Yesterday evening was a confluence of events: Chanuka, the 75th
anniversary of the founding of Kibbutz Tzora and my younger grand-daughter's
5th birthday. Two of these events were celebrated last night in a
show held in the kibbutz auditorium, attended by many members and even more
children.
Of course, the joy of the evening was tempered by the general mood of the
kibbutz and the country: we cannot forget the captives/hostages/prisoners of
war being held in Gaza. Alongside atrocious stories of rape and child beating,
we also heard in the past few days admissions from the general public of Gaza
at how annoyed they are at Hamas. It's not enough that they (Hamas) brought
yet another a war to the residents, their leaders hide underground whilst the
general populace suffers. Most of the humanitarian aid sent to Gaza is looted
by Hamas, leaving only little for the real sufferers.
On the other hand, there was a great deal of joy and general emotional release
in the auditorium last night: those on stage tried to bring some normalcy to
our lives.
On to the musical group: we had prepared four songs; as I
wrote
a few weeks ago,
a set of songs that would bring a message of hope and peace.
The songs were interposed between the lighting of the candles; this
arrangement was slightly offputting as I'm fairly sure that we would all have
preferred playing the songs in one go.
We opened with a song that dates from the Yom Kippur war - I realised
afterwards that I was the only one of the group who remembers the song 'in
real time'; in fact, I was the only one of us even alive in 1973 (i.e. the others had yet to be born). There is a
tradition of sending food parcels to soldiers; this song upset the tradition
by asking for underwear instead of cake! It was appropriate in 1973 and is still
appropriate in 2023. Here's the
link
to the original version of the song; I hadn't listened to this as I knew the
song well enough even though I had never played it. Listening to it now, I am
struck by the double lead guitars in the introduction - maybe influenced by
Kaveret, whose staggering debut album had been released only a few months
prior to the war.
The reason that I'm looking a bit clueless at the beginning is that I
thought we were starting with a different song; I only caught on in the first
seconds. One can hear the audience joining in.
As opposed to our previous two appearances, this time the audience was in
darkness which removed some of the distractions that plagued me in the past.
During our second song, I saw that a sizeable part of the audience had lit the
torches of their mobile phones - very touching.
After a while of rehearsing, there comes a time when one can play the songs
freely, without worrying what the next chord is or whether if one is in tune.
Then playing the songs becomes a pleasure and one wants more. I think that we
reached this stage last Saturday night, so our rehearsal on Wednesday evening
was more fun that usual. Last night was relaxed and enjoyable, and at the end
I wish we could have played the whole set again. On the other hand, I am
informed that some of the younger children in the audience had exceeded their
attention span and were noisy, impairing the enjoyment of others.
Final words: putting the 'nines' on the Stagg helped a great deal.
A close up, courtesy of my daughter
This day in history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 316 | Project management exam | Jewish holidays, MBA, Project management | |
| 432 | Post mortem on the Finance exam | MBA, Finance | |
| 658 | International dressing | Personal | |
| 1095 | Trip to the Dead Sea | Israel, Personal | |
| 1096 | Dead Sea, part 2 | Personal | |
| 1190 | First official picture | Grandfather | |
| 1278 | The new DVD: what I have learned in a week | DVD |
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