By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — One day last February I was surfing on the Internet for nothing in particular, just a nice sunny day in Taiwan and I was in the mood for some music.
By complete random chance I ended up on a Youtube link listening to one of the most beautiful melodies I had ever heard in my life, and it was so haunting and mournful to my ears that I kept listening to it over and over again, without any idea who was singing it or what the song was about (since it was in Hebrew)
However, the musical tones of Hebrew carried the song to my ears in a way that I almost felt I could understand the meaning, although I had not idea what the lyrics were.
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Later, with some Googling, I discovered the song was titled “MeHaMerchakim” in Hebrew and that its English title was ”Long-Distance Love.”
Released in February 2014 as a single, it was also part of an album written and produced by Sagiv Cohen, who, I later learned, was the subject of a feature story by editor Don Harrison here at San Diego Jewish World a few years ago.
I also learned that the song has over 2 million hits on its YouTube link!
Wanting to know more about this song and how the two singers, Cohen, now 40, and Gali Atari, 62, came to record the song, I asked the editor of this newspaper if he could put me in touch with the composer, and sure enough, a few days later, an email communication system was established with Cohen answering my English questions with replies in Hebrew.
Thanks for Google Translate, I could read his answers in English with the click of the mouse.
It turns out that Cohen wrote the lyrics and composed the melody for the song.. When I told him that I fell in love with the song just from the music, without having any idea what the song was about or what the lyrics meant, he told me that I was not alone in this.
“For many people outside Israel who do not know Hebrew, the song’s melody struck a chord internationally,” he told San Diego Jewish World. “I wrote this song for my first wife after we broke up. I wrote it in order to give her strength to better her future and that of our children. The song is about female empowerment.”
The woman who performed the duet with Cohen is Gali Atari, an Israeli actress and singer, whose parents immigrated to Israel from Yemen.
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When I asked Cohen how he met up with Atari to perform the song, he told me that he was initially introduced to her by Atari’s sister Shosh, an Israeli radio and TV personality.
“I sent Gali an email with the lyrics of the song and over a period of time, we did the recording,” he said. “It was magic.”
Cohen is also originally from Yemen, and is well-known in Israel as a singer of ”mizrachi” (Middle Eastern Jewish) music.
I fell in love the a melody from across the seas and then I fell in love with the Hebrew words that I could follow with lyrics search. Soulful, enchanting, resonating.
Here are some of the Hebrew words from the song which you can use to follow along with the video on this page:
Me’amerchakim she’at borachat
lo yadhu derech chazara
sham at olechet lehibud
bminhara bli matara
ve’ashchakim hem agvulot
al te’almi bametzulot
ki en tshuva tova lechol ashe’elot.
A rough translation, provided by the editor’s son-in-law Shahar Masori, is as follows:
From the vast distances you are escaping
We did not know our way back
You get lost there
Inside a tunnel with no target (objective)
And the heavens are the borders
Don’t disappear in the depths
Because there is no good answer for all the questions
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer. You may comment to him at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.
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