Most people listening to this podcast will know Israel's national anthem,

and its stirring melody.

All Ode, Balev, penima, nefesh Yehudi, chomiyah, Ulefate Mizr Qadima, Ain Le C seeon, sophia. Oud no avda tiquat tiquat bata shnott alpahim, liot am hofshi, be our tion, and Yerushalayim. As long as the heart within the Jewish soul yearns forward toward the east, an I looks to Zion, our hope is not yet lost.

Our hope is 2,000 years old, to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion, and Jerusalem.

Hatikva has a very poignant and distinguished history. In White Knights, his memoir of being a

prisoner in the Soviet gulag, Menachem Begin tells the story of a fellow prisoner,

one Mikhail Garin, whom Began describes as having been the assistant editor of Pravda,

a communist from his earliest youth, estranged from his people, enemy of Zion, persecutor of

Zionists. Garin was, in other words, a Jewish anti-Zionist and a communist activist, whom

the party betrayed or who betrayed the party, and who was sent to die in the icy, frostbidden

expanses as a convict. When we meet him in Began's memoir, Garin is worn, ill, and knows that

he's about to die. And then, and now I'm quoting Began, one day,

it might have been night, Garin's voice aroused me from the semi-sleeping state that we were

perpetually in because of the dark, hunger, weakness, and the stench. Menachem, he called in a

whisper. Do you remember the song Lo Shuv?

It's the song the Zionists sing.

It's the song the Zionists used to sing in Odessa when I was a boy.

Began then realized that the song Garin was asking for, in his accent,

was the one that contained the lyric La Shuv Le' Elit's Avotenu, from the poem, originally

written by Naftali Hertz Imbar, Tikvaitenu, the poem that came to be known as Hatikva.

Garin went on, confiding, trusting in Began.

You are healthy.

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