Many songs have been written about the Hebrew language, the most famous of which are “Eliezer Ben-Yehuda” written by Yaron London and composed by Matti Caspi and the song “Hebrew is difficult language” written by Dan Almagor and composed by Yair Rosenblum. Decades have passed since these songs were published.
And here, on the occasion of Hebrew Day 1962, which will be celebrated next Thursday, the Hebrew Language Academy decided to fill in the gaps, and initiated and produced a new song – which is all about love for the Hebrew language.
The lyrics to the new song – “A Song in Hebrew”, was written by the creator Jimbo Jay (Omar the Baron) and he also composed it with Shai Ben-Shoshan. For the performance of the song, join the exciting and happy performance of the Shalva band as together with Jimbo Jay they connect us all – young and old – to the emotion of love for our language.
The song is accompanied by a beautiful clip shot at the Jerusalem Khan Theater, on Ben-Zion Boulevard in Tel Aviv and Moshav Udim – with the intention of reflecting the colorfulness of contemporary Hebrew, its connection to sources on the one hand and the influences it absorbs from the speakers brought with them. Its combinations from the high literary language to the language of speech and dialect.
Lyrics:
A song in Hebrew
My mother sang to me
A song in Hebrew
That we would study in classrooms
A song for a language that has been wandering between the sacred and the profane for generations
Who writes us
In twenty-two letters
You made an aliyah
From all corners of the globe
From my brother’s throat animal
To the Yiddish she sang from above
You gave us a name
From Canaan to Israel
That we will not fall apart in exile
Like the Tower of Babel
And today you are as light as the whistling of a child on the street
Sometimes you’re as meticulous as a news anchor
And when you feel like resting, you still know how to ask from other languages
A good word and also some generous curses
Hebrew, people are fighting for you, every day, all the time
It is still believed that the pen is stronger than the sword
Fighting if you say pink or pink socks
And it’s the same sock, that is, the same sock
I saw a St. Bernard poodle barking “WOOF WOOF” in English
In Ben-Yehuda in the evening
He said to him: In Hebrew they bark
Right on the face, but what now?
And maybe the dog is buried here, Hebrew?
The war on you is not simple
Dogri tells you, that it’s Western, not in the Polish section
How did Yossi Banai and Rivka Michaeli say to me?
Hebrew is a difficult language, in the studio section
You want to absorb everyone but it’s hard to absorb you
Because you have something extraordinary about you in a linguistic section
You’re like a Yemeni chef who adds Bulgarian cheese to a salad and says
Voilà – now he’s Greek!