December 1, 2013

Before I begin, a disclaimer: I've only lived in Tel Aviv for a year. And I hadn't heard of Israeli singer Arik Einstein, who many are calling the greatest Israeli singer of all time, before he died last Tuesday. (Blasphemy, I know.) Of course I'd heard his retro surfer Hebrew on the radio, in taxi cabs, at the wine-and-cheesier parties I attended in the Old North — but I'd never put a name to the voice. So my observations on his death are not those of a longtime fan or a member of The Family; they're those of an outsider engulfed in the strange, warm grief cloud that recently moved in on my city. A foreigner breathing its little drops with the rest of you.

Einstein, 74, a pretty Israeli pop singer who grew to be a beautifully reclusive old man, “>that of losing peacenik Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to the bullet of a crazed Orthodox assassin. It's as if Einstein, too, has been robbed from Israel, murdered in the public square — and with him, all his open-minded and -hearted ideals. Eighteen years apart, Rabin and Einstein's deaths were announced in the same courtyard of the same Tel Aviv hospital, and (As a colder, more pessimistic parallel, it seems to me that Einstein and Rabin have both come to symbolize these liberal ideals despite the fact that neither was quite as wholeheartedly committed to peace as his simplified legacy suggests. Rabin was a long way from a real peace accord with Palestine. Einstein wrote songs about populating the Negev, which would require pushing out thousands of Bedouin — an enduring Zionist prerogative I've never experienced a mourning so communal-yet-personal. The days since Einstein's passing have been tragic, but not in the big, shouty Internet way that I remember America mourning legends like Michael Jackson or Adam Yauch. This great popular death has spread through Tel Aviv with a soft and all-encompassing nostalgia, like it means no one can see their childhood home again (even if they haven't been back in years anyhow). The loss hurts, but the remembering is cozy. 

See also: “Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, an exotic staple in the “Fast and Furious” franchise, posted tributes to co-star Paul Walker on her Facebook and Twitter accounts today, after news came in during the night (Israeli time) that Walker had died in a fiery L.A.-area car crash.