Ishay Ribo, Religious Pop Star, Is Winning Over Secular Israel

The singers and their songs are very religious. Her concert venue, in a kibbutz developed by secular leftists, certainly isn’t. The audience is in the hundreds? It’s somewhere in between: some secular, some devout, an unusual mix of two parts of divided Israeli society that rarely mix.

Ishay Ribo, 34, is one of a crop of young Israeli pop stars from religious backgrounds, some from Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, whose music appeals to a more diverse audience, and features prominently in the soundscape of contemporary Israeli life.

This surprised Mr. Ribo himself.

“I never imagined I would be playing to this crowd,” he said, backstage after a show earlier this year at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a town in northern Israel that was originally founded as a collective farm. A decade ago, he said, “These people really didn’t exist.”

Besides Mr. Ribo, other singers from religious backgrounds – like Nathan Goshen, Hanan Ben-Ari, Akiva Turgeman and Narkis Reuven-Nagar – also in the new year gained more audiences. And its popularity reflects the changing Israeli society.

The religious right has expanded its influence in politics and society, leading to a conflict between secular and sacred visions of the state that underlies the ongoing judiciary. At the same time, religion has taken on a more important, and less controversial, role in the mainstream music scene.

In less than two decades, religious singers have gone from cultural fringes to widespread acclaim, “not only among them, but in all of Israel,” said Yoav Kutner, an Israeli music critic and radio presenter.

“If you don’t listen to the words,” Mr. Kutner added, “they sound like Israeli pop.”

Mr. Ribo is perhaps the clearest example of this change. Ignoring the erotic and the profane, healthy songs often pray to God – but they are sung to pop and rock music played by a band of guitarists. “The cause of the cause,” which addresses God in one of his greatest hits. “Only you have to thank for all the days and nights.”

In 2021, the song, “Sibat Hasibot,” became the most played song on Israeli radio stations, both religious and secular.

“This is part of my job,” Mr. Ribo said in a recent interview. “To be a bridge between these two worlds.”

Mr. Ribo’s journey to the role of liaison began in the early 2000s, on the bus to his religious school.

His family had moved from France a few years earlier. He lives an ultra-Orthodox and ascetic life in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, outside Jerusalem.

The family had no television, and Mr. Ribo attended an ultraconservative Jewish seminary. They listen to music on religious radio stations – often liturgical poetry is sung in synagogues. He usually only heard secular music on the bus to school, playing from the driver’s radio.

“I don’t know this music,” said Mr. Ribo.

At age 11 or so, he began recording simple songs on a portable cassette player. Then as now, the lyrics were written with piety, said Mr. Ribo. But the songs were inspired by the lead singer-songwriters he heard on the school bus.

About four years later, Mr. Ribo bought a guitar and formed a band with other seminary students. He began to practice and dress as a Modern Orthodox Jew, forgoing the dark coat and wide-brimmed hat of the ultra-Orthodox for jeans and sweaters.

But his awareness of contemporary music and its customs is still present. In the first gig, Mr. Ribo played with his back to the audience, not knowing that he should join the crowd.

Unlike many Israelis from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish background, he paused his religious studies at age 22 to serve in the military for two years. After completing his service in 2013, he tried to build a hybrid musical career – playing religious music for both secular and devout audiences.

He envisions the melody to sound like Coldplay, the popular British rock band, but the lyrics, he added, “will be about God and faith.”

The challenge is that there are several templates for cross-career.

Only a few religious artists, like folk singer Shlomo Carlebach, have built a secular following. The most successful religious artists are, like Etti Ankri and Ehud Banai, who started secular, became more devout, and then took the original audience with them.

Mr. Ribo’s problem, initially, was that the music industry “didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said.

When he submitted his music to mainstream record labels, they all turned him down.

Mr. Ribo continued to move forward, releasing the first of five albums in 2014. He hired a secular manager, Or Davidson, who marketed as if he were a secular client – booking him to play in the main venue and securing airtime in nonreligious. radio station. Gradually, the secular fan base grew.

It is sometimes a fraught balancing act.

Religious Jews criticized him for playing in a secular concert hall. Secular Jews oppose their performance in religious places where men and women sit separately. And when he played in two audiences in a secular venue, the staff could not provide halal food for the religious fans. Even his parents are religious to attend some places.

But the two-pronged approach finally worked. Four of the five albums were classified as gold or above – selling more than 15,000 copies in the small market of Israel. Secular pop legends, including Shlomo Artzi, began performing duets with him, and he began to build an audience among diaspora Jews. Later this year, he is scheduled to headline Madison Square Garden, Mr. Davidson said.

In fact, Mr. Ribo’s attraction is only from his short songs, his clean and sincere demeanor.

“Even though I’m secular, I come to watch him because he’s so good,” said Adiva Liberman, 71, a retired teacher who attended the concert at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

“Not everyone pays attention to the lyrics,” he added. “He was just attracted to the melody.”

Mr. Ribo’s rise comes amid not only political change in Israel, but demographic change as well. Religious Israelis, who have more children than secular Israelis, are the fastest-growing part of the population, so they can have a greater cultural influence.

Daniel Zamir, an Israeli jazz star who became religious as an adult, said Mr. Ribo’s request was part of a “larger process of Israeli society coming closer to tradition.”

At the same time, the rise of Mr. Ribo represents a negotiated but free style: a greater willingness among some religious musicians to cater and mix with mainstream audiences, and a greater demand among religious audiences for music with a more contemporary sound.

This is a “dual process,” Mr. Zamir said. Mr. Ribo is an icon of “this new generation that sees that you can be religious and also make good music,” Zamir added.

For some secular consumers, the rise of “pop emuni” — “pop faith” in Hebrew — has been jarring. “I’m not interested in listening to prayers on my radio,” wrote Gal Uchovsky, a television presenter, in a 2019 article about the proliferation of Mr. Ribo’s music. “I don’t want him to explain to me, even in the songs that illuminate my journey, how God is pleasing.”

Mr. Ribo’s latest song, “I Belong to the People,” also caused discomfort among liberal Israelis. Released in early April, it is an attempt to unite Jews at a time of deep political division in Israel. But critics say that it unintentionally sounds demeaning to people of other religions, implying that they are idolaters.

Mr. Ribo also caused discomfort in the religious world. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, especially their religious leaders, feel that they are too far removed from secular society.

Early in his career, Mr. Ribo personally felt so conflicted about this that he sought rabbinic approval for his work. In order to avoid the fundamentals of his religion, there are still some lines he refuses to cross.

“I would love to write a classic love song – but no,” Mr Ribo said. “It’s not my job or my duty.”

However, some feel that he has compromised too much. In a popular sketch performed by an ultra-Orthodox comedy duo, an ultra-Orthodox man is asked if he knows a secular singer.

The man stopped, then answered: “Ishay Ribo!”

Gabby Sobelman contributed report from Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, Israel.