One Day
So there’s no way that the people in this video are actually all more beautiful than any other 3,000 strangers who might be invited to come together to sing a single song. They’re just people. Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular Israelis… And yet here, in this five-minute video, I am taken with their singular beauty. I don’t mean collectively (though of course that’s true too); I’m talking about every one of them. I’m in love with all of them. One at a time as the camera scans their faces, their bodies, their backlit hair. All ages and persuasions. What it is, if I had to name it (and if you know me at all, you know that I always try to name things), it would be joy.
The thing is, the woman with the red dot on her forehead, the one with the close-cropped hair and hands clasped at her heart as she sings with her eyes closed? I know the exact emotion that elicits that expression. That posture. I have felt it. Many times. The one with knitted brows and earnest fervor in her eyes as she sends her song into the air? I have been her. The older gentleman in the yamaka…the one with sadness in his face but who is buoyed up by the sound of the 2,999 voices surrounding him, embracing him? He sings in spite of the heaviness in his heart. I am he.
The young woman with long brown locks, shifting her weight from heel to heel with the beat, singing with eyes closed and face contracted with her intention—there is gentleness even there between her brows, in the softness of her throat as she contributes to the sea of voices wrapping themselves around her. I know that intent. It is so ardent. So pure. And the woman with the curly locks framing a face that speaks of bliss and adorned by a yellow dot on her third eye? When she throws her head back, it is the identical gesture as that of the Jewish man a couple of frames later, his long beard almost reaching his chest, his wire-rimmed glasses encircling eyes crinkled with his delight.
And there are several women and men around my own age (and older) sprinkled into the crowd. They could be me. They are. We understand, even as it is happening, the improbability of this moment; it is one in a lifetime of moments, one in which the fractures have healed themselves and the balm of like-mindedness have been allowed, miraculously, to seal with healing power what divides them outside of this sacred space. The musical director—his name is Ben Yaffet—his energy is wild and delicious as he springs into the air, waves his arms in sweeping motions, coaxes this song from the hearts of those assembled here. He knows the importance of his role in this momentous thing. He loves his light into this shared arena where the sound of faith (not in any divinity but in humanity) is being pushed out of bodies and between lips that are still smiling even through the effort.
And the children—my God, they are gorgeous. Perfect in their perfect intent, their gleaming eyes full of the peace of knowing that at least for this moment, their grown-ups are doing something better than safe or right. They are doing something beautiful. In a Keatsian sense, they have become truth. So it’s not their physical beauty, though certainly it is experienced with the eyes as well. It’s their all-ness. The whole of them. We love them because they are us, and because their exultation is an expression of our most profound desire. How can I name one thing as the “deepest desire” of us all? Easy. It’s love. That’s it. Nothing fancy.
We just want to experience love—the unconditional kind. It is what is promised of the divine in holy books, but those books only make those promises because they know that in the endeavor to touch the divine we will remember ourselves, and we are that love. We are light. And we are ourselves the divine. Someone not accustomed to my exultant language, my impassioned diatribes, might opt to just hit play on the video and experience it for themselves. I know they won’t be able to help but feel it too, watching these 3,000 people gathered together in Haifa for the sole purpose of breaking down barriers. Is it possible for laughter to be a song? If not a song, what else? This is the laughter of the joyful. It is the harmonious music of the all. The whole of us.
I can watch this video a million times, each time dreaming of being there myself. Singing out in English, Hebrew, Arabic. I too am beautiful in my effort. The reason for this is also simple: in seeing these people engaged in this effort, this collective summoning of what is perfect and light and divine in us all—we are seeing God. The Divine itself.
So what does it take to bring this effort, this wholeness out into the world? To the streets and the cities and the businesses and churches? To the masses and to the ivory-towered few? I wish I knew. More people like Ben Yaffet perhaps and his team of musicians and activists at Koolulam. More people willing to drop everything to learn a song with thousands of strangers, their own children on their shoulders and holding their hands. More of all of this.
I think of the quiet when they filed out into the streets of Haifa after the final rendition of the song…the one that resulted in this incredible video. I think of the hush and the shock of natural light and the incongruity of traffic sounds against the perfection still ringing in their ears. Did they want to turn around and go back inside? Did they shield their eyes from the real? Or did they pick up their children and forge ahead, resolving to be the music? How many does it take to tip the scales? How many willing singers and be-boppers? More than 3,000, I’m guessing. So that leaves us. No pressure.
As for myself, I won’t give up yet. As long as there are displays like this of the love that we really are (beneath everything that diminishes us, dulls our color and our sound), I will keep fighting the fight. I’ll keep teaching the “unteachable” and loving the “unloveable,” because they are extensions of myself and I of them. We are one and the same, so that the song’s title, “One Day,” refers to this space between sunrise and sunset, the today one, with all of us united. Day of being one. It refers to a moment in time. And all moments in the continuum. It means all of us. A single song. It means now.
"‘Koolulam’ is a gibberish word based on the Hebrew word for ‘everyone.’ It is also an initiative to bring people of different faiths and backgrounds together through song.”
