Parsha on the radio
So I just returned home from dropping the boys off at school. Its Friday here so I don’t have ulpan today (no class Friday or Saturday, class starts again Sunday). (and Valerie is visiting her parents with the girls, so I’ve been flying solo this week – so far so good). Anyway, on the way home I turned on the radio to our favourite radio station, Galgalatz, which is a secular, general music radio station. They play a variety of Hebrew pop and rock songs and they also play a lot of American pop songs and sometime some popular European songs as well. And they’ll play the unedited versions of songs, complete with expletives, etc. What I noticed, as my Hebrew is beginning to improve somewhat, is that today the female DJ came on and said something like, “OK, so coming up we have some parshat hashavua (torah reading section for the week). This weeks parsha is Bo. In it we have the last three plagues followed by the story of Passover when God took the Israelites out of Egypt, etc… So lets play the song “Bo.” It really has nothing to do with the parsha, other than the name, but I’m allowed to do that, right? Anyway, here it is…Bo…”
Keep in mind this is my basic recollection of a DJ monologue in Hebrew, but you get the gist of it. Now I freely admit I may still be in that hazy fog of new Oleh amazement that everything here is actually Jewish, but it’s just that you don’t expect a drash (rabbinic sermon) on the weekly parsha from the pop radio station DJ.
FYI, here’s a link to the song, Bo (which means simply “come.”) Its by Rita, a famous Israeli singer. And here’s a link to the web stream of the radio station Galgalatz, in case you want to hear some Israeli music…
And FYI, here’s the song: