Click on image to read full column

By now, the fact that Meir Banai released an album called Shema Koli ("Hear my voice"), words taken from the opening of the liturgy for Yom Kippur, seems utterly unremarkable. And that alone is indication of the pervasiveness of the revolution of which he was a part.

Banai, who died in Israel yesterday at age 55 after a long but private battle with cancer, was part of the "first family" of Israeli music. Like his uncle, Yossi Banai, and his brother, Evyatar (among others in the family), he was a household name in Israel. And like members of his family and other well-known Israeli musicians, Banai's long-lasting contribution to Israeli music may reside less in the songs that he wrote and performed than in the subject matter he helped legitimate.

Meir Banai was, like many other Israeli musicians, a performer whose inner search for meaning led him not away from the Jewish tradition, but back to it. That may sound inconsequential or natural, but Israel's founding generation had sought meaning precisely by leaving the tradition behind.

Haim Nachman Bialik, David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah and dozens of others of the giants of early Zionism were raised in Orthodox homes and-to one degree or another-abandoned the rigors of that way of life. They sought sanctity not in the synagogue but their ancestral homeland. They replaced prayer with labor. They ached not for ritual purity, but for the dirt of the Land of Israel and the messiness of state-building. Early Zionism was, in many ways, a rebellion against Judaism. And poems like Bialik's "City of Slaughter" were the declaration of war.

Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, the caricature of the Israeli was the utterly secular man in shorts, sandals and a  kova tembel driving a tractor. That man had no use for the trappings of religion, which was the vestige of Europe, where God had failed to redeem the Jews. Now, Israel's founding generations said, Jews would redeem themselves, and the one thing they did not need was the passivity and weakness born of the religion of their ancestors.