Rainbow – What Will We Take out of Our Arks?

By Toby Klein Greenwald

EFRAT, Israel – Shortly following the Gulf War, in 1991, I wrote in a column for Jewish Action in which I described how our family took, into the sealed room, gas masks and bottled water, food, magazines and coloring books, games, a TV and a radio. My husband was on reserve duty, so it fell to me to oversee the safety and sanity of six children, ranging in age from a year and four months to thirteen. My children decorated their gas mask boxes with hearts and balloons, stars and rainbows. Each older child was in charge of helping a younger one put on their mask; my job was to put the toddler into his special transparent tent and try to keep him calm (an impossible task).

I hid two kinds of chocolate in the sealed room – regular chocolate, for after every siren that was a false alarm, and special deluxe chocolate if it was real, but we were still alive due to our gas masks and the injections we would have given ourselves (and I would have given to six children). That post-Armageddon plan of mine seems ludicrously surreal now but it made sense to me at the time.

I also took into the sealed room a siddur that had been my mother’s, and one of my father’s, 1941 U.S. Army issue, so I could tell them I prayed from their prayer books. I ended the column, “We took into our sealed rooms fears, and uncertainty, and prayers. We must now ask ourselves what we brought out.”

Fast forward ten years to 2000 and a bloody intifada in Israel.

Some friends and I started a theater company in 2001 to give us something to do other than lamenting the daily body count from terror. We called our troupe ‘Raise Your Spirts’ because that was our goal; we performed and then wrote our own biblical musicals, and in 2004-5, I joined co-authors Sharon Katz and Arlene Chertoff in writing one called Noah! Ride the Wave! (with music by Mitch Clyman) about the anguish the Noah family felt at seeing a world destroyed, wondering, “When will it end?” and looking beyond the ark to build a new world.

I wrote the lyrics to the finale called, “Rainbow,” and, echoing our experience in the Gulf War, I wrote, “We know what we have taken deep into the ark, the question now is what we’ve brought ashore.” It was clear to me that those words were not just about Noah’s family, or about a family in a sealed room, but about anyone who experiences trauma or tragedy, or who is living in isolation, and seeks a meaningful takeaway.

Fast forward again, to April, 2020 and COVID-19.

We are in lockdown in Israel, as elsewhere. People are asking philosophical questions alongside medical and practical ones. Our children are adults and don’t live at home. My Gulf War toddler has children of his own to keep safe.

A friend of mine, Phyllis Hecht, sent me a WhatsApp: “’Rainbow’ always resonated within me. This time period… we are all in our separate ‘arks,’ with our own challenges. B’ezrat Hashem (Please God) someday we will come out and I hope change the world in many ways. Your song needs to be played.”

At Phyllis’ suggestion, I gathered singers to record “Rainbow” from their homes, each individually. A few were professional vocalists, but most were ordinary people – attorneys and teachers, a nurse, a few artists, a speech therapist and a reflexologist. One was a survivor of coronavirus. Some of the women had performed in the original Noah! fifteen years earlier. My musical director, Elisheva Neomi Savir, did the mix in her tiny home studio, and a young local composer and filmmaker, Yehuda Gelb, put inspirational footage over the voices. We dedicated it to those who bring healing to the world, and invited people to donate to first responder organizations.

He sent me the first draft, which included forests and oceans, gloriously colored parrots and swans, and also featured people expressing love and friendship. I realized that there was no one in the clip who was identifiably Jewish. Even though I intentionally wanted it to be universal, I thought it would be nice to have at least one quick shot of a little boy in a kipah. I turned to my daughter, who filmed her young daughter and son skipping down a pathway in their Negev community. Interestingly, his large white kipah is the same style worn by Moslems. Cool, I thought, let anyone see what they want to in it.

The day we were finished and about to post it, that same daughter sent, to our family Whatsapp group, a few seconds of her older, recently bar-mitzvahed son reading the Torah on a Monday morning, with his friend alongside. We put the biblical verse on screen next to them, at the end of the clip. It was especially meaningful to me, as we had been told by three doctors to not attend his bar mitzvah on a Shabbat in March, during the first lockdown, due to our at-risk status.

We posted our clip on the Hebrew calendar date of the 15th day of Av (August 5 this year), the Jewish holiday of love.

The song includes an excerpt sung in Hebrew from the verse in Genesis 9:16: “And the rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will see it, to remember, the everlasting covenant between God and between every living creature, of all flesh, that is upon the earth.” In a few weeks we will read those lines in the synagogue.
Israel is once again in lockdown. Each of us is again taking different items and thoughts and prayers into our respective arks. The question now, as always, is: what will we bring ashore, when it’s all over.

May we all be sealed for a year of good health, life and happiness.

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The author is an award-winning theater director and a recipient of American Jewish Press Association awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.