“This one starts with a real longing, a from-the-guts call for peace. And by the end, the music earns it.”
This uncharacteristically poetic description from our tour guide introduced the song that woke me from my mental fugue state after a few days of international travel. He held his smartphone to the microphone and said, “Bear with me. It starts slowly, but I promise it’ll wake you up.”
The song opens with Mosh Ben Ari’s clear tenor voice introducing the refrain in the rich sounds of a language I had loved from the day I had first been immersed in it in Israel. It’s simple and natural to express pain and longing in Hebrew, the throaty, melodic language of a people who have been calling for peace for a few thousand years.
“Od yavo shalom aleinu,” sings the popular Israeli pop/folk artist: “Peace will come upon us.”
The rest of the lyrics are just as simple, repeating the call for “shalom”—or “peace”—and sharing this hope with a world that has resisted this tiny country’s very existence for hundreds or thousands of years, depending on one’s definition of Israel as a political entity or people fighting for peace in their Promised Land.
The song gathers speed and power as it translates its message into the language of one of its longstanding enemies: “Salaam” is the Arabic word for peace.
We stumbled through the words a few times, humming the melody and clapping to the Middle Eastern rhythms, mumbling and mangling the lyrics to one another for the rest of the day.
And while greeting the Sabbath at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem Friday evening, we found a group of women who proved that the call for peace was spreading.
“It’s our song!” I shouted, and my American Christian friends and I were drawn into the fray of Jewish women dancing in a circle, joyful with the promise of a peace that is long in coming. But that is the mindset of Israel; peace has not yet come, but the promise and the joy (and the music) are with us.
A British-Israeli tour guide teaches his American students a song that has become a Jewish anthem for peace throughout Israel.
And the message of the song is just as universal as those who sing it: this is the music of “Salaam,” peace for Israel that will come “Aleinu ve’al kol ha olam”: “Upon us and upon the whole world.”
“Salaam” lyrics:
Od yavo shalom aleinu
(Peace will yet come upon us)
Od yavo shalom aleinu, ve’al kulam
(Peace will yet come upon us and upon the whole world.)
Salaam, aleinu ve’al kol ha’olam,
(Salaam, upon us and upon the whole world.)
Salaam, salaam.
