Daddy Is Listening to Queen Again

As I write this, I’m listening to Queen.

“Too Much Love Will Kill You” is playing – which feels painfully ironic, because I haven’t been able to listen to Queen, my favourite band, since 7 October 2023.

I was listening to them that morning, as I so often did, when my phone began exploding with breaking news from Israel. Reports of rockets. Terrorists crossing the border. People being murdered and kidnapped. A massacre unfolding in real time, back home.

From that moment, Queen became tangled up with the horror of that morning.

Their music became an enormous emotional trigger for me. Every familiar note pulled me back to the moment the news began arriving. Listening to them somehow felt disloyal – even dishonourable – to everyone who had been so brutally murdered, attacked or taken hostage.

I know that probably doesn’t make rational sense.

Trauma rarely does.

Since then, I have barely listened to anything other than Israeli and Jewish music – in Hebrew, English, Arabic and occasionally French. Along the way, I’ve discovered some absolutely incredible musicians and artists, many of whom helped shape my book, Legends of the Light.

Both journeys – the musical one and the literary one – were born from incredible pain, but also from enormous pride. They became my way of trying to process the trauma I experienced as a result of 7 October.

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t personally attacked or taken hostage. I didn’t lose an immediate member of my family.

But, like so many Jews in the Diaspora, I was only one step removed from it.

One of my first cousins was supposed to go to the Nova festival. At the last minute, she changed her mind. Her four best friends went without her.

She survived because she stayed home.

None of her four best friends came home.

Another close friend is related to Abigail Edan, who was just three years old when she was kidnapped into Gaza, having witnessed her parents being murdered.

How do you remain untouched by that?

The trauma of 7 October reached me in ways I still struggle to explain. It reopened something inside me. It reignited a long-dormant flame of pride in our people and in Zionism – not the grotesque caricature of Zionism presented by those who hate us, but its true and simple meaning: the belief that the Jewish people have the right to live safely, freely and peacefully in our ancestral homeland.

It sent me on a journey of rediscovery – a kind of teshuvah. A return.

A return to my roots. A return to my heritage. A return to Judaism. A return to my people. A return, emotionally and spiritually, towards home.

Music became a huge part of that journey.

I discovered rappers such as Subliminal, Remedy and SHI 360, rhyming about Jewish pride, resilience, identity and history. I found Matisyahu, whose extraordinary fusion of reggae, hip-hop, beatboxing and Jewish spirituality brought Torah, faith and survival into musical spaces where they had rarely been heard before.

I listened to Eden Golan, standing before the world at Eurovision while crowds protested, jeered and tried to intimidate her – yet she stood tall and sang “Hurricane”, carrying something of our collective pain onto that stage.

Then came the incredible Yuval Raphael.

Yuval survived the Nova massacre by hiding beneath the bodies of her murdered friends for hours. She endured gunshot wounds, unimaginable terror and the unbearable pain of watching people she loved die around her.

A year after Eden, Yuval stood on that same Eurovision stage and sang “New Day Will Rise”.

And she was magnificent.

Not merely because of her voice, but because she was there at all. Because those who tried to silence her had failed. Because a young woman who had lain among the dead rose before the world and sang about a new day.

That is Am Yisrael.

I discovered Shiri Maimon, Yaakov Shwekey, Gilad Segev, Shlomi Shabbat, Omer Adam and countless others. The list is endless and the styles incredibly varied, but every artist seemed to open another window into Israel and Jewish life.

And then there was Josh Shron.

Josh isn’t a singer. He is the creator and presenter of Israel Hour Radio, a weekly podcast celebrating Israeli music.

His show stretches back three decades, but, incredibly, Josh and his family made aliyah from the United States just three weeks before 7 October.

I discovered his programme shortly after the massacre. For one hour each week, he introduced me – and so many others – to the breadth, beauty and joy of Israeli music.

I have cried my eyes out listening to his show more times than I can count. But even when it broke me, it also helped put something back together.

It made me feel closer to home.

Closer to my people.

Closer to others who understood what I was feeling, even when I couldn’t find the words to explain it myself.

I included Josh in Legends of the Light. He very kindly mentioned both me and the book several times on his show – and I somehow managed to persuade him to write its foreword.

That still means more to me than he probably realises.

Through all of this, my children have repeatedly asked why I don’t listen to Queen anymore.

It has been incredibly difficult to explain.

They don’t fully understand what an emotional trigger the music became, although they have certainly seen the difference in me since 7 October.

My daughter, like most tweens, pushes back. She asks why I’m suddenly so interested in Judaism and why everything I listen to has to be Israeli or Jewish music.

My son loves much of what I’ve discovered. He is far more curious about who we are, where we came from and what it means to belong to this extraordinary people.

But that’s children.

Different personalities. Different questions. Different ways of finding themselves.

All completely normal.

Then today, my daughter walked into the kitchen and heard Queen playing.

Her face lit up.

She looked at me, gave me a knowing smile and immediately went off to tell my wife:

“Daddy is listening to Queen again.”

She said it as though some enormous cosmic tectonic plate had shifted.

Perhaps it has.

Perhaps she understood more than I realised.

Perhaps this was never simply about a band or a playlist. Maybe hearing Queen again told her that a small piece of the daddy she knew before 7 October had finally found its way back.

I once read about a rabbi who said that he had been unable to listen to music or dance since 7 October because celebrating felt disrespectful to those who had been murdered.

I understood that completely.

How can we dance when they were slaughtered while dancing?

How can we sing when so many voices have been silenced?

How can we allow ourselves to feel joy when so many families will carry this pain forever?

Then, a few days ago, I heard a brand-new song by Boy George.

Boy George is not Jewish. He is a proud gay Buddhist man who has chosen, simply as a human being, to stand fiercely beside Jews and Israel.

His new reggae-infused song is called “We Will Dance Again”.

It speaks openly about what happened on 7 October. It declares without hesitation that he stands with the Jews. He makes no attempt to soften his support to make it more palatable to those who believe Jewish grief must always be qualified, contextualised or apologised for.

Predictably, he has faced an enormous backlash.

That is precisely why voices like his matter so much.

Standing beside Jews should not require courage. Condemning the murder, rape and kidnapping of innocent people should not be controversial. Yet in the world we now inhabit, people who stand openly with us know exactly what it may cost them.

We see them.

We hear them.

And we will never forget them.

Boy George says that we will dance again.

Perhaps today I realised that dancing again does not dishonour those we lost.

Neither does singing.

Neither does laughing, celebrating, living – or listening to Queen.

Hamas didn’t only try to murder our people on 7 October. They tried to murder Jewish joy. They attacked people dancing beneath the desert sky because they wanted the music to stop.

Perhaps refusing to listen was never an act of remembrance.

Perhaps listening again is an act of defiance.

We will grieve. We will remember. We will carry the names and stories of those taken from us. The pain will never disappear entirely, nor should it.

But slowly, piece by piece, we will learn to live alongside it.

We will return to the dance floor.

We will return to the songs we loved before that awful morning.

We will turn the volume back up.

We will dance again.

We will listen again.

And perhaps today is my day to begin.