Black Eyed Peas find a home

June 5, 2006 - 8:14 AM by David Brinn

Interesting piece in ‘Ha’aretz’ relating to the first big concert of the hot summer…

Marrano Zionism, Black Eyed Peas, and Shahar Peer

By Bradley Burston

There is an Israel we never talk about.

It is the best place on earth.

Just about everyone who lives here, feels it for fleeting moments. That may be why we live here.

It could be a cataclysm of a sunset. It could be an entirely unbidden and sorely needed act of kindness on the part of a perfect stranger.

Then the unbearable gravity of being here kicks in, and with it, the manifold miseries of the Holy Land, brutal enemies, bad friends, bad government, brutal weather.

For many a leftist, many a settler, many a new immigrant, many a sixth-generation sabra – all of them serially betrayed by the Promised Land where promises come to be broken – the ember of Zionist warmth and fervor cools fast, the flicker of fine feeling burrows underground, instinctively, replaced by an armor of frown, hooded eye, selective hearing, unfiltered speech, inappropriate vehicular acceleration.

The cruelties of everyday life in Israel have created Marrano Zionism, furtive, masterfully secreted, camouflaged with the protective coloration of the disenchanted and the disheartened, but with its own quiet, innate, slightly bent traditions and handed-down vestigial customs.

You think you’re used to it. You think, after a while, that this is how it’s going to stay.

Then, without warning, it whacks you again.

Just when it seems too late by far, something hits us upside our calloused shell of a head, and there it is. From a direction we could not expect, something comes to fan long-buried Zionist faith back to life.

The Black Eyed Peas, for example.

We didn’t know what hit us. The expectations of the thousands in that stadium, and the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands following the live concert broadcast on Army Radio, ran in a very different vector, pointing squarely at the hip hop nation of the City of Angels, a mesmerizing funk-til-death backup band, by-your-throat rhythm cascades, assault rifle bursts of knowing, glowing, mow-down rhyme riffs and inexhaustible energy in human motion. That’s what we’d come for.

What we didn’t expect, was Zionism.

“We’ve been here for five days,” vocalist-rapper Will.I.Am called to the crowd. “And that’s been the best five days of our lives.”

“Check this out,” he went on, ticking off the ways he found himself loving the country, from the landscape, to the tight-knit character of family life, to “the most beautifullest women on the planet.

They stopped at nothing. They spoke about the possibility of moving to Israel to live. “Y’see, I brought my mom and my grandma. You know, we’re Christian, but I think I’m gonna convert to Judaism …”

The audience, which came knowing every syllable of every infinitely complex song, was caught entirely unprepared. They were witnessing a full-blown Revival Meeting of that old time Zionism, and it was their turn to testify.

Testify they did.

In seconds, they were delirious.

The band broke into a horn driven, Mussel Shoals-seasoned “Hava Nagila.” The crowd, already bananas, roared so loud it would have surprised no one had it been capable of levitating itself through sheer animal delight, and a peculiarly local version of loud, proud, surprised, oddly patriotic, unedited love.

Fergie, the group’s woman singer, flew in the face of every conceivable assumption, as well as every tenet of political correctness, by calling Israel “one of the most fun places on the planet.” But the crowd, knowing exactly what she meant, loosed yet a larger paroxysm.

From the standpoint of partying like there’s no tomorrow, Israelis have a decided edge over most of their peers in the West.

No Tomorrow, in fact, may have come to replace the concept of No Alternative in the Israeli sense of self in the world.

Take the case of the Israeli army’s most famous soldier.

The day after the Black Eyed Peas took the field in Tel Aviv, IDF recruit Shahar Peer faced Martina Hingis, not long ago the best women’s tennis player in the world, in the prestigious French Open.

Battling back from a first set in which Hingis seemed to defy the laws of physics in placing soft shots in unreachable corners, Peer, 19, refused to break, playing a No Tomorrow second set in which the veteran Hingis seemed at one point to be on the ropes.

Peer, who lost the first set 6-3, thundered and grunted to a dominating 6-2 victory in the second. Tradition, and France, being what they are, the match was then suspended for darkness.

But for Israelis, watching on television back home, Peer had already won a clear victory.

The game that Peer played was nothing less than heroic. She stood her ground, she refused to surrender, she roared back to challenge and prevail. She had, to understate it by leagues, heart.

If there’s one thing you learn around here, there’s a lot more to victory than the score. Heart, it turns out, is what really counts. It’s what makes us what we are.

At this point, the more cynical among our readers, those who may, in fact, be the realists among our readers, are likely thinking: “Enough. Tennis, Rap, nothing but nonsense. Worse than nonsense. Besides, the Black Eyed Peas probably say those things at all their shows, no matter what country, no matter what crowd.”

Think what you will. I’m going to spend a few more minutes with this cassette we taped off the radio, late at night, with the lights out. Like the Marranos we are, and the Marranos we will return to being. After just one more listen. One more reminder of what we really are, at heart.

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