Q&A: Question
Question
Question
To my teacher, Rabbi Michael Abraham, may he live long and well,
What does the Rabbi think about this song:
A song בעקבות the war.
In our community on Simchat Torah we danced \ ate and drank \ we did not let anything disturb us \ even when the messenger arrived about our brothers \ telling that hundreds of our people were being murdered \ our rabbi, a man of many gifts from among us \ was in wonderful cleaving to our Creator \ and when the messenger from among us arrived \ to warn our rabbi \ he ignored it as though it had nothing to do with our camp \ as though they were not protecting us \ suddenly the head of the community in our congregation shouted \ why should this make any difference to us \ after all our children are here among us \ and we have cholent \ fortunate are we, how good is our portion
P.S. “The head of the community” means a rich and stupid man. And when he said this in front of several people, nobody protested, and some of them laughed and agreed 😫😫😫
Best regards,
A.Y.A.
Answer
Is there actually some question here? Are we lacking fools or wicked people (or both)?
Discussion on Answer
It’s hard to ignore the idiotic/evil content and give a purely artistic opinion. But it seems to me that artistically too, it’s on the level of something written by a kindergarten child.
Thank you.
In my opinion it’s a nice song—what’s the problem?
I’m not sure I understood. Is this a song that describes the situation critically, or one that expresses the alienated position itself? It’s very hard for me to separate the outrageous content from the song. As criticism, it seems more reasonable, though in my opinion this isn’t really a song but an argument in rhyme (far too simplistic). The description is also too direct. When writing a poem, the treatment is not supposed to be descriptive but paraphrastic—something more sophisticated. See the column series on what poetry is.
Here in Israel, for some reason, all songs are written in a broken style, meaning with no connection between one sentence and the next [that’s not always deep; a lot of the time it’s just nonsense].
The poem \ rhymes were written as criticism.
As someone who was in the crowd and then wrote about it.
But I completely understand the confusion. 😳
What does the Rabbi think about the song as a song?