Eurovision 2019

To say that the annual Eurovision Song Contest has not been a big part of my life is really almost to say nothing at all. Obviously I had heard of it before last year when Netta Barzilai won the contest for Israel with her slightly bizarre but extremely catchy hit song, “Toy”? (The bizarre part has to do with her mimicking a chicken in the course of the number. But she was a very engaging chicken and the voters loved it, and I did too! To take it all in, click here.) For one thing, I was still at JTS the year that Israel won for the first time with Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta’s performance of Nurit Hirsch and Ehud Manor’s song “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” (click here) and remember loving the song and feeling very proud of Israel for winning. And I was only one year older when Israel then pulled off the remarkable feat of winning for a second consecutive year in 1979 with Kobi Oshrat and Shimrit Orr’s song, “Hallelujah,” performed by Gali Atari and the musical group Milk and Honey (click here). It then took almost twenty years for Israel to win again, taking the prize in 1998 with Dana International’s truly remarkable rendition of Tzvika Pick and Yoav Ginai’s song, “Diva.” (Click here and you’ll see what I mean.) And then, twenty years later still, Netta took the prize again last year.

The general principle is that the contest is held in the country of the previous year’s winner and there have only been a handful of exceptions, mostly connected with the winner’s country not wanting to shoulder the expenses involved in hosting the contest. (In 1980, when the contest should have been in Israel for the second year in a row, Israel declined to host the contest because its date fell on Yom Hazikaron and it seemed impossible to contemplate to hold a contest like Eurovision on a day of national mourning for the fallen servicemen and women of the IDF.) But that was then, and Netta’s win last year meant that this year’s contest would be held in Israel, which is exactly what has been going on this last week.

It’s been a wild time with missiles from Gaza aimed at civilian targets clearly meant to discourage people from coming to Israel to attend or participate in the contest. There have been endless efforts by anti-Israel groups of all sorts to condemn the participants for coming to Israel and adding their name to a contest that will surely bring Israel international prestige. And yet there are forty-one countries participating in Tel Aviv. The semi-finals were on Tuesday and Thursday; the finals featuring singers from Greece, Belarus, Serbia, Cyprus, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Australia, Iceland, San Marino, and Slovenia are this Saturday night. Will Israel’s Kobi Marimi manage to win the prize for Israel for a second consecutive year with his English-language song, “Home”? I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough, although he’s not favored to win or even to come close to winning. But who knows? The world is full of surprises! (You can decide for yourself what you think. Click here to hear Kobi Marimi sing “Home.”)

More impressive even than Netta’s chicken dance from last year is the fact that no contestants at all pulled out of the contest this year—and that despite the intense pressure that was exerted on some of them not to perform in Israel. The rockets—hundreds of them, some landing less than twenty miles from Tel Aviv—also failed to affect the party. Yes, it’s true that fewer tourists came to attend the contest than Israel had expected. But the bottom line has to be that the contest came to Israel, that it unfolded precisely according to plan, that no one was successfully bullied into backing out, and that Israel felt—for the course of almost a full week—like a regular country among the nations of the world, one that takes its place naturally among the nations who participate in international song competitions like Eurovision, like a contestant state among contestant states…and not as the recipient of such endless hostility from the very nations that should be Israel’s most staunch supporters and allies that we—we who keep track of these things and who truly care about Israel’s future—we barely even notice insults and aggressive statements of the kind that would ignite international storms of outrage if they were directed against any other country at all. 

But even though no one withdrew, there was still the lingering irritation regarding the decision specifically not to have Eurovision in Jerusalem despite the fact that the regular practice is always to hold the contest in the capital city of the previous year’s winner’s country. In the past, this hasn’t been an issue: the contest was held in Jerusalem both in 1979 and in 1999. You could say that nothing much has changed since 1999 with respect to Jerusalem: it was the capital of Israel then and it is the capital of Israel now. But that wouldn’t be taking into account the world-wide efforts of the BDS movement and its Israel-hating leadership to delegitimize Israel’s existence and, with particular venom, its natural right to establish its capital wherever it wishes, a right naturally and uncontroversially accorded every other country on earth. It is true that many Eurovision contests have not been held in capital cities—when Germany hosted the contest in 2011 contest, for example, it was held in Düsseldorf rather than Berlin—but these were not political decisions, just ones related to how much money the host city was willing to spend and other venue-related considerations. Only here does it feel certain that political considerations outweighed all others. Yes, it’s true that the European Broadcasting Union, which is the parent company that organizes the Eurovision contest, said publicly that their decision to hold the contest in Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem was simply a function of Tel Aviv’s “creative and compelling bid.” But, at least as far as I can see, that has convinced basically no one at all. Nor is it at all clear that our own nation’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was unrelated to the EBU’s decision and their eagerness not to be seen to be supportive of that move. So there’s that issue too in the mix of emotions I bring to Eurovision this year!

For me personally, the whole scene— this is the rabbi in me talking, not the music fan—the whole scene evokes a set of feelings unrelated to the world of pop music and unrelated, even, to Netta Barzilai. That longing to be one of the nations, after all, is as old as the Jewish people…as is the tension between that longing for normalcy and the sense that Israel—both it is sociological guise as the people Israel and its political one as the State of Israel—has a role to play in the history of the world that is uniquely its own, a role for which it was chosen from among the nations of the world to play in the pageant of human history that is different from the parallel roles assigned other nations and peoples.

Scripture uses the phrase am s’gulah mi-kol ha-amim (“the treasured nation from among all the nations”) three different times to reference the Israelite nation. How that somehow morphed into the much-maligned epithet, the “chosen people,” I’m not entirely sure…but it clearly happened a long time ago: the benedictory formula recited when someone is called to the Torah includes the Hebrew version of that expression and requires that the person coming forward acknowledge God as the one who “chose us from among the nations to grant us the revelation of the Torah.” There was a time when those words were considered entirely normal and not at all chauvinistic or arrogant. But even to me they feel just a bit iffy these days…and I am someone with the greatest respect for the liturgical heritage of the Jewish people.

I suppose I too long for normalcy. I want to see Israel treated like the other nations of the world. I want Israeli athletes to compete freely in whatever tournaments they qualify for, not only those that take place in countries that will grant them visas. I want Israeli professors to be welcome guests in the universities of the world, not to have to negotiate minefields of unwarranted hostility from their own colleagues in academe. I find it beyond problematic that Israel is forced by the United Nations to be part of the Western European Group (delicately renamed in their honor as the Western European and Others Group) rather than welcome to join the Asia Group, membership in which you would think would be naturally awarded to a country that is, after all, in Asia. I hate that Israel is singled out again and again by self-appointed critics who find it offensive for Israel to self-define as a Jewish state but who seem not to care at all about Iran or Pakistan self-defining as Islamic ones.

And so I find myself in a familiar bind, wanting specialness and normalcy, uniqueness and averageness. I want Israel to be seen as a regular nation, as a normal one, as just another member of the family of nations. But I also want to embrace the concept of Jewish destiny, a concept inextricably tied in my mind to the unique role in history that is Israel’s. I suppose we all feel that about ourselves at least to some extent, that we want to be thought of as unique, as special…but somehow also not to stand out unduly or to be perceived as other than regular people living regular lives. I’ve learned over the years how to live with a bit of ambiguity, how to accept that the tension that inheres in every set of incongruent desires does not need to be resolved, how to want two incongruous things and not feel obliged to abandon either merely because it feels impossible to have both. Sometimes—and I say this both on the macrolevel of national identity and on the microlevel of personal individuality—sometimes you just have to choose not to make a choice.