Land of the Rave

By Daniel Belasco

Daniel Belasco is a former staff reporter for the Jewish Week and is currently working toward his doctorate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

A rave, simply stated, is an underground, informal, and sometimes illegal, dance party organized around high—tempo, repetitive electronic music. Sensations of wordless music, light, and psychedelic art wash over dancers, reaching deep into some internal, primordial rhythm and propelling them for hours. This sound-body fusion generates a powerful sense of togetherness and joy, far greater than that created at a typical club or concert. Thus the rave kid’s banner “PLUR” (peace, love, unity, respect) professes optimism and liberation, a postmodern multicultural updating of the Sixties hippie mantra “make love, not war.” Public displays of polymorphous sensuality are never taken lightly by the powers-that-be, however. Mainstream culture has presented raves as weirdly subcultural, if not downright threatening and subversive. An episode of the popular teen program Beverly Hills 90210 from 1991 shows the danger of a rave when a central character goes to one and is promptly drugged by his girlfriend with ecstasy, rave drug of choice, and goes crazy for the night. At stake in all of this, from the utopian claims of ravers to the puritanical response of authorities, is the vitality of the largest international youth culture trend to have emerged since hip-hop. The image of thousands of young people dancing for days in abandoned warehouses or outlying lots from Pasadena to Pakistan looks a lot like a revolution.

Raves in Israel are no exception, as they display the commonplace bliss, drugs, and relentless digital music. Yet Israelis also have made raves their own, not surprisingly for a nation that has always adored and reviled its sense of uniqueness. Though raves originated in Europe in the 1980s, many Israelis first encountered them on the beaches of Goa, a former Portuguese colony on the west coast of southern India. Popular since the 1960s for Western travelers and dropouts, Goa is a favorite destination for young Israelis on walkabout after serving their mandatory military service. Fleeing the tensions and stresses of terrorism and occupation, they flock to unguarded spiritual places from the mountains of Patagonia to the beaches of Thailand. In Goa, Israelis discovered all-night parties, where diskjockeys set up on the beaches and birthed trance, fusing eastern and western elements with stronger beats and melodies than other rave music, dripping psychedelic ornamentsm and spacey computer-generated sound effects. Since the late 198os, Goa has been the Israeli mecca of trance liberation. Enterprising deejays and promoters brought the musical magic back to their homeland in the early 1990's, and thus the Israeli trance scene was born.

Initially, raves in Israel were granted police permits and sponsored by hopeful anti-drug organizations. But as fears of drug culture spread, authorities began making arrests at the multi-day festivals that attracted thousands. In response, leftist activists organized raves because they considered the rave to be a new form of civil disobedience. Caught amid Israel’s ongoing cultural civil war, trance may have achieved its greatest visibility and public debate in Israel in the late 199os, which, not coincidentally, was the last time of relative peace. At “Give Trance a Chance,” over 30,000 thronged Yitzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to dance and protest the government crackdown on raves. Today, fears of terrorism have significantly reduced the number of large public gatherings. Free movement is more curtailed than ever, and the trance scene has been thrown up against the backdrop of the hawkish government of Ariel Sharon.

Trance music still predominates at Israeli clubs, but foreign deejays, once enamored with the unrestrained enthusiasm on the Tel Aviv dance floors, are coming in smaller numbers. Record companies specializing in Goa trance music are now among the largest independent labels in the country, and trance albums are Israel’s biggest musical export. Inspite of the music’s popularity, however, raves have gone back to being an underground culture. Diehards must negotiate anonymous emails, remote meeting points, vague maps, and stern checkpoints in order to arrive at a rave. Once there, they discover a smaller scene that remains committed to its ideals. At an Israeli rave, the moment of truth occurs at sunrise, when the break of light reveals the countenances of the anonymous bodies heaving together in unison. If the magic holds, then the unity of night can be carried forth into the next day, and the day after that, until the next rave.

For those who have never experienced an Israeli rave, it might be tempting to draw parallels with European raves and American outdoor festivals like Burning Man. But in Israel, the raves are imbued with numerous additional layers of spirituality. The dancing can be related to “shuckling,” the back-and-forth swaying of orthodox Jewish men in prayer. Trance music also evokes niggunim, repetitive sung Hasidic melodies that promoted impassioned spirituality to combat the modernization and secularization of Judaism. The fact that many trance festivals are held on Friday nights or during Jewish holidays precludes participation by observant Jews. Instead, the raves present the opportunity for secular Israelis to create personal rituals to connect to the sublime aspects of Judaism. Held in remote forests, beaches, and deserts, raves bring urban Israelis closer to the beauty of nature, to the very land dreamt of by modern Zionism founder Theodor Herzl in Vienna at the end of the i9th century, and fought for still today by the Israeli army.

Israeli raves also embody longings for cultural and spiritual unity with other people. By linking their Jewish spiritual ecstasy to that of other cultures, as in gospel music and whirling dervishes for example, they aspire to overcome the particularism of being a member of “the Chosen People.” Many musical elements of trance are taken from Indian and other eastern music, adding a non-Western beat that transcends the European culture that still influences a now diverse Israeli society, one that includes Jews from North Africa, the Middle East, India, Russia, Ethiopia, Europe, and the Americas, not to forget the marginalized Palestinians, Druze, and Bedouins that make up twenty percent of the population.

Raves are an expression of independence of mind and body for mainly secular, middle class Israelis. In the past four years, Palestinian suicide bombers and the Israeli government response of building a separation wall have wiped out nearly all hope for a peaceful solution for Israel’s security. Beset with a faltering economy, international criticism, threat of bombings, and disillusionment from their participation in a society that kills in their name, young Israelis have struggled to find an identity. They wish to be international yet are also stubbornly nationalistic, contemporary yet irresistibly connected to a Biblical sense of place. Israelis fed up with occupation and all the “isms” have turned to trance raves for a new consciousness that envisions peace with neighbors and celebrates the value of the individual. Raves in Israel send a powerful message. In a nation so conflicted and militarized, the longing for “PLUR” is far more political than in the United States, which enshrined the pursuit of happiness in its founding document.

On balance, any written description of a rave risks reducing it to a series of clichés about togetherness, oneness, and liberation. We are fortunate to have Tomer Ganihar’s photographs, which more accurately transmit the vibrancy of the scene to a distant and unfamiliar audience. Taken at raves and other dance happenings in Israel from 1996 to 2003, Tomer’s photographs capture the many contradictions at play. Some of his images, in particular The Parting of the Red Sea and Holy Rave maybe compared to a powerful scene from Arnold Schoenberg’s modern opera Moses and Aaron. Performances of the unfinished masterpiece climax at the end of Act II. The Israelites, anxiously waiting the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai, grow fearful and impatient. To sooth them, Aaron provides the Golden Calf to mitigate their loss of faith in God. Moses descends Mount Sinai, observes the orgiastic frenzy, and smashes the tablets of the law.

Mass worship of the sensual, be it the Golden Calf or electronic music, is said to be deviant behavior that threatens the future of the collective. As the Calf will prevent them from accepting one God and reaching the Promised Land, so will the rave disrupt the serious business of security against the Arab “threat.” Unlike the Bible, which describes the fulfillment of God’s promise with the bloody entry of the Israelites into Canaan, Moses and Aaron remains unresolved. There is no Act III. There are only unanswered questions. What will save and preserve Israel: adherence to an invisible God, the political expediency of the state, or the human necessity of pleasure? An Israeli rave is an ephemeral utopia, the wellspring of dreams, and, as a poet wrote in the dark year 1937, “in dreams begin responsibilities.”1

1 Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Resposibilities, New York: New Directions, 1998