Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I love national anthems, because the national anthems of other countries are inherently strange and often humorous. It has something to do with other people being different, apparently? My father loves to tell the story of Oksana Baiul’s first Olympic win, where, since it had been independent for such a short time, the event coordinators were scrambling to find the Ukraine’s national anthem and had to stall for time. (Their national anthem is, pessimistically, entitled “Ukraine’s Glory is Not Yet Lost,” and was written after a Ukrainian regiment allied with Napoleon suffered a crushing defeat.) My mother hates “The Star-Spangled Banner” - she thinks it’s too bellicose and too hard to sing. She’s been half-heartedly advocating a switch to the tranquil, singable-by-an-untrained-alto “America, the Beautiful” since I can remember. A glance through Wikipedia unearths these:

The Czech Republic: “Where is My Home?” (In… in the Czech Republic?)
Yugoslavia, back in the day: “Hey, Slavs!” (Chto?)
Turkmenistan: “Independent, Neutral, Turkmenistan State Anthem” (Can’t argue with that…)
Tuva (an autonomous area in Russia): “The Forest is Full of Pine Nuts”
Netherlands Antilles: anthem without a title (I can’t tell if that’s the name of the anthem or a description)
Lebanon: “All Of Us! For Our Country, For Our Flag and Glory” (this is actually very sad)

North Korea and South Korea have different anthems with the same title. India, an enormous and populous coutry, has a national anthem that takes 52 seconds to sing in its entirety. Japan’s anthem’s Japanese title is “Kimi Ga Yo;” its English title is given as “May a Thousand Years of Happy Reign Be Yours,” implying that the Japanese are surprisingly optimistic and have a word that means “a thousand happy years.” The title of the Kurdish anthem is translated both as “Hey, Guardian” and “Hey, Enemy.” I don’t know what to say about that, except that it makes me wish I spoke Kurdish. “La Marseillaise” has some great things about slaying tyrants that the French people have managed to completely ignore since Marie Antoinette, uh, fell all to pieces. A number of very, very small countries have anthems with titles like “God Bestow His Blessings Upon You, Free Republic of Ocean Island, and Deliver the Blood of your Foes to Your Glorious Lips.” Okay, not exactly that. But close.

Because I am from the South and thus have been trained to be a good guest, I thought it would be polite to learn New Zealand’s national anthem before I moved there. I hunted up the anthem, and I found the “official website of the New Zealand National Anthem.”

Yes. With history of the songs (”G-d Defend New Zealand” and “G-d Save the Queen”), sheet music, and mp3 samples. Considering the United States’ disagreement with the current queen’s great-great-great-grandfather (I think that’s right, but I may have skipped a George somewhere), I decided to concentrate on “G-d Defend New Zealand” - “G-d Save the Queen” is just “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” so if I get into dire straits I can hum along, at least. The website offers three mp3 versions of the song: one standard “woman with a good singing voice” version, one Enya-oid version, and one by “Frankie Stevens and the Department of Internal Affaris Choir.” That last one also features an electric guitar. The custom appears to be to sing the song reverently and quietly in Maori (reverently in deference to the sorrows of a people displaced from there land, and quietly because only six people in the whole stadium will be confident of the words) and then to rip, lusty and full-voiced, into the English version:

G-d of Nations, at thy feet
In the bonds of love we meet
Hear our voices, we entreat
G-d defend our free land
Guard Pacific’s triple star
From the shafts of strife and war
Make her praises heard afar
G-d defend New Zealand! (In practice, it is sung “G-d. Defend New Zee-ea-ea-ea, eala, aaaand!”

Like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the song gets awkwardly high in the middle (on “guard Pacific’s triple star”), and also has a random word a line before the end upon which singers tend to wax melismatic (”afar” in the next-to-last line tends to get the same hammering as “free” in “la-and of the frEEeeEEEEEEeeEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEE“). The triple star, by the way, refers to the North Island, South Island, and small Stewart Island south of the South Island; the Kiwis rightly reasoned that “triple star” was 50% more impressive than “double star,” and so pressed Stewart Island and its 400 or so souls into service.

I would learn “Hatikvah” before I go to Israel, but when I tried to download it all I got was a sound clip of Barbra Streisand talking to Golda Meir. Did you know that, when recorded, Golda Meir sounds almost exactly like Bea Arthur? It’s unsettling. Bea Arthur is Jewish, too. If I didn’t think that the timing of “Maude” and the Yom Kippur War clashed, I would suspect.