was it about Safam’s music that resonated so deeply with my household, particularly contemplating that half their repertoire was in Hebrew, which we didn’t communicate? In contrast to, say, Shlock Rock—Safam’s contemporaries on the synagogue circuit, who delighted audiences with foolish parodies of traditional rock hits (like “Each Chunk You Take,” in case you ever puzzled how it might sound if The Police had sung about Jewish dietary legislation)—Safam was distinctive. Whether or not jazzing up mainstays of the Hebrew liturgy, or composing authentic torch songs like “Leaving Mom Russia,” Safam’s rousing “rallying cry for the Soviet Jewry motion” and their best-known music, the band had a recognizable sound all its personal.
However this sound transcended the group’s various Jewish musical roots—Chasidic, klezmer, Israeli people. It was, essentially, a Jewish-American sound (“The Jewish-American sound,” per Safam’s tagline). Drawing on a variety of widespread types, Safam crafted a musical language that completely captured the expertise of Jewish children like me: a fourth-generation, middle-class suburbanite, completely acculturated into mainstream American life whereas nonetheless desperate to have a good time my Jewish heritage. Rising up, going often to synagogue, it was at all times the music—the wealthy, haunting minor-key melodies that unfurled every Shabbat morning—that helped me really feel most tightly linked to Judaism. Safam delivered that very feeling, however sonically repackaged within the acquainted musical vernacular of American people and ‘70s and ‘80s pop rock.
***
Within the weeks after rediscovering Safam, I turned obsessive about the music’s candy sentimentality, which conjured a bygone Jewish childhood: Chanukah candles, Purim carnivals, Hebrew College puppet exhibits, raucous household seders.
Andy fortunately accompanied me on this listening journey down reminiscence lane. My household used to debate Safam members like different music followers would argue over their favourite Beatle. My mom swooned over Solomon, together with his lush cantorial tenor. Andy reminisced about assembly the band after considered one of their concert events: “I acquired all of them to signal the again of a file album, and I instructed Robbie Solomon I used to be his largest fan.”
We quickly exhausted the restricted choice of Safam’s music out there on-line. However Andy shocked me by ordering the whole 10-CD set of Safam’s albums from the band’s antiquated web site for my birthday. I used to be overjoyed. Handing me the reward, he declared: “Nostalgia, right here we come!”
***
Safam launched their debut album, Desires of Safam, in 1976. Two years later got here the extra polished Encore, which showcases an formidable synthesis of the band’s eclectic influences—from biblical tales to bossa nova and barbershop sounds.
But it’s Sons of Safam (1980), their third album, that can at all times stand out to me as their quintessential work. Whereas I suppose it was the jubilant music that moved me as a toddler—I distinctly bear in mind dancing to the tight jazz-funk groove of “Judah Maccabee”—I used to be struck this time by the album’s thematic consistency.
Launched after a number of band members had grow to be fathers, Sons of Safam is, primarily, about blessings. However additionally it is about Jewish continuity: the blessings fathers recite to their sons, so they might go them all the way down to their very own sons at some point. These themes converge within the album’s beautiful (if cloying) title observe, as Safam’s vocalists take turns sanctifying the brand new technology. The refrain even concludes with a cheeky prophecy: “Ani ro’eh yavo hazman / Yitahadu kulam / V’kol echad yashir shirei Safam [I see the time will come / When everyone will unite / And everyone will sing the songs of Safam!].”
The flip facet of the album’s earnest optimism is its deep concern over how simply Jewish life can slip away throughout the generations. Heard on this gentle, I now realized, “World of Our Fathers” is a cautionary story—Safam’s ethical plea to American Jews like me.
Set to a lilting acoustic guitar line paying homage to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” the music—possible an homage to the eponymous Irving Howe ebook—relates a well-recognized Jewish immigrant story. Not not like my very own great-grandfather, the narrator arrives at Ellis Island from Russia and—peddling, scrimping, and saving—builds a life for himself in America.
Regardless of his finest efforts to maintain the flame of Jewish custom alive, the “little residents” he raised—bent on remodeling themselves into “sophisticate People”—finally shun their first-generation father. “Simply don’t overlook the place we got here from, my youngsters,” he sings out, if anybody is listening. “The world of our fathers is what made us sturdy.”
Redemption comes late. Now dwelling with considered one of his grandchildren (a physician!), the narrator observes a rekindling of Jewish spirit within the latest technology: “There have been occasions, so many occasions, after I feared that every one was misplaced / We had come to date, so quick, that I puzzled what the fee / However now I see my father’s world start to rise / In my great-grandchildren’s eyes!”
With 4 heart-shredding clarinet notes, the music erupts right into a boisterous klezmer finale. It’s as if the music’s rollicking chorus (“Yai dai dai in America”) sardonically means that, in America, one should select: forged apart Jewish life, or lovingly nurture its blessings and go them alongside to future generations. Listening obsessively to “World of Our Fathers,” I heard Safam asking: Which facet are you on?
***
I didn’t have a great reply to Safam’s query.
If my Bar Mitzvah in Israel marked the head of a sturdy Jewish id that had been cultivated from my earliest Hebrew College days, it additionally unearthed some vexing questions. One reminiscence particularly continues to hang-out me.
On our first Shabbat in Jerusalem, our tour group headed to the Wailing Wall for a night service. As our well-worn American-Ashkenazi melodies stuffed the air, the golden solar setting earlier than us, I sang my coronary heart out. Chanting Shabbat prayers on the holiest Jewish website on Earth, I felt as if it had by no means been extra fantastic to be Jewish.
Earlier than lengthy, nevertheless, a number of Orthodox males began berating us. The issue was that our prayer group intermixed women and men; it didn’t matter that we have been a whole bunch of ft from the Wall. The spiritual police ultimately broke up our service however, mockingly, allowed us to proceed nearer to the Wall, contained in the gender-segregated enclosure, the place we may hear however not see our fellow worshippers throughout the partition.
Whereas the tour fulfilled the unspoken objective of many such Bar Mitzvah journeys—I did fall in love with Israel over two brief weeks—this episode left an indelible blemish on my relationship to the place. Why have been my fellow Jews so illiberal on the very second my spiritual pleasure was at its peak?
I drifted farther from Judaism in school, now not conserving kosher and infrequently observing holidays. As a historical past main, now fashioning myself a cosmopolitan humanist (a type of “sophisticate People”?), I turned suspicious of any particularistic id. My school years additionally coincided with the Second Intifada, a large-scale Palestinian rebellion that unleashed cycles of brutal violence and triggered a brand new part of more and more oppressive Israeli insurance policies within the Occupied Territories. It was towards this backdrop that I took my first Center East historical past course, which challenged lots of my assumptions in regards to the Israel-Palestine battle. With mainstream American Judaism doubling down on its staunch assist for an more and more rightwing Israel throughout these years, I grew uncertain I might ever really feel at dwelling once more in my Jewish id.
My alienation solely intensified after I returned to Israel in 2005, eleven years after my Bar Mitzvah. Now dwelling in Egypt as a graduate pupil, I took a brief flight to go to my Orthodox cousin, who had immigrated to Israel. Though I had a beautiful time together with her household, it was unattainable, on the heels of the Intifada, to disregard the pernicious political local weather. On two separate events individuals requested if I used to be a suicide bomber—ostensibly as a result of I used to be a bearded man of a sure age getting into a bar or restaurant alone.
My final morning, strolling alongside the Tayelet Haas Promenade overlooking Jerusalem’s Outdated Metropolis, I met a kindly outdated man named Israel, who lived close by. He identified the army’s safety wall snaking alongside within the distance and lamented the havoc it might wreak on his Palestinian buddies dwelling within the adjoining villages. Seeing Israel by means of Israel’s eyes made the Occupation actual for me, catalyzing a extra pointed political training that for too lengthy I had been reluctant to obtain. And with a 3rd Israel journey 5 years later—capped off by a vicious combat with my cousin’s household over the Israeli blockade of Gaza—my relationship with Zionism felt unsalvageable.
At the moment, I merely didn’t know how one can maintain a Jewish id with out Israel on the heart of it. Jewishness and Zionism had at all times been so completely imbricated for me that jettisoning the latter appeared to necessitate severing my reference to the previous.
As soon as I settled in New York in my thirties, nevertheless, I discovered myself craving for Jewish life as soon as extra. Conscious I had misplaced some important a part of myself, I met with a rabbi and explored totally different Jewish communities. I started to hope I would discover a little bit dwelling inside the Jewish universe, although the American Jewish group’s unwavering institutional assist for Israel nonetheless left me doubting whether or not I actually belonged.
***
Safam’s music—with its candy however solemn message about Jewish continuity—got here again into my life throughout this era of soul looking and hit me particularly onerous.
As Andy had predicted, the music aroused highly effective nostalgia—for the peppy, earnest ‘80s and tight-knit household togetherness of my childhood. Nevertheless it additionally made me lengthy for a time when my Jewishness felt secure and pure. Behind the completely happy reminiscences that Safam’s music evoked was a form of prelapsarian wholeness that I had misplaced and now suspected I might by no means get well.
Anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin has documented how “the ‘loss’ of 1’s youngsters to a special cultural world, frequent as it could be, stays in massive measure an unalleviated supply of ache” for Jewish diaspora communities. However what has sometimes been neglected in such discussions is the ache of the kids—those that carry the guilt of endangering Jewish continuity by choosing totally different cultural (or, certainly, political) worlds—which is exactly what I felt so intensely listening to “World of Our Fathers.”
The unbridgeable hole between the reminiscences of my very own heat, uncomplicated Jewish previous, symbolized by Safam’s music, and my estrangement from American Jewish life within the current appeared like an unforgivable breach of duty. I couldn’t assist feeling like I had let my household down, and Safam, too.
***
So I saved going again to their music, desperately clinging to the spark of Jewish connection it rekindled in me.
With Safam’s fourth album, Bittersweet (1983), the band moved in a brand new route. Because the title suggests, the temper began to really feel a shade darker—a pattern that continued by means of their subsequent releases, Peace by Piece (1984) and A Brighter Day (1986). Whereas the hopefulness of their earlier work was nonetheless current, the group waded into some knotty thematic terrain, from the elusiveness of Center East peace to the guilt and despair of a Holocaust survivor. Listening to Safam urge us to “use the bitter with the candy,” it appeared like their imaginative and prescient of Jewish life had grown extra advanced.
Whereas I may get down with Safam’s distinctive model of Holocaust pop/rock, I had a a lot tougher time with their overtly Zionist materials. One evening, getting deeper into Bittersweet, I used to be grooving alongside to “Yamit”—a propulsive, vaguely Center Japanese rock quantity that options considered one of Safam’s most hummable melodies. My musical ear tends to tune out music lyrics, however after I began being attentive to the storyline, I used to be horrified.
Yamit was a short-lived Israeli settlement established within the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 Struggle. In 1982, in achievement of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Israel’s army forcibly evacuated some 3,000 Israeli settlers from Yamit and bulldozed it to the bottom.
“Yamit” was Safam’s bittersweet lamentation for the misplaced Israeli enclave. Whereas the music conveys hope that the withdrawal will assist ship lasting peace, the tone is undeniably melancholic. The wistfulness of the reluctant evacuees is voiced most plaintively by a younger woman, “too younger to know” what is occurring, very like the “easy youngster” of the Passover seder: “Can we ever return once more?” she asks.
Whereas “World of Our Fathers” had me imagining Safam’s disappointment over my faltering dedication to Jewishness, now I discovered myself upset in Safam. As a Center East historian with sturdy objections to Israel’s settlement motion, I struggled to reconcile myself to a Safam that will memorialize Yamit like this.
Zionism was not a function of Safam’s music I had consciously registered rising up, however now there was no denying it was a key ingredient within the potent Jewish-American alchemy embodied of their work. If listening to their music initially felt like a homecoming, I now realized, this was as a result of it transported me to a extra harmless time when Zionism didn’t but seem to me as a political perception, however slightly as an implicit cultural id. I had been reflexively formed by Safam to imagine there was however one overarching Jewish story all of us shared—one which essentially leads, as one other of their catchiest songs has it, “dwelling to Jerusalem.”
***
On the top of my Safam binging, in 2017, I sensed there was nonetheless unfinished enterprise for me within the Holy Land. If nothing else, I felt an ethical {and professional} obligation to go to the West Financial institution; my instructing about Israel/Palestine appeared woefully insufficient with out having a extra granular understanding of realities on the bottom within the Occupied Territories.
My first evening in Israel, wandering jetlagged round Jerusalem, I adopted the distant sound of drums and horns in Nachla’ot, the colourful neighborhood the place I used to be staying. It was the second evening of Chanukah, and I discovered myself in the course of an exuberant avenue social gathering. The revelers accepted me immediately; earlier than I knew it a shot of whiskey had been positioned in my hand. I stayed for over an hour, intoxicated by the group spirit, the attractive improvisational music, and the festive singing and dancing.
How fantastic it might be to assert this, I assumed—to really feel really at dwelling on this transcendent, all-embracing Jewish-Israeli house. One of many social gathering’s organizers, the form of Orthodox hipster who was ubiquitous in Nachla’ot, appeared to learn my thoughts: “There’s a prophecy,” he mentioned, gesturing first in the direction of me, then the group. “In the future all of the Jews of the world will come collectively and dance within the streets of Jerusalem.” I soaked all of it in, sublimating my misgivings and opening myself one final time to Zionism’s seductive siren music.
A number of days later I went to the West Financial institution. I toured the unspeakably miserable outdated metropolis of Hebron, which the Israeli army had ruined below the pretext of defending a tiny coterie of Jewish settlers (a number of of whom hounded us and threatened our information, a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence). I spent a beautiful day in Ramallah with my Palestinian pal Sa’ed, who launched me to the wonder and vibrancy of his hometown, whereas additionally mentioning the fortress-like Israeli settlements flanking it on all sides—an unrelenting reminder of the Occupation.
The training that had begun after I met Israel on the Jerusalem promenade, twelve years earlier, now felt full.
***
As alluring as I discovered the Nachla’ot prophecy that magical Chanukah evening, I acknowledged its twinned beliefs of Jewish unity and Zionist belonging to be at finest a comforting phantasm, at worst a harmful lure. It might be true that every one nationalisms fake “we’re one” (the chorus of one other Safam earworm). However Judaism, not like Zionism, is just not a nationalism. Judaism is a wealthy and sophisticated historical religion custom that accommodates multitudes; Zionism, a distinctly fashionable political ideology, is however one present within the huge ocean of Jewish historical past. Even when Jewish custom is animated by a notion of frequent peoplehood, the actual fact stays that Jews have by no means been unified in religiosity, tradition, or politics.
Nor wouldn’t it be wholesome or fascinating if we have been. Because the thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “The unities we create fare higher after we face the convoluted actuality of our variations.” Seen on this gentle, the query “Can we ever return once more?”—the nostalgic lament in “Yamit,” and the sentiment on the coronary heart of a lot rightwing nationalism—results in a useless finish, given its fixation on just one authentic Jewish pathway, in the direction of one genuine homeland. Regrettably, clamor for such slim, inflexible nationalist loyalty tends to extend dramatically in occasions of collective trauma and concern—as we’ve witnessed throughout the Jewish world for the reason that horrors of October 7, 2023.
I don’t imagine in nationalism, however I do imagine in music as a sort of borderless homeland. All nationalisms, together with Zionism, commerce in reductive myths of previous wholeness and unity, partitioning the previous and holding us aside from each other within the current. Music, in contrast, has the uncanny energy to convey us nearer collectively, bridging cultural distinction by conveying common emotions of longing, loss, and hope. I hear this high quality in Safam’s music, with all its joyful eclecticism and earnest melancholia, even whether it is usually overshadowed by the Jewish and Zionist particularism of the lyrics.
Reconnecting with Safam put me again in contact with elements of my previous I didn’t know I may nonetheless entry—a nostalgia journey that without delay enticed and repelled me in equal measure. On the identical time, it sparked a extra trustworthy reckoning with my Jewish journey by illuminating these components of my upbringing that had as soon as made it appear unattainable to assert a Jewish id bereft of Zionism. For this, to borrow Chaim Moshe’s phrases, I say to Safam: Thanks—for what you’ve given me; for a day of happiness, innocence, and honesty; for a tragic bygone day that has vanished. In spite of everything these years, regardless of all of it, to be wrestling once more with my Jewish id lastly appears like dwelling—and precisely what’s required of me at this agonizing second in historical past. It is a blessing.
Matthew H. Ellis is a historian specializing within the fashionable Center East and North Africa. He at the moment holds the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Basis Chair in Worldwide Affairs and Center East Research at Sarah Lawrence School.
(Sons of Safam album cowl)
My Bar Mitzvah tour had a theme music.
This was 1994, my first time in Israel. And I did all of the issues any good younger American Jew must do on a whirlwind journey: I kissed the Wailing Wall; positioned stones on the graves of battle heroes; sobbed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum; recited Torah atop Masada; danced the hora whereas cruising Lake Kinneret; and developed a quick crush on one of many Bat Mitzvah ladies.
By the tip of the journey, our information had your complete bus singing and swaying alongside to Israeli singer Chaim Moshe’s anthemic pop ballad “Todah,” even when most of us couldn’t perceive the bittersweet lyrics:
Todah al ma sheli natata / Al yom shel osher / T’mimut v’yosher / Al yom atzuv she-ne’elam [Thank you for what You’ve given me / For a day of happiness / Innocence and honesty / For a sad bygone day that has vanished].
I hadn’t thought of “Todah” since I used to be a teen. Till one frigid winter evening, again in 2017, I fell into considered one of my listening rabbit holes. Starting with some Israeli jazz and people music, YouTube’s algorithm serendipitously led me to “Todah,” earlier than alighting on one other blast from the previous: “World of Our Fathers,” by the Jewish-American group Safam.
Right here it was, my musical madeleine. Instantly I used to be transported to the again of our outdated household Toyota, my brother Andy sitting throughout from me. We have been on considered one of our frequent Pittsburgh road-trips, and my mother and father have been asking which Safam cassette we needed to listen to. It was often Sons of Safam, although we’d have insisted on beginning with the B-side, so our favourite music “World of Our Fathers” would come quicker.
Listening to Safam once more for the primary time in a long time, I instantly broke down crying. Although it doesn’t take a lot for films or music to make me weepy, this reconnection with Safam was one thing totally different, much more highly effective: it felt like coming dwelling. However what was I coming dwelling to?
***
Safam (Hebrew for “mustache”) was based in Boston in 1974 by Boomers Dan Funk, Alan Nelson, Robbie Solomon, and Joel Sussman—buddies from the Zamir Chorale, Boston’s celebrated Jewish choir. Although a labor of affection, the band was at all times a facet venture; solely Solomon would pursue music professionally, as a cantor and composer.
Regardless of their disparate day jobs, what united Safam’s founders, past their mustaches, was a equally observant and loving Jewish upbringing (Funk’s father was a rabbi, and Solomon was raised Orthodox). The music the group recorded and carried out over the subsequent quarter century translated their ardour for Judaism right into a complete imaginative and prescient for Jewish-American life. It was a successful formulation. Within the early ‘80s, Safam loved a meteoric rise into the rarefied orbit of Jewish-American popular culture, not less than within the Northeast. Funk, in an interview on the band’s 40th anniversary, characterised Safam in its heyday as a “Jewish supergroup.”
(Safam “On Monitor.” Picture supply: Spotify)
What was it about Safam’s music that resonated so deeply with my household, particularly contemplating that half their repertoire was in Hebrew, which we didn’t communicate? In contrast to, say, Shlock Rock—Safam’s contemporaries on the synagogue circuit, who delighted audiences with foolish parodies of traditional rock hits (like “Each Chunk You Take,” in case you ever puzzled how it might sound if The Police had sung about Jewish dietary legislation)—Safam was distinctive. Whether or not jazzing up mainstays of the Hebrew liturgy, or composing authentic torch songs like “Leaving Mom Russia,” Safam’s rousing “rallying cry for the Soviet Jewry motion” and their best-known music, the band had a recognizable sound all its personal.
However this sound transcended the group’s various Jewish musical roots—Chasidic, klezmer, Israeli people. It was, essentially, a Jewish-American sound (“The Jewish-American sound,” per Safam’s tagline). Drawing on a variety of widespread types, Safam crafted a musical language that completely captured the expertise of Jewish children like me: a fourth-generation, middle-class suburbanite, completely acculturated into mainstream American life whereas nonetheless desperate to have a good time my Jewish heritage. Rising up, going often to synagogue, it was at all times the music—the wealthy, haunting minor-key melodies that unfurled every Shabbat morning—that helped me really feel most tightly linked to Judaism. Safam delivered that very feeling, however sonically repackaged within the acquainted musical vernacular of American people and ‘70s and ‘80s pop rock.
***
Within the weeks after rediscovering Safam, I turned obsessive about the music’s candy sentimentality, which conjured a bygone Jewish childhood: Chanukah candles, Purim carnivals, Hebrew College puppet exhibits, raucous household seders.
Andy fortunately accompanied me on this listening journey down reminiscence lane. My household used to debate Safam members like different music followers would argue over their favourite Beatle. My mom swooned over Solomon, together with his lush cantorial tenor. Andy reminisced about assembly the band after considered one of their concert events: “I acquired all of them to signal the again of a file album, and I instructed Robbie Solomon I used to be his largest fan.”
We quickly exhausted the restricted choice of Safam’s music out there on-line. However Andy shocked me by ordering the whole 10-CD set of Safam’s albums from the band’s antiquated web site for my birthday. I used to be overjoyed. Handing me the reward, he declared: “Nostalgia, right here we come!”
***
Safam launched their debut album, Desires of Safam, in 1976. Two years later got here the extra polished Encore, which showcases an formidable synthesis of the band’s eclectic influences—from biblical tales to bossa nova and barbershop sounds.
But it’s Sons of Safam (1980), their third album, that can at all times stand out to me as their quintessential work. Whereas I suppose it was the jubilant music that moved me as a toddler—I distinctly bear in mind dancing to the tight jazz-funk groove of “Judah Maccabee”—I used to be struck this time by the album’s thematic consistency.
Launched after a number of band members had grow to be fathers, Sons of Safam is, primarily, about blessings. However additionally it is about Jewish continuity: the blessings fathers recite to their sons, so they might go them all the way down to their very own sons at some point. These themes converge within the album’s beautiful (if cloying) title observe, as Safam’s vocalists take turns sanctifying the brand new technology. The refrain even concludes with a cheeky prophecy: “Ani ro’eh yavo hazman / Yitahadu kulam / V’kol echad yashir shirei Safam [I see the time will come / When everyone will unite / And everyone will sing the songs of Safam!].”
The flip facet of the album’s earnest optimism is its deep concern over how simply Jewish life can slip away throughout the generations. Heard on this gentle, I now realized, “World of Our Fathers” is a cautionary story—Safam’s ethical plea to American Jews like me.
Set to a lilting acoustic guitar line paying homage to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” the music—possible an homage to the eponymous Irving Howe ebook—relates a well-recognized Jewish immigrant story. Not not like my very own great-grandfather, the narrator arrives at Ellis Island from Russia and—peddling, scrimping, and saving—builds a life for himself in America.
Regardless of his finest efforts to maintain the flame of Jewish custom alive, the “little residents” he raised—bent on remodeling themselves into “sophisticate People”—finally shun their first-generation father. “Simply don’t overlook the place we got here from, my youngsters,” he sings out, if anybody is listening. “The world of our fathers is what made us sturdy.”
Redemption comes late. Now dwelling with considered one of his grandchildren (a physician!), the narrator observes a rekindling of Jewish spirit within the latest technology: “There have been occasions, so many occasions, after I feared that every one was misplaced / We had come to date, so quick, that I puzzled what the fee / However now I see my father’s world start to rise / In my great-grandchildren’s eyes!”
With 4 heart-shredding clarinet notes, the music erupts right into a boisterous klezmer finale. It’s as if the music’s rollicking chorus (“Yai dai dai in America”) sardonically means that, in America, one should select: forged apart Jewish life, or lovingly nurture its blessings and go them alongside to future generations. Listening obsessively to “World of Our Fathers,” I heard Safam asking: Which facet are you on?
***
I didn’t have a great reply to Safam’s query.
If my Bar Mitzvah in Israel marked the head of a sturdy Jewish id that had been cultivated from my earliest Hebrew College days, it additionally unearthed some vexing questions. One reminiscence particularly continues to hang-out me.
On our first Shabbat in Jerusalem, our tour group headed to the Wailing Wall for a night service. As our well-worn American-Ashkenazi melodies stuffed the air, the golden solar setting earlier than us, I sang my coronary heart out. Chanting Shabbat prayers on the holiest Jewish website on Earth, I felt as if it had by no means been extra fantastic to be Jewish.
Earlier than lengthy, nevertheless, a number of Orthodox males began berating us. The issue was that our prayer group intermixed women and men; it didn’t matter that we have been a whole bunch of ft from the Wall. The spiritual police ultimately broke up our service however, mockingly, allowed us to proceed nearer to the Wall, contained in the gender-segregated enclosure, the place we may hear however not see our fellow worshippers throughout the partition.
Whereas the tour fulfilled the unspoken objective of many such Bar Mitzvah journeys—I did fall in love with Israel over two brief weeks—this episode left an indelible blemish on my relationship to the place. Why have been my fellow Jews so illiberal on the very second my spiritual pleasure was at its peak?
I drifted farther from Judaism in school, now not conserving kosher and infrequently observing holidays. As a historical past main, now fashioning myself a cosmopolitan humanist (a type of “sophisticate People”?), I turned suspicious of any particularistic id. My school years additionally coincided with the Second Intifada, a large-scale Palestinian rebellion that unleashed cycles of brutal violence and triggered a brand new part of more and more oppressive Israeli insurance policies within the Occupied Territories. It was towards this backdrop that I took my first Center East historical past course, which challenged lots of my assumptions in regards to the Israel-Palestine battle. With mainstream American Judaism doubling down on its staunch assist for an more and more rightwing Israel throughout these years, I grew uncertain I might ever really feel at dwelling once more in my Jewish id.
My alienation solely intensified after I returned to Israel in 2005, eleven years after my Bar Mitzvah. Now dwelling in Egypt as a graduate pupil, I took a brief flight to go to my Orthodox cousin, who had immigrated to Israel. Though I had a beautiful time together with her household, it was unattainable, on the heels of the Intifada, to disregard the pernicious political local weather. On two separate events individuals requested if I used to be a suicide bomber—ostensibly as a result of I used to be a bearded man of a sure age getting into a bar or restaurant alone.
My final morning, strolling alongside the Tayelet Haas Promenade overlooking Jerusalem’s Outdated Metropolis, I met a kindly outdated man named Israel, who lived close by. He identified the army’s safety wall snaking alongside within the distance and lamented the havoc it might wreak on his Palestinian buddies dwelling within the adjoining villages. Seeing Israel by means of Israel’s eyes made the Occupation actual for me, catalyzing a extra pointed political training that for too lengthy I had been reluctant to obtain. And with a 3rd Israel journey 5 years later—capped off by a vicious combat with my cousin’s household over the Israeli blockade of Gaza—my relationship with Zionism felt unsalvageable.
At the moment, I merely didn’t know how one can maintain a Jewish id with out Israel on the heart of it. Jewishness and Zionism had at all times been so completely imbricated for me that jettisoning the latter appeared to necessitate severing my reference to the previous.
As soon as I settled in New York in my thirties, nevertheless, I discovered myself craving for Jewish life as soon as extra. Conscious I had misplaced some important a part of myself, I met with a rabbi and explored totally different Jewish communities. I started to hope I would discover a little bit dwelling inside the Jewish universe, although the American Jewish group’s unwavering institutional assist for Israel nonetheless left me doubting whether or not I actually belonged.
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Safam’s music—with its candy however solemn message about Jewish continuity—got here again into my life throughout this era of soul looking and hit me particularly onerous.
As Andy had predicted, the music aroused highly effective nostalgia—for the peppy, earnest ‘80s and tight-knit household togetherness of my childhood. Nevertheless it additionally made me lengthy for a time when my Jewishness felt secure and pure. Behind the completely happy reminiscences that Safam’s music evoked was a form of prelapsarian wholeness that I had misplaced and now suspected I might by no means get well.
Anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin has documented how “the ‘loss’ of 1’s youngsters to a special cultural world, frequent as it could be, stays in massive measure an unalleviated supply of ache” for Jewish diaspora communities. However what has sometimes been neglected in such discussions is the ache of the kids—those that carry the guilt of endangering Jewish continuity by choosing totally different cultural (or, certainly, political) worlds—which is exactly what I felt so intensely listening to “World of Our Fathers.”
The unbridgeable hole between the reminiscences of my very own heat, uncomplicated Jewish previous, symbolized by Safam’s music, and my estrangement from American Jewish life within the current appeared like an unforgivable breach of duty. I couldn’t assist feeling like I had let my household down, and Safam, too.
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So I saved going again to their music, desperately clinging to the spark of Jewish connection it rekindled in me.
With Safam’s fourth album, Bittersweet (1983), the band moved in a brand new route. Because the title suggests, the temper began to really feel a shade darker—a pattern that continued by means of their subsequent releases, Peace by Piece (1984) and A Brighter Day (1986). Whereas the hopefulness of their earlier work was nonetheless current, the group waded into some knotty thematic terrain, from the elusiveness of Center East peace to the guilt and despair of a Holocaust survivor. Listening to Safam urge us to “use the bitter with the candy,” it appeared like their imaginative and prescient of Jewish life had grown extra advanced.
Whereas I may get down with Safam’s distinctive model of Holocaust pop/rock, I had a a lot tougher time with their overtly Zionist materials. One evening, getting deeper into Bittersweet, I used to be grooving alongside to “Yamit”—a propulsive, vaguely Center Japanese rock quantity that options considered one of Safam’s most hummable melodies. My musical ear tends to tune out music lyrics, however after I began being attentive to the storyline, I used to be horrified.
Yamit was a short-lived Israeli settlement established within the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 Struggle. In 1982, in achievement of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Israel’s army forcibly evacuated some 3,000 Israeli settlers from Yamit and bulldozed it to the bottom.
“Yamit” was Safam’s bittersweet lamentation for the misplaced Israeli enclave. Whereas the music conveys hope that the withdrawal will assist ship lasting peace, the tone is undeniably melancholic. The wistfulness of the reluctant evacuees is voiced most plaintively by a younger woman, “too younger to know” what is occurring, very like the “easy youngster” of the Passover seder: “Can we ever return once more?” she asks.
Whereas “World of Our Fathers” had me imagining Safam’s disappointment over my faltering dedication to Jewishness, now I discovered myself upset in Safam. As a Center East historian with sturdy objections to Israel’s settlement motion, I struggled to reconcile myself to a Safam that will memorialize Yamit like this.
Zionism was not a function of Safam’s music I had consciously registered rising up, however now there was no denying it was a key ingredient within the potent Jewish-American alchemy embodied of their work. If listening to their music initially felt like a homecoming, I now realized, this was as a result of it transported me to a extra harmless time when Zionism didn’t but seem to me as a political perception, however slightly as an implicit cultural id. I had been reflexively formed by Safam to imagine there was however one overarching Jewish story all of us shared—one which essentially leads, as one other of their catchiest songs has it, “dwelling to Jerusalem.”
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On the top of my Safam binging, in 2017, I sensed there was nonetheless unfinished enterprise for me within the Holy Land. If nothing else, I felt an ethical {and professional} obligation to go to the West Financial institution; my instructing about Israel/Palestine appeared woefully insufficient with out having a extra granular understanding of realities on the bottom within the Occupied Territories.
My first evening in Israel, wandering jetlagged round Jerusalem, I adopted the distant sound of drums and horns in Nachla’ot, the colourful neighborhood the place I used to be staying. It was the second evening of Chanukah, and I discovered myself in the course of an exuberant avenue social gathering. The revelers accepted me immediately; earlier than I knew it a shot of whiskey had been positioned in my hand. I stayed for over an hour, intoxicated by the group spirit, the attractive improvisational music, and the festive singing and dancing.
How fantastic it might be to assert this, I assumed—to really feel really at dwelling on this transcendent, all-embracing Jewish-Israeli house. One of many social gathering’s organizers, the form of Orthodox hipster who was ubiquitous in Nachla’ot, appeared to learn my thoughts: “There’s a prophecy,” he mentioned, gesturing first in the direction of me, then the group. “In the future all of the Jews of the world will come collectively and dance within the streets of Jerusalem.” I soaked all of it in, sublimating my misgivings and opening myself one final time to Zionism’s seductive siren music.
A number of days later I went to the West Financial institution. I toured the unspeakably miserable outdated metropolis of Hebron, which the Israeli army had ruined below the pretext of defending a tiny coterie of Jewish settlers (a number of of whom hounded us and threatened our information, a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence). I spent a beautiful day in Ramallah with my Palestinian pal Sa’ed, who launched me to the wonder and vibrancy of his hometown, whereas additionally mentioning the fortress-like Israeli settlements flanking it on all sides—an unrelenting reminder of the Occupation.
The training that had begun after I met Israel on the Jerusalem promenade, twelve years earlier, now felt full.
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As alluring as I discovered the Nachla’ot prophecy that magical Chanukah evening, I acknowledged its twinned beliefs of Jewish unity and Zionist belonging to be at finest a comforting phantasm, at worst a harmful lure. It might be true that every one nationalisms fake “we’re one” (the chorus of one other Safam earworm). However Judaism, not like Zionism, is just not a nationalism. Judaism is a wealthy and sophisticated historical religion custom that accommodates multitudes; Zionism, a distinctly fashionable political ideology, is however one present within the huge ocean of Jewish historical past. Even when Jewish custom is animated by a notion of frequent peoplehood, the actual fact stays that Jews have by no means been unified in religiosity, tradition, or politics.
Nor wouldn’t it be wholesome or fascinating if we have been. Because the thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “The unities we create fare higher after we face the convoluted actuality of our variations.” Seen on this gentle, the query “Can we ever return once more?”—the nostalgic lament in “Yamit,” and the sentiment on the coronary heart of a lot rightwing nationalism—results in a useless finish, given its fixation on just one authentic Jewish pathway, in the direction of one genuine homeland. Regrettably, clamor for such slim, inflexible nationalist loyalty tends to extend dramatically in occasions of collective trauma and concern—as we’ve witnessed throughout the Jewish world for the reason that horrors of October 7, 2023.
I don’t imagine in nationalism, however I do imagine in music as a sort of borderless homeland. All nationalisms, together with Zionism, commerce in reductive myths of previous wholeness and unity, partitioning the previous and holding us aside from each other within the current. Music, in contrast, has the uncanny energy to convey us nearer collectively, bridging cultural distinction by conveying common emotions of longing, loss, and hope. I hear this high quality in Safam’s music, with all its joyful eclecticism and earnest melancholia, even whether it is usually overshadowed by the Jewish and Zionist particularism of the lyrics.
Reconnecting with Safam put me again in contact with elements of my previous I didn’t know I may nonetheless entry—a nostalgia journey that without delay enticed and repelled me in equal measure. On the identical time, it sparked a extra trustworthy reckoning with my Jewish journey by illuminating these components of my upbringing that had as soon as made it appear unattainable to assert a Jewish id bereft of Zionism. For this, to borrow Chaim Moshe’s phrases, I say to Safam: Thanks—for what you’ve given me; for a day of happiness, innocence, and honesty; for a tragic bygone day that has vanished. In spite of everything these years, regardless of all of it, to be wrestling once more with my Jewish id lastly appears like dwelling—and precisely what’s required of me at this agonizing second in historical past. It is a blessing.
Matthew H. Ellis is a historian specializing within the fashionable Center East and North Africa. He at the moment holds the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Basis Chair in Worldwide Affairs and Center East Research at Sarah Lawrence School.
