"The Wheat Grows Once More"

Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis · Nov 30, 2023 · 3m

The Yom Kippur War, which erupted almost fifty years to the day before this year’s October 7th massacre, led to an outburst of Israeli song-writing. Many of those songs have now become classics; one of the most famous is

“And the wheat grows again.”

The refrain goes as follows:

It is not the same valley, it is not the same home, You are absent and unable to return, The path shaded by the trees, and in the sky an eagle, And yet the wheat grows once more.

The Wheat Grows Again” was written in 1974 by Dorit Tzamarat, a resident of Kibbutz Beit HaShita, the kibbutz that lost eleven of its sons in…