There was something almost unbearably poignant about this year’s Israeli Eurovision entry.

On the surface, Michelle appeared to comply perfectly with Eurovision’s insistence on political neutrality: a multilingual love song, wistful, romantic, and melancholy, about a toxic relationship and lingering heartbreak.

Yet many listeners immediately sensed that the song was reaching toward something larger. As several commentators have observed, Michelle lends itself naturally to broader interpretation.

Hebrew blended into French and English as the singer pleaded with a lost love who had once been “my light,” but who had now left him in darkness. And as the performance unfolded, it became increasingly difficult to experience it as merely a song about romance. Amid boos from sections of the crowd, yet buoyed by ecstatic Israeli supporters in the arena and overwhelming public support across Europe, Michelle seemed to transform into something far larger. It became, somehow, a lament for Europe itself.

Michelle. The name matters. It is not Yael or Tamar or Maya. It is unmistakably French, unmistakably European. Elegant. Cultured. Romantic. The Europe of cafés, literature, philosophy, symphonies, enlightenment, and humanism. The Europe that Jews loved so deeply for so long, even while history repeatedly warned them that the relationship was never entirely safe. Perhaps that is why the song struck such a nerve for some of us.

Because viewed through a different lens, Michelle no longer sounds like a song about a failed romance. It sounds like Israel, perhaps even the Jewish people themselves, singing not to a lost lover, but to Europe.

“You were my light.” In this larger context, it’s a devastating line. For centuries, Europe truly was the light for many Jews. Jewish civilization flourished in Prague, Vilna, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Paris. Jews contributed disproportionately to European science, medicine, philosophy, music, economics, and law. They rolled up their sleeves and helped build the societies around them. They did not arrive as conquerors. They arrived as guests, often poor and vulnerable ones, determined to contribute, adapt, and belong, while still preserving enough of their Jewish culture and religious practice to sustain the unbroken chain of Judaism stretching back more than three thousand years.

Europe helped shape the modern Jewish mind, just as the Jews helped shape that of Europe. Even Zionism itself was, in many ways, a European intellectual project born from Europe’s failure to rise above its own antisemitism.

And then Europe became the graveyard of Jewish civilization. Through action and inaction,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)