Last night I sat among more than eight thousand people in the TD Coliseum in Hamilton as three thousand young athletes from across the world marched in to open the JCC Maccabi Games — a festival of sport, of peoplehood, of Jewish values worn with pride rather than apology. There was joy the size of a stadium. And there was memory. We paused for the eleven Israeli athletes murdered in Munich in 1972, and for the wound still open in all of us since October 7. Grief and celebration in the same breath. That braid is one of the oldest things about us.

Then Yuval Raphael sang, and I nearly cried.

You know her story. On the morning of October 7, she was at the Nova festival near the Gaza border. When the terrorists came, she crowded into a roadside bomb shelter with dozens of others. For eight hours she lay beneath the bodies of the dead, playing dead herself, shrapnel in her leg, as the gunmen returned again and again. Of the many who took cover in that shelter, only a handful walked out. She was one of them.

And then she chose to sing. She won Israel’s “Rising Star,” then took “New Day Will Rise” to Eurovision in Basel — booed by a hostile crowd, and voted the winner........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)