Ben-Zion Orgad: The Composer of “Landscape Religion” or Something More?

Abstract

This article engages with a deeply hidden internal personal conflict regarding one of the most prominent and successful Israeli composers—Ben-Zion Orgad (1926-2006). His career spanned over half a century: from the early days of the State of Israel in the late 1940s to the early 2000s. Outwardly appearing as a prosperous and creative powerful founder and builder of the young State and its culture, Orgad transmitted a pantheistic and idealistic delight in the ancient/new homeland for Jews and established his image as a composer of religious landscapes. One of his later compositions, however, A Personal Place (1995), marking the beginning of his valediction period, reveals another Orgad, torn by a deep and traumatic internal conflict caused by the clashing of his German cultural roots with his rejection of these, following both his personal and the general historical experience of the Holocaust. His realization of this conflict was reflected in Orgad’s memoirs and arose from the salutary influence of the writer Rivka Raz, his loyal friend and wife of the later period. His memoirs comprise a document in which his self-analysis represents a case-study of the eternal and unresolved psycho-socio-historical conflict of the dual identity that defines the European Jews who try to reconcile their love and loyalty for their non-Jewish birthplace and its culture with their deep realization of their Jewish otherness, in search of their true place in culture and in life.