By Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin
PIKESVILLE, Maryland — One of the purposes of writing my essays is to encourage people of all religions to read or recite prayers and the Bible and to understand what they are reading, because understanding will inform and improve them.
An example is Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah. The Hebrew stirs many Jews when they hear it sung, but they do not know the meaning of the Hebrew. In the following, I will give a history of the anthem and my new translation.[1]
The word Hatikvah means “The Hope.” It is the first stanza of a poem written by Naphtali Herz Imber (1856-1909), a Jewish Hebrew-language poet from Złoczów, now called Zolochiv, Ukraine, then part of Austrian Galicia, in 1878.
Samuel Cohen (1870-1940), a Bessarabian Jewish musician, is believed to have adapted the melody in 1888 from a 16th-century Romanian song, “La Mantovana.” It was unofficially adopted as Israel’s national anthem when the State of Israel was established in 1948 and officially recognized in November 2004.
The anthem expresses the 2,000-year-old hope of the Jewish people to return to Zion and Jerusalem and reestablish a state in Israel. In the Bible, Zion refers to Jerusalem and the entire land of Israel. It also symbolizes the Jewish people, such as the Zionist movement. It represents what is best, a utopia.
A new English translation
Forever in our hearts
Deep inside
The Jewish spirit murmurs
Eyes turned east
Toward Zion
Never abandoning the Hope
The Hope of two thousand years
To be a free people
Back in our homeland
Zion and Jerusalem.
[1] My translation follows the sage Maimonides’ advice to his translator not to render the translation into the new language word for word because what makes sense in the original language may not make sense in the literal translation. I try to capture the intent while being as close to the original as is reasonable.
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Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps and the author of more than 50 books.
In one of the great ironies of Jewish history, the much-beloved Israeli national anthem was written by Naftali Herz Imber (1856-1909), a complex and deeply flawed vagabond, drunkard, and buffoon known as “the King of Jewish Bohemia in America.”