Two Jews, Three Opinions, One Song

I started listening to Michelle last Friday afternoon.

I was cooking Shabbat dinner for fourteen people I had invited that morning. The challah was in the oven. My daughter’s friend had a concert an hour away she could not miss. Two round trips, slotted into a Friday afternoon that simply did not have the hours. This song, Michelle, was on repeat in my car the whole way there, and back, both times.

It has been on repeat ever since. In the kitchen. In the car. In my head when I wake up in the morning. A song in three languages, sung by a twenty-eight-year-old from Ra’anana, about a girl who broke his heart. It is the Israeli entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, and I have not been able to put it down. Not just because I am fluent in two of the languages and trying to learn the third. Because it has layers mature beyond its author’s years.

A note for American readers, for whom Eurovision is not really a thing. Eurovision is the largest live music broadcast in the world. Not the largest in Europe. The largest, full stop. More than 160 million people watch every year, across forty-some countries.

The Super Bowl pulls 120 million. Eurovision launched ABBA.

It is the stage where countries that spent the twentieth century killing each other now hand each other “douze points” live on television. Australia competes. Israel competes, and has won four times, and people never like that. Our fledgling nation is woven into Eurovision the way the Yankees are woven into baseball.

Now let me tell you why this song is living rent-free in my mind.

First, from the very first note, is the familiarity of friends, family, neighbors, and strangers as one.

Noam Bettan opens Michelle in Hebrew. He slips into French without skipping a beat. By the chorus he is in English, walking down Florentin. Three languages, one voice, no seams between them.

In Israeli homes and communities, this is simply how people talk. French, Hebrew, English, Hebrew, Spanish, Hebrew, Amharic, Hebrew, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Hebrew. A word-salad. A game of linguistic ping-pong where everyone gets their point across. Everyone gets to be heard.

When I first moved to Israel, two of my closest friends were Ukrainian and French, and our common language was broken Hebrew. We had immersed ourselves for months in a residential Ulpan, a language immersion programme, learning a language together by living it. On the last day, my Ukrainian friend turned to me and said, in perfect English, “It has been so nice to meet you.” My jaw dropped. I asked her why on earth she had never told me she spoke English. She smiled and said, “How else were we going to learn?”

That is what an Israeli home sounds like. A harmony of multilingual exploration where the language you reach for is the language that will land hardest in the moment. A blessing in Hebrew because Hebrew is for the holy. A scolding in French because French is the language of grandmothers’ love. A pop chorus in English because English is the language of the world.

Bettan was born in Ra’anana to parents who made aliyah from Grenoble. Hebrew is the language resurrected with the rebirth of the nation. French is the language his parents carried with them across the Mediterranean. English is the language of the global stage he is reaching for. Three modes of Jewish presence in the world, all in one young man’s mouth at once because all three are in his life at once.

Most of the audience in Vienna will hear a clever multilingual pop song, perhaps thinking it is tailored to the Eurovision audience. Many of us will hear the sound of home.

Then there is the dance.

Alors je danse, danse avec les maux. So I dance, I dance with the pain. On the surface, Bettan is singing about the woman who became the queen of his problems. I hear something else in those seven words. I hear the entire Israeli national project. The pain is the dance partner. We laugh through our tears and we cry through our joy. We light Hanukkah candles in bomb shelters. We sometimes go to weddings from shiva houses. The dancing is not a denial of the grief. It is the only honest response to it.

Then there is the prayer.

The bridge is in Hebrew, and on the surface he is praying for the woman who broke him to one day be worthy of love. But yesh mi sheyishma — there is Someone who will hear — is, in Hebrew, with the right inflection, an invocation of G-d. I do not know if Bettan intended the theological reading. The Hebrew makes it whether he meant it or not. That is how Hebrew works. The language carries the prayer.

Finally, a neighborhood.

The English chorus drops us onto a street in south Tel Aviv. Walking down Florentin. He names a neighborhood. Not Jerusalem. Not even Tel Aviv. Florentin, the scrappy quarter where the graffiti runs in five alphabets, where Falafel Gabai has been frying chickpeas since two years before there was a state to fry them in, where you can buy jachnun at three in the morning from a guy whose grandfather sold the same recipe in Sana’a. Where Mizrahi and Ashkenazi and Russian and Ethiopian and Druze and French kids all end up at the same bar, arguing in the same Hebrew about whose grandmother had it hardest.

Florentin is not just a neighborhood. Florentin is the country in miniature.

A country. A dance. A prayer. A neighborhood. Four readings of one song, all from one listener, all sitting alongside one another in three minutes of music. And that is before anyone else has listened to it.

This week I have learned that everyone else is hearing their own version, and every version is right. A French listener hears a breakup song about a girl named Michelle. A Moroccan grandmother hears the ache of leaving a homeland. A Jewish mother in Golders Green hears the diasporic ache of loving and leaving in the same breath. An American who only discovered Eurovision last year hears a banger he is going to play again in the morning.

And then there is Eylon Levy, Israel’s former government spokesman, who hears the entire two-thousand-year Jewish romance with Europe. In a brilliant short video posted this week, Levy argues that Michelle is not a woman at all. Michelle is Europe. The song, he says, is the centuries-old toxic love affair between the Jewish people and a continent that gave us emancipation and the Holocaust, the Enlightenment and the pogroms, that promised us light and turned out to be the queen of our problems. Tu étais ma lumière. You were my light. La reine des problèmes. The queen of problems. Je te laisse partir, mais je t’aime. I let you go, but I love you. Israel, Levy says, is what the Jewish people built when we finally walked away from her.

It is a brilliant reading. It is also one of about a dozen readings I have heard this week, and not one of them cancels out any of the others.

That is the thing. That is the whole thing. One song, a dozen meanings, all of them true. That is the power of Israel compressed into three minutes of music. The song is doing what only the best Jewish art has ever managed to do, which is to be specifically and undeniably about one thing while also being about every other thing the listener brings into the room. Bettan wrote a heartbreak song. Yuval Raphael, the Nova festival survivor who co-wrote it with him, wrote a heartbreak song. They did not sit down in the studio intending to encode a two-thousand-year history, or the resilience of a country at war, or the texture of an Israeli home, or a prayer for the queen of problems. They did not have to. The song means all of it anyway. That is how Jewish art has always worked. The writer makes one thing. The listener finds twelve. All twelve are home in the same melody.

This is the song that five European countries decided their citizens should not be allowed to hear.

Alors je danse, danse avec les maux. So I dance, I dance with the pain.

Ireland is boycotting Eurovision this year because Israel is competing. So are the Netherlands, Iceland, Spain, and Slovenia. Five state broadcasters pulled out rather than share a stage with Noam Bettan singing a heartbreak ballad co-written by a Nova festival survivor. Yuval Raphael hid under bodies on October 7. She represented Israel at Eurovision the following year with New Day Will Rise. She is one of the four credited writers of Michelle. A trauma survivor co-wrote a pop song with a French-Israeli singer because in this country there is no wall between the trauma and the art. Alors je danse, danse avec les maux. The art is what we make from the trauma. The art is the only honest thing we have left to make.

Eurovision was founded in 1956 as a peace project. A continent that bled itself half to death in two world wars decided it would gather every year and sing to each other instead of shooting at each other. The whole point was that you showed up even when you did not love your neighbor. The whole point was that the song was bigger than the grievance. And yet somehow, Israel, a nation under attack, is the one whose participation has become a moral emergency.

A peace project that cannot include the country it most needs to include is not a peace project. It is a fashion statement with a glitter cannon.

On Tuesday night, the boycott failed in real time. Bettan performed Michelle in the first semifinal over the sound of “stop the genocide” being chanted loudly enough to be audible on the live broadcast. Austrian state television had announced in advance it would not use anti-booing technology. Today I learn there is such a thing as anti-booing technology. Two protesters were dragged out of the Wiener Stadthalle by security during his three minutes on stage.

Noam Bettan sang through all of it. He thanked the crowd afterwards in Hebrew, French, and English, the three languages of the song. He wrapped himself in an Israeli flag. He told reporters: “I didn’t let the boos bother me. I focused on the Israeli flags.”

He made the final.

Within seconds, my phone started pinging. Group chats from around the world, friends in different timezones, the modern Jewish WhatsApp tapestry that runs across every continent and connects us in real time the way phone-trees used to. All of us texting the same thing without using words. Glitter gifs, party emojis, Israeli flags, dancing women, blue hearts. Israel had qualified. Noam Bettan was going to the final. The voices of antisemitism had not stopped him. Noam had done it.

And the kids in Dublin and Madrid and Reykjavík who actually wanted to hear Michelle found it instantly. The reaction videos have been multiplying on YouTube for a week. A British music fan. An Irishman in front of his ring light. An American rocker calling the language switching trilingual magic. An Italian reactor playing it back twice in a row. An Albanian musician breaking down the production. An Eastern European reactor falling apart on the bridge. A Spanish reactor whose video has ninety-four thousand views. A traditional American from Tennessee who only discovered Eurovision last year. Two of those reactors live in countries that pulled out of the contest. Their own citizens are streaming the song anyway.

Bettan made the final on a day when antisemitic marchers paraded through New York and Jews in England absorbed another wave of attacks and Israel sat in the same is-it-war-is-it-routine limbo it has lived in for two years. And we danced. We did not dance despite the day around us. We danced because of it. Jewish joy is not the absence of grief. Jewish joy is the refusal to let grief have the final word.

A generation ago the anthems came from synagogues and songbooks, written by survivors. Hatikvah was a poem before it was an anthem. Ani Maamin was a melody Jews sang on the way to the gas chambers before it was a melody sung at every memorial since. Jewish peoplehood gets re-narrated in every generation, in whatever language and form the moment will hold. This week ours came from a Eurovision stage. A handsome twenty-eight-year-old in a black leather jacket sang in three languages, co-written by a Nova survivor, and a continent that decided to look away was forced to listen anyway. Because one song can mean a dozen things at once, all of them true, and that is what Israel has been telling the world for seventy-eight years.

This song is not just a Eurovision entry. It is a testament to the freedom and the beauty and the complex, layered, trilingual, multiethnic, ancient and brand new diversity that is the State of Israel.

Perfect? No. Misunderstood? Greatly. Ours? Forever.

The final is Saturday night in Vienna. Bettan will sing again.

Somewhere, a French listener will hear a breakup song; a Moroccan grandmother will hear the ache of leaving a homeland; someone will hear two thousand years of Europe; an American who discovered Eurovision last year will hear an anthem; Yuval Raphael will hear her song of survival; and in my kitchen, my phone will be pinging, while I hear the country I love speak in three languages at once.

And all of us will be right.

Alors je danse, danse avec les maux.