What Eden Means to Us

Every day we're losing our minds

Tonight begins Yom HaZikaron, the heaviest day on the Israeli calendar – heavier than Yom Kippur, heavier than Yom HaShoah. This is the day on which Israelis remember their countrymen who fell in defense of this state. 

On Yom HaShoah we stand once for the memory of the six million as the siren wails; on Yom HaZikaron, we stand twice, once in the evening and again in the morning. 

This day is heavier because the pain reaches everywhere: Everyone here has lost children, parents, brothers and friends in the wars and acts of terror that have marked the renewal of Jewish life in this land. 

But there is something deeper: The murdered myriads of the Shoah are on the Nazis’ account: They died because they were defenseless Jews. But the dead of Yom HaZikaron died on our account, that the project of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel might succeed. Our life here has been purchased with their lives. And whether their sacrifice will be redeemed or will have been vain is yet to be determined; it turns on what becomes of us and what becomes of this project.

This year especially, the fear that we might not make it, that the sheer mass of death and loathing might overwhelm us, hangs heavy.

The thought is unutterable, a sacrilege; but it hangs there nonetheless, which accounts for the awful weight of the day. (Emil Fackenheim wrote that the true hero of faith, like Elijah against the priests of Baal, must run the risk of his faith being falsified. If you cannot fail, you’ve wagered nothing.)

Something of this heaviness penetrated the otherwise frivolous atmosphere at the Eurovision competition last night in Malmö, Sweden.

Act after trivial act took the stage, each more weightless than the last: an antisemitic pagan duo from Eire; a flaccid British pantomime of gay porn; Nemo of Switzerland (the eventual champion), dressed as a pink toy poodle, sharing their triumph at “breaking the code” of their true non-binary nature.

And then the lights came up on Eden Golan, Israel’s contestant, small and slight, her body swaying limply over her heels. Her song, “Hurricane,” a barely concealed reenactment of the killing fields of the Nova Festival at Kibbutz Re’im, had not a hint of frivolity:

Surrounded by dancers dressed as the shades of the slaughtered “angels” of the Nova, Eden sang her heart out. She sang our pain, our grief and the utter madness that has gripped every one of us since October 7. “Every day I’m losing my mind,” she howled, and we all howled along with her. “Promise me you’ll hold me again” she begged the hundreds of murdered young Israelis whose deaths we still cannot accept. And we all of us, our whole nation, thought only of our dead and of our hostages in Gaza, tortured and raped and killed day after day. 

And throughout it all, the crowd — playing the part of Hamas — jeered and booed Eden, along with a mob of thousands on the streets outside the arena, for the crime of being Israeli.

I opened my phone, downloaded the Eurovision app, turned on my VPN and paid €23 to vote for Eden as many times as I could. 

It turns out I was not alone. The professional jury snubbed Eden, despite her devastating performance. Two presenters swore they would not utter her name and had to be replaced. Last year’s champion announced that, should Eden win, she would refuse to hand her the glass trophy. (In the event, the pink poodle won; she awarded them the trophy, which they promptly dropped and shattered.) 

But mysteriously, marvelously, the viewers at home went wild for Eden. Whether because they were moved by the tragic weight of her performance, or because they are sick to death of the mobs in keffiyehs vandalizing their boulevards and monuments in the name of Palestine, fifteen participating countries awarded douze points — top marks — to Israel, along with “the rest of the world” (everyone watching from non-participating countries). 

Public votes for Israel in Eurovision 2024

This popular surge for Israel could mean a great deal, or it could mean nothing at all. But to us here — “we who dwell in Zion,” as the correspondent for Channel 11 called us — it means everything. They and we together are bearing Eden Golan aloft, our queen, our tribune, our shlichat tzibbur, who gave such exquisite voice to our agony.