15 years ago I wrote a song about the lack of support in Israeli society, and I had the honor of having Chava Elberstein sing it.
The song was called "Coconut", but today the favorite parable of the coconut tree with its sweet and generous fruit, which is missing from the landscape of our country, is no longer enough to describe the hatred of brothers in a country where the phrase "Mary Tzichi" is starting to be heard in too many living room conversations.
And here, precisely in these troubled days, my wife Tamar and I went to the north to look for peace, and we found the lost coconut.
It started on Thursday evening in the church in Nazareth.
We came there to hear Vida Makhiyal - a wonderful singer and a student at the "Colling" voice development college where my wife teaches.
When she finished greeting the audience in Arabic, Vida turned in Hebrew to her fellow students at the college and thanked them for coming from afar to hear her.
After that she didn't speak anymore.
There was no need.
Her wonderful singing filled hearts.
My little Arabic allowed me to understand the closing sentence of one of the songs: "Bil Ayam Sebi" - "In hard times".
In these days, when it becomes difficult to hear the voices of those from the West of Israel who desire coexistence, I am glad that I came to Nazareth to listen to Vida's voice.
But the hatred that gives birth these days to the expression "Civil Marys" is not that between Jews and Arabs, but rather the hatred of Jews towards their Judaism.
We discovered the antidote to this hatred by chance the next day: on the way out of the settlement of Sde Ya'akov, I saw a small sign advertising a shop for sacred trinkets.
Since I have known for several months that my tefillin are invalid, we drove to the address indicated on the sign.
At the door of a separate wing of his house sat Ametsia - a not young Jew, of Yemenite origin, with a beard, a cap and a mischievous glint in his eyes.
From the conversation with him we learned that he has seven children, that he is one of the deportees of Gush Katif and that after the deportation he worked in the Prime Minister's office to help teenagers who were in distress, after their parents' house was destroyed before their eyes.
It is interesting to note that the Gush Katif deportees did not think about Mary Tsari.
Instead, when their children did not want to enlist in the army that destroyed their homes, they called Amzia to help return the children to the bosom of Zionism.
Suddenly Emzia turned to me and said: "You know? I also play - on the clarinet."
"What are you playing?"
"Mainly Hasidic tunes."
"But you're Yemeni, aren't you?"
"Yes, but my wife is Hungarian, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Before she lights Shabbat candles, I sit down and play her tunes from her father's house. But the song with which I usher in Shabbat is always Rachel's 'And maybe things never happened'."
The secular media in Israel often call people like Emcia "dark" or "having an imaginary friend".
This is how a camp was created that dares to call Mary a citizen when Emzia exercises its democratic power.
The song "Coconut" ends like this: "Don't say it will never happen here again, there is power to sow free love, to grow and blossom in the hearts of people, and the poet's song can open deaf ears...".
When I wrote this, I didn't know that I was referring to Emzia when he plays Rachel's song to his wife on his clarinet just before Shabbat.
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