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A Funny Thing Happened to Hatikvah on the Way…

With Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Yerushalayim in the air I happened this month to hear an old BBC recording from April 20 1945. The date is worth noting: It was five days after the liberation of the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. In the recording the few survivors of that camp were singing a song. The song: Hatikvah destined to become the official national anthem of the future State of Israel.
The recording as expected of a 70-year-old transcription is scratchy and tinny — but while the melody was of course familiar there were several significant differences between the words sung by the survivors and the words ultimately chosen for Israel’s national anthem.
Particularly striking were the changes made in the second stanza of the song. The classical words —written by the Ukrainian Jewish poet Naftali Hertz Imber and redolent of the melody of Smetana’s Symphonic poem La Moldau — were:
Od lo avdah tikvaseinu / our hope is still not lost
Hatikvah hanoshanah / the ancient hope
Lashuv l’eretz avoseinu / to return to the land of our forefathers
La’ir bah David chanah / to the city in which David dwelled.
These words are unfamiliar to most of us but for many years it was the unofficial anthem of European Jews yearning to come to Eretz Yisrael. However the words have undergone a metamorphosis. The official version that is sung today is:
Hatikvah shenot alpayim / the two-thousand-year old hope
Liheyot am chofshi b’artzeinu / to be a free nation in our land
B’eretz Tzion v’Yerushalayim / in the land of Zion and Jerusalem.
What happened to the original lines of Hatikvah to “ return to the land of our forefathers”? Apparently they have been traded in for a newer model: “to be a free nation.” What happened to King David? He has been summarily dismissed.
Most crucially the very thrust of the original has been changed. Originally the focus was on returning to the land of our forefathers; now the focus is not on return but on becoming a free nation. The references to our past to ancient hopes to King David have been expunged. Rather than return to the glories of the past the improvers chose the current zeitgeist.
A careful look at this evolution of the Israeli national anthem might offer an insight into the thinking of the secular mind. Of course no one can clearly know what underlay the motivations to make these changes though some suggestions come to mind. Was it the desire to cast tradition overboard as excess baggage in favor of more acceptable liberal terms like “freedom”? Does the exclusion of ancient motifs like hanoshanah and avoseinu reflect a certain mindset a certain desire to negate the Galus mentality and to demonstrate that Israel is fully au courant with the spirit of modern times and has no need for the albatross of ancient history? After all concerns about the past and forefathers and ancient hopes do not quite meld with one’s self-image as a tough sabra.
Who can know? About inner motivations one can only speculate and perhaps unfairly so. Still one would have to be completely anesthetized not to take note of these significant changes. I will confess that whenever I hear the word “chofshi ” the mind goes back to Rashi’s famous comment when the desert Israelites whine that they want to return to Egypt where things were “free” (Bamidbar 11:5). Rashi says that by “free” they really meant free from performing mitzvos likely basing his comment on the Talmudic reading (Niddah 61b) of Tehillim 88:6: “chofshi from mitzvos.”
That I am not alone in my discontent at the improvements is demonstrated by the groups in Israel today who in place of chofshi insert the word kadosh: liheyot am kadosh b’artzeinu / to be a holy people in our land. And the late Chief Rabbi Avraham Kook surely sympathetic to Zionism wrote an entirely different anthem called Ha’emunah. Others in the past have suggested Tehillim 126 the famous Shir Hamaalos (“hazorim b’dimah b’rinah yiktzoru…”) as most appropriate — plus it perfectly fits the melody of La Moldau. Many alternative ideas — we are after all Jews — but Hatikvah as we know it today remains the official national anthem.
I keep wondering if those remodelers of the Hatikvah ever heard the poignant voices of those Bergen-Belsen survivors. Had they been so privileged they might have thought twice before tampering with their song. —

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