* Translation by Yehoshua Siskin ([email protected])
These days, many of us have been getting up each morning with sadness and a heavy heart.
The way to overcome this feeling is found in one of Naomi Shemer's most beautiful and poignant songs: "You Will Not Defeat Me."
According to the title, you might expect a soldier's song. Yet Naomi, a leading Israeli songwriter who passed away twenty years ago, wrote in this song that a nation's road to victory is simply a matter of many people getting up each day to carry out their mission -- to study, to build, to create:
'From my window I see a street like a rising river
And people going off to their day's work,
And children with school bags on their backs who study Torah
And in their hands blossoming myrtle branches.
Suddenly something becomes clear and I say:
You will not defeat me,
I am not defeated so quickly.'
What do people going off to work and children going to school have to do with victory? Because our consistency, our persistence, and our uninterrupted daily routine are a sign of faith in the justice of our cause, and this is the true secret of victory; it's the victory of ordinary, yet extraordinary, everyday life.
This is what our enemies wish to defeat. And therefore every sort of positive action, every act of building and creating, and every mitzvah and good deed we do routinely every day are proof of our resilience and the faith that never stops pulsating within us. No, they will not defeat us so quickly.
