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Culture & Jewish Life

Friday, March 30, 2007

The ‘Messiah’ is Coming—in Hebrew!
One of the world’s most popular oratorios, Handel’s Messiah, is going to be performed in Jerusalem in the Bible’s original language—Hebrew—for the first time. It is the brainchild of Messianic Jewish believers who were born in Israel and who, like many Israelis, grew up with a deep connection to the Hebrew Bible.

“Three years ago I saw the Messiah performed by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra,” recalled Efrat Gerlich, a sixth generation sabra (native-born Israeli). “I thought, ‘Wow, this is something we must do in Hebrew.’”

Ammikam Tavor, a translator and teacher, had been thinking the same since 1964. “When I heard this music for the first time I was just infatuated with it,” he told Israel Today. “Some of the music demanded to be translated.”

But it wasn’t until two years ago that Irene Levy, a tireless 87-year-old Christian resident of Jerusalem, asked Tavor to officially translate the music so it could be performed in Hebrew, a lifelong vision of hers.

“Most of the translation was already in my mind, but to sit down and do it systematically, I didn’t do until this year,” Tavor said. It took him a month to hammer out his first official version—about the same amount of time it took George Friedrich Handel to compose the classic. Tavor took the words from the Hebrew Bible. “I tried not to make any changes from the Hebrew Bible unless it was absolutely impossible not to [musically],” he said, although he allowed himself more leeway with the New Testament, which was translated from Greek.

Translation in hand, the visionaries needed a conductor and a choir. Arie Bar David, a classically trained musician, conductor and pioneer of Israeli Messianic music, was asked by Levy numerous times over the years to take on such a feat, but he had repeatedly refused.

“As a musician it frightened me. I know how important language is to the composer,” he said. “I thought, ‘Impossible! I will have to ruin the Hebrew, or the music or the Bible!’”

But a veiled “threat” from Levy finally got Bar David moving: “She told me, ‘In three years I will be 90 years old. Before I pass to the Lord, I want to hear it in Hebrew!’”

(More in israel today from March 2007)

Photo: Messianic Maestro: Arie Bar David

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