Comfort: the Jewish music that helps us heal

Many of life’s moments – big and small – are accompanied by music. A first dance as a married couple. A sports chant at a winning final. A lullaby sung to a restless newborn. A school anthem at a graduation.

For Hannah Golan, the experience of life as a Jew in Australia after October 7 is set to the soundtrack of Israeli singer-songwriter, The Idan Raichel Project.

“For months after the Hamas attack and throughout the Gaza conflict, I would listen Mi'Ma'amakim. I would just sit there and get very, very teary.”

As a registered music therapist working in palliative care, Melbourne-based Golan knows better than most about the power of music to affect our emotional state.

“We relate to music in so many different ways – it’s connected to our identity, to our memories, to our feelings, to our communities. It’s hard to untangle music from our emotional experiences,” she said.

“Our musical memory is stored alongside our emotional memory. When you listen to a song, you form attachments to it, whether that’s the way you connect to the lyrics, the genre or even the songwriter, and this can become bonded to our identities. We are then very easily able to intensify our emotional experience by listening to a song that we associate with that big feeling.”

This also applies to our connection with community, Golan says. From music sung in Holocaust concentration camps to religious Cantor hymns and youth movement chants, Jewish songs tie us to our culture and history – no matter how far we’re physically located from the Israeli heartland.