There’s a song that opens softly, almost like a prayer, that has chased generations of dreamers across continents and centuries: “Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high…”
From Kansas to Jerusalem, it’s the hymn of those who searched for home—not as myth, but as a place where one might finally belong.
Few outside our community pause to ask what it means that Over the Rainbow—so often labeled an uncomplicated American classic—was born of Jewish grief, yearning, and resilience. Its lyricist, Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg), and composer Harold Arlen (Chaim Arluck), were the sons of Eastern European Jews who fled pogroms and came to America imagining, literally, “a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.”
The song soared onto the public stage in the months after Kristallnacht, the night when synagogues and Jewish shops across Nazi Germany burned. The world, for Jews, was nowhere safe. “Somewhere,” that word in the first line of the song, is not nostalgia. It’s necessity.
I thought of this as I welcomed Yiscah Smith to the studio in Jerusalem—a city as old as longing itself, and as embattled as the hope that built it. We spoke just after the stories of inherited trauma and persistent exile that have marked the lives of so many, including Willie Handler’s. But Yiscah’s presence reframes the question: what happens when that “somewhere” over the rainbow is no longer a daydream or a promise deferred, but a place—real, even if contested—where the seed of belonging is planted, watered, and made to grow?
The Jewish Question, the World’s Question
History, and at its core Scripture itself, is haunted by the “Jewish Question.” Where do the people of Israel belong? From Pharaoh to the pogromists, from the Czar’s Pale of Settlement to the ship wandering the Atlantic turned away by every port, the answer was often everywhere and nowhere—a dispersion, a prayer of return, a covenant kept alive in part by its unfulfillment.
The paradox of our age is this: we live in a time obsessed with “safe spaces” and the dignity of identity, but the idea of the Jewish homeland—Zion, Israel—is met with a level of scrutiny, suspicion, and at times ferocity that no other people faces for seeking refuge or home.
If the Bible is the record of anything, it is of the journey—physical and spiritual—of Israel and the Israelites. The promise of land, loss, and return. Prophets warned that Israel would be “sifted amongst the nations,” but “not one grain shall fall to the ground” (Amos 9:9). The entire Western imagination—so much of its sense of justice, of promise and justice denied—has roots in this tension between wandering and coming home.
Yiscah Smith: Planting Seeds on Real Ground
If Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote a song that asked if the bluebirds ever find it, Yiscah Smith’s life is devoted to living it. Her story—told in “Planting Seeds of the Divine”—is rooted in a journey that echoes the odyssey of her people: born in America, raised with little active tradition but deep values, coming to Israel at twenty and feeling that indefinable pull, like the melody of a song you can’t stop humming.
She tells of her first steps in Jerusalem, among new immigrants who kneeled to kiss the ground—ordinary people overcome by the miracle, or perhaps the fulfillment, of home. At the Western Wall, not fluent in prayers or in the formal codes, Yiscah pressed her lips to the stone and heard a voice whisper, “Welcome home.”
But to be home in Israel is not just to arrive. It is to take up the labor of rooting—to learn, to teach, to bring ancient text into lived encounter. To choose, day by day, to cultivate the promised land not as property, or ideology, but as the most radical affirmation: “I am planted. I am not passing through.” Each seed—of trust, hospitality, gratitude, study—becomes a reply to all the prophets, all the sorrow, all our questioning: can what we dreamed be made real here, in this dust, on this ground, in this moment?
Somewhere Under the Rainbow: The Paradox of Belonging
Let’s not kid ourselves: for many, this “somewhere” is still up for debate. Israel’s right to exist—to be a “refuge” in a world that expelled, murdered, and refused the Jew at every turn—is forever up on trial in the courtroom of world opinion. Calls for “safe space” explode on campuses, corporate memos, and city halls, but for the Jews, no “safe space” seems unqualified, unreserved, without an asterisk.
Why, amidst the proliferation of recognition and belonging, is Jewish rootedness—especially when it has political, national, and spiritual dimensions—still so fiercely negotiated? Why does the dream of crossing the rainbow so often become a pretext for dispute rather than recognition?
Yiscah’s answer is not an argument. It’s a practice. Her book is less manifesto than manual for living with sacred audacity: the blessing of gratitude, the challenge of honesty, the grit to keep planting, teaching, drawing out both tradition and transformation. Her spiritual mentoring carries forward a vision of tikkun olam, of healing not just for Jews but for “all the cousins club,” as she lovingly calls the nations—an echo of the way “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” itself was born as the universal longing of exiles everywhere, even as it sang in a uniquely Jewish key.
Over the Rainbow, or Here and Now?
Near the end of our conversation, the rainbow returned—this time not as metaphor, but as a question: have we arrived, or are we still only dreaming? Yiscah reminds us (and lives it!) that Israel is not a fantasy. It is complex, alive, unfinished. It contains its own wounds, its own contradictions. Yet it is—perhaps uniquely—the answer to the oldest question: will there ever be a home for a people whose search for home animates both history and scripture?
The rainbow is not just in the distance, not just a fantasy. It arches over Jerusalem as it does over Kansas. In Yiscah’s hands—soil-stained, spirit-lifted—it becomes a bridge from “never again” and “never forget” to the ongoing, unfinished work of actually belonging. Of building, of blessing.
The Song Continues
The opening bars of “Over the Rainbow” promised a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” The truth, as Harburg and Arlen knew, is that the lemon drops are rare, hard-earned, sometimes fleeting. But the song endures because the longing endures—and, sometimes, in lives like Yiscah’s, the song comes true not through escape, but through planting, teaching, and taking up the everyday work of being home.
So as we listen—across distance, across time—may we remember that “somewhere” has a name. Sometimes, the rainbow lands in a place where people have prayed and bled and danced and dreamed for thousands of years. Sometimes the “why, oh why, can’t I?” becomes “here I am. I have come home.” And in that moment, the song belongs not only to the Jews, but to everyone who has ever dreamed of safety, dignity, and a ground for making blessings.
If this resonates—if you’ve ever stood at the edge of belonging, if you know what it is to dream of a home or to build one at risk—share below. How does the rainbow appear in your story? How do you plant seeds, even while the world debates your right to stand beneath its arc?
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