Even standing on their own without musical accompaniment, Shemer’s lyrics are achingly beautiful and highly emotional. A superlative example is presented in the original essay exhibited with this column, where she uses stunningly exquisite poetic prose to present her impressions of Passover, both as to her warm memories of celebrating the holiday with her family near her beloved Kinneret and in her understanding of the fierce and eternal dedication of the Jewish people to Passover:
Erev Pesach in the late afternoon, my father dons his white shirt and gathers the three of us [she and her siblings] around him to prepare for his role in reciting the Haggadah. Passover! A nation that preserves its exodus from the House of Slavery over thousands of years – and, amidst all the suffering, slavery, use of force against it, inquisitions, and destruction, continues to carry in its heart the memory of the Egyptian Exodus as a personal recollection, that never pales or fades. I quote from memory Beryl Katznelson, who wrote this, and these words find their place in the typical jumble of the “secular” Haggadah that was copied during the 1930s and 1940s in my Kinneret.And all this begins a week earlier when the studies are completed: the rainy season has passed [here, Shemer uses a beautiful verse from Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs], the mud has solidified into hard soil, smooth and cool so that it is a pleasure to play hopscotch and five stones on it. Early in the morning, they go out to uproot the wild grass so that it will be nice in honor of the holiday, and soulful conversations are held amongst the girls and amongst the bushes. The sprinklers open on the mowed grass. The air warms slightly. On the mountain, the green grass commences a hopeless battle against the first chamsin [heat wave].
New shoes. White dresses. A jumper. The workers from Kiryat Chaim arrive, and rehearsals for the chorus commence. The van delivering the matzah arrives in the morning, and packages fly from hand to hand, hand to hand, hand to hand [most likely a reference to an “assembly line” type of operation, where large and heavy boxes are passed from person to person]. The first matzah is eaten with butter and honey, crunchy and dry, and they are broken in half: the taste of manna.
In the evening, standing near the piano, I feel my back to the audience [she is apparently referring to her conducting a Passover choir], my palms hardly able to reach up to a single octave, yet she [poetic reference to herself] must pleasantly lead the Levii’im [literally, the “Levites;” the loving reference here is to the Levites who daily sang their beautiful songs in the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem] into a single singing group. Years later, I will think of the group of singers in their white shirts, and I will understand that these very people, who fled out of synagogue [apparently a reference to chilonim, non-observant Jews], actually carried the synagogue on their backs.
They go outside at midnight, and the night is tied with magical ropes, and the moon is like a gigantic gold coin – in the middle of the month, in the middle of the sky, in the middle of the universe, in the middle of time.
Though the Bible and its related holy texts were not religiously significant to her, Shemer always viewed them as an important part of her nation’s literary and ethical history and, as is evident from every line of prose in this essay, Pesach was particularly beloved to her. In fact, she recorded an album of Passover songs for children and also wrote “Song of the Four Brothers,” a whimsical take on the famous parable of The Four Sons in the Haggadah.
