It was a short video clip that went viral. It showed a Purim party held in a bomb shelter, where a group of young Israelis danced and sang along to Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive.” Gaynor’s lyrics, written about romantic heartbreak, took on a totally new meaning as Iranian missiles were flying overhead:
Did you think I’d crumble?
Did you think I’d lay down and die?
Oh, no, not I
I will survive…
Jews celebrate survival, and the first Jewish song is about survival. After seeing their Egyptian slavemasters vanquished at the Red Sea, Moses leads the people in song, calling out that “The Lord is my strength and song; he has become my salvation.” In Psalms, David sings, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”
Jews have always sung the sweet song of survival.
We sang this song of survival even during the Holocaust. In the Vilna Ghetto, 21-year-old Hirsch Glick wrote “Zog nit keyn mol,” a Yiddish song that became an anthem of survival. The song’s refrain is:
So, never say the road now ends for you,
Though leadened skies may cover over days of blue.
As the hour that we longed for is so near,
Our marching steps beat out the message: We are here!
The closing words, “mir zaynen do” (“we are here”), became a Jewish catchphrase. Despite all the attempts to destroy the Jewish people, we had survived.
This theme has deeply influenced Israeli music. Ofra Hazah’s hit song “Chai,” which was written by the famed Israeli composer Ehud Manor, was the Israeli entry for the 1983 Eurovision contest. The contest that year took place in Munich, Germany. Manor wanted to make a statement about Jewish pride and survival, and wrote the following chorus:
Alive, alive, alive – Yes, I’m still alive!
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing]
I’m still alive, alive, alive
The people of Israel live
When the backup singers performed the song, they all wore yellow, the color of the hated yellow star, making it clear to Germany and the entire world: We are here.
Once again, Jews were singing the sweet song of survival.
Judaism sees survival as a sacred task. It is each individual’s first responsibility. Life is a gift from God; right after waking up each morning, we thank God for another day of life. We must cherish life, so much so that saving a life takes precedence over all other religious responsibilities.
But there is a second form of sacred survival: to survive as a nation. And that too takes precedence over everything.
After the Jews make the golden calf, God tells Moses: “Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation.” God is ready to destroy the entire nation. But Moses argues with God. At one point, Moses says that if God will not forgive the Jews, he wants to be erased from the Book of Life and punished along with the rest of the Jews.
That Moses is ready to argue with God on behalf of the Jews is in itself remarkable. But a comment from Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz in his Kli Yakar is even more dramatic.
As the Jews dance around the golden calf, Moses descends the mountain with the tablets that God had divinely inscribed with the Ten Commandments. When Moses sees them worshipping the golden calf, he smashes the tablets.
Why would Moses destroy these sacred tablets? The Kli Yakar offers a radical interpretation: Moses broke the tablets because he wanted “to join in with the rest of Israel in sin,” and thereby be no better than the rest of the Jewish people. Yes, Moses intentionally sins. This way, God would have to punish him if He punished them.
Moses would rather be a sinner and stand together with the Jews, then a saint and stand together with God.
This episode underlines that for Jews, survival is absolutely sacred. It offers a vision that is unique to Judaism: Peoplehood comes before religion. All spirituality begins with an absolute love for life and for the Jewish people.
It offers a vision that is unique to Judaism: Peoplehood comes before religion.
During the Holocaust, survival took on heightened spiritual importance. As the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, the survivors embraced life even more. Dr. Nathan Eck described life in the Warsaw Ghetto, explaining that, “Among the residents of the ghetto, there arose a powerful will to live, overflowing with hidden strengths, the likes of which could hardly be imagined in normal times … Against Hitler’s plot to annihilate and destroy, the Jews responded with a deep and determined desire to live.”
One of the rabbinic leaders in the Ghetto, Rabbi Yitzchak Nissenbaum, called this drive to survive “kiddush ha-chaim” or sanctification of life. This differed greatly from medieval practice, when Jews would choose martyrdom rather than abandon their faith, as an act of deep devotion to God.
Eck wrote that Nissenbaum preached:
“This is an hour of the sanctification of life, not of the sanctification of the Name through death. In the past, our enemies demanded our souls, and the Jew sanctified God’s Name by sacrificing his body. Now, the oppressor demands the Jewish body—and it is the Jew’s duty to defend it, to preserve his life. In the past, Jews upheld the sanctification of God’s Name; in our time, they are obligated to uphold the sanctification of life.”
Survival is sacred.
That is why we always cherish life and relish life. And we have always sung the sweet song of survival.
Life goes on in Israel’s bomb shelters. There were Purim parties and costume contests. There are singles events. And there are even underground weddings.
Lior and Michael planned to get married on March 1. Unfortunately, their wedding hall had to cancel because of the rocket attacks. But Lior and Michael decided they weren’t going to move the date; so they moved the wedding instead, to the minus four level of the Dizengoff Center parking lot in Tel Aviv. Yediot Achronot’s reporter offered this comment:
“Inside a parking garage and under the shadow of the sirens, the simple moments of joy and love took on a different meaning. The couple said that for them it was important to continue living and to celebrate their love, even during a challenging time.”
Lior and Michael’s wedding is part of a three thousand year-old story of survival. The pundits might predict from time to time that the Jews will crumble, or lay down and die, but Lior and Michael know better.
They know that we will survive. Am Yisrael Chai!
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.
