GadolHadofi, thanks for referring to Cross Currents. Here is an interesting view from R Adlerstein who watched from Israel:
Why was it exhilarating? Because you could feel the achdus of a people that had come together. Every different religious and secular sub-community was represented. (Well, almost. I don’t want to write about the “almost” just now, in the middle of the war.) It was a brilliant move to have the cameras trained on the young people there, to see their enthusiasm and commitment.
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Those of us old enough to remember previous rallies were bowled over by how Jewish (rather than Jew-ish) it was. The organizers are to be commended for leaving out all rabbis, avoiding a source of internecine conflict and discomfort. That worked out well – particularly for the Torah-abiding community. Ishai Ribo did a better job of giving the event a “yiddishe taam” than virtually any rabbi we could have tapped as a speaker. At previous events (which the yeshiva world, contrary to the revisionists, participated in), the frum community felt like outsiders, as they had to listen to the words of people who seldom, if ever, invoked Hashem. On Tuesday, Ishai somehow engineered that the event pretty much began with a recitation of Tehillim, line by line. (A guitar strumming in the background turned that into the “musical” performance he had been billed to give in that slot.)
Besides his other songs, all full of yearning for Hashem, he managed to end with both a Shema Yisrael (Did we hear correctly? Shema by 290,000. Such a shout did not need the Shaarei Shomayim to open for it. The pressure surely must have knocked down the doors!) and more devekus. Who could have imagined that this would be part of a mass rally?
Even the secular organizers found ways to mention G-d! Who would have imagined?
Who would have thought that the kol isha that was standard fare in the past would give way to a monopoly on musical performance by Ishai and the Maccabeats?
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The imprint of Orthodoxy was all over the event. The points mentioned above. The fact that Ishai did not have to translate his words, because so much of the crowd understood them. The fact that the organizers knew that music by Ishai Ribo and by the Maccabeats would be recognized by the non-Orthodox, and appreciated by them. All this speaks of the Orthodox having taken over Jewish culture in America! Gone are the days when we had to beg for some scraps of recognition.