Sometime around 1974, I spent a summer at Camp Massad Gimmel, an Orthodox Jewish Hebrew-immersion camp. I don't remember for certain which summer it was, but it was after the Yom Kippur War, which happened in the fall of 1973, and that summer we sang a lot of songs that had come out of the war.
One of them was "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" (אין לך מה לדאוג) — "You Have Nothing to Worry About."
At the end of the summer, there was some sort of event at which every group performed a musical number. My group did "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og."
Our counselor decided to lean heavily into one particular lyric in the chorus, in which the soldier asks the woman back home to send him underwear and undershirts. Without telling us, he took one undershirt and one pair of underpants from each kid in the group and dyed them purple. For our performance, we wore our newly purple underwear and undershirts over our white Shabbos clothes.
I no longer remember whether we actually sang the song or merely danced in a line while the recording played.
I do remember the purple underwear.
And, for more than half a century, I have remembered something else about that chorus that made absolutely no sense to me.
Here is the chorus:
Roughly translated:
Send me underwear and undershirts,
Here everyone is already like animals,
Fighting like lions.
Morale is really high,
And here in our company
We're asking for a little break.
Honey, don't send me cake.
And for fifty-some years, every time I heard or thought about that song, I had essentially the same reaction:
Why the hell wouldn't he want cake?
Underwear, yes. Undershirts, yes. But surely underwear, undershirts and cake would be better.
I finally asked ChatGPT about it.
It turns out that the line isn't some Hebrew idiom I was missing. It means exactly what I thought it meant.
Don't send me cake.
And there was a very good reason.
"Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" was written by Telma Eligon-Rose during the Yom Kippur War and was inspired in part by a postcard from her brother Giora, who was serving as a reservist near the Suez Canal.
During the war, Israelis on the home front were sending packages to the soldiers. And apparently they sent them an absolutely stupendous quantity of cakes and sweets.
So much cake.
The soldiers weren't sitting in the desert thinking, "Gee, I wish somebody would send us a nice chocolate babka."
They were apparently thinking, "For God's sake, we have enough cake."
What they needed were mundane things that weren't nearly as much fun for people back home to put into care packages.
Like underwear.
And undershirts.
And, as it turns out, toilet paper.
According to the story behind the song, Eligon-Rose's brother's actual list of needed supplies included toilet paper, underwear and undershirts. An early version of the song even mentioned the toilet paper. That proved a little too earthy for Israeli sensibilities at the time, and the lyric was changed.
Which makes the whole chorus considerably funnier once you understand it.
The message isn't really:
"I'm at war, but strangely I don't like cake."
It's more like:
"We're fine. Don't worry about us. We're fighting like lions. Morale is good. Now, please send underwear and undershirts. We could use toilet paper, too, although apparently we're not allowed to sing about that on the radio. And seriously — we appreciate the thought, but STOP SENDING CAKE."
After ChatGPT explained all this to me, I happened to be sitting with Blair, Sharon and British Rich. I read the explanation aloud to them, and we were literally laughing out loud. Well I was anyway.
Because suddenly a lyric that had puzzled me since approximately 1974 made perfect sense.
And it made me think back to Camp Massad Gimmel, where a counselor had already recognized the comic potential of this song and stolen our underwear to dye it purple.
Apparently, though, he missed an opportunity.
He should have taken away our cake, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment