Sagui Dekel-Chen is not a singer. He is, as he said recently, “just a father who sings.” But a recent video of his rendition of the Hebrew song “Keren Shemesh,” meaning “Ray of Sun,” in which he is surrounded by his wife, his little girls and a group of young women and men whose lives he has changed, has gone viral for all the right reasons.
Over a decade ago, Sagui and his friend and Nir Oz neighbor Tamar Kedem Siman Tov started a boarding school in Eshkol called Bikurim. The school was a village for gifted youth, with the aim to teach them music at the Gaza border, where Sagui and Tamar lived. Sagui co-founded the school with his father, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, an American-born and bred professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Tamar, who was young and idealistic, became its principal.
In the morning of October 7, Tamar was murdered with her husband, twin daughters and toddler son and entire family — brutally erased. A quarter of their kibbutz was killed or taken hostage, including Sagui. He was taken into Gaza after protecting his pregnant wife and two young daughters. They stayed behind, his wife Avital fighting with all her might to get the man she had loved since she was 14 back. The graduates of Bikurim joined her, creating the Tamari Project, singing songs in Tamar’s honor and to draw attention to the plight to bring Sagui back. They sang his favorite songs with big Israeli stars, with Talya Dancyg whose grandfather Alex Dancyg was taken into Gaza, too. And after almost 500 days of making music for him, last week, Sagui, who came back home in the second ceasefire deal, finally joined them.
His arm bandaged due to an injury that went untreated between October 7 and his return, he told the crowd of Bikurim graduates and his wife and three daughters — one of which, Shachar Mazal, was born while he was still in captivity — about the ritual that helped him survive 15 months in Gaza. Sagui shared that he would sing in his head all day, and he would do something that he often did with his daughters, Bar, 7, and Gali, 3: explain the meaning of the lyrics of the songs. Each morning when he woke up, he would go to the corner of the room, play love songs in his head and dance to them with his wife Avital, who he affectionately calls Mili. He made up songs that he started finally putting to paper after his release.
But that day, he was there to sing a song that meant a lot to his Bar and Gali, that they would sing in the car and on Friday mornings in their living room: “Keren Shemesh,” a 2022 song by Benaia Barabi.
In the video, as he speaks and sings, his wife looks at him lovingly and the girls sing and dance around. Avital once shared that every night when he was in Gaza, she would take a shower after her arduous long day and get ready for a “date” to meet him in her dreams. He would be there in her sleep and she would wake up rejuvenated, ready to fight. That story was an inspiration for a song by the Idan Raichel Project called “Drishat Shalom MeChayim Acherim.”
As Sagui sings to Avital in the living room, with their girls dancing around them, her dream to be with him again has finally come true. Later Shachar Mazal sits on Sagui’s lap as Avital joins her daughters in their dancing and Sagui shines bright smiles and reaches out his hands to his loved ones.
He also continues that ritual of explaining the song to his children, now in front of this crowd of young musicians, in their living room. “This song is first and foremost,” he said, “a love song,” for the wife who became that ray of light for him almost 21 years ago, and he said, a sun that then grew with all of his daughters. “You are the source of light, warmth and life for me,” he told the four of them.
“Don’t go ray of light, I’ll do everything so you’ll stay,” he quoted the lyrics of the song. “I did everything so that you would stay, despite the distance, I felt my love for you grow every day,” he continued. “The song is a song of hope… they took away my sun for 498 days and I chose not to let it go and I talked to my sun every day.” Finally, two weeks ago, he got to see the sun and his suns again. In the helicopter on the way to the hospital, he shared a message with his girls on a whiteboard: “Bary, Gali, Shachar, thank you for protecting me, daddy is on his way.”
In the video, Sagui urges everyone around him to “send love and warmth, it pierces through the ground,” and ended his heartfelt speech with a message to the hostages: “To my friends who cannot see the sun there in captivity, be strong. Your soul needs a strong body and your body needs a strong soul. Wipe away the tears, go to the corner of the room and sing with me.”
Here’s hoping that the sun soon reaches each and everyone of them. We are so grateful to Sagui and his family for this radiant beautiful rendition of the song, and are so happy he can once again talk about music with his loved ones.
