KF: See what happened with Jesus Christ. He was doing his blasphemy thing. He was doing that. Instead of speaking with him – he was Jewish – instead of coming to him and saying, “Hey listen, let’s talk about it. What’s your problem? Let’s hear what you have to say, let’s speak about it like we speak in chavruta-”

MI: Well, they said in Talmud that his rav was wrong.

KF: Right. Because look what happened. They were so frightened that they said “Yo! Crucify the motherfucker!” And now look what you have today. You have black metal. You have Christianity. You have the Pope. You have the Vatican. You have, I mean, you know the Gremlins movie?

Kobi Farhi of Orphaned Land
for Orphaned Land concert photos I took click here.

MI: What’s up with the khaffiyeh, dude?

KF: We’re coming from the Middle East. We’re different. People are used to bands from the USA, from Scandinavia, Europe. We’re different. We’re coming from the Middle East. We’re coming from this place. People here are wearing khaffiyehs. I used to grow in Jaffa, which is kind of a mixture of Christians, Moslems and Jews. Lots of Arabs live there and I used to see them with their khaffiyehs. You’re even coming into my home and I’m wearing jababiyeh.

MI: That’s an Arab thing?

KF: I don’t know if I can say that it’s an Arab thing. But I can definitely say to you that back then in the early days, most people here were walking with this. From Jesus Christ to Yaakov Avinu. Everybody used to go with this costume.

MI: The Jews also?

KF: Of course. If you look back then, to the period of Jesus Christ or Avraham Avinu they used to go here like that. It’s just nowadays that things turned out to be here so Western related. I’m even thinking that they used to go with khaffiyehs. Did you see pictures of Avraham and Yaakov Avinu? They wore khaffiyehs.

MI: Well, it’s not exactly khaffiyehs.

KF: Well, they had something on their head.

MI: Yeah, a turban. like, the Teimanim still wear it. But nowadays, what does it represent. When you see a khaffiyeh, you see Hamas, PLO, Islamic Jihad. How come you’re not seeing it like that?

KF: No..I’m not trying to take any position in anything we do. I don’t take any sides. I’m not trying to justify what the Jewish people do to the Palestinians and I’m not trying to justify the fight of the Palestinians and Jews. I think it’s a very big circle of confusion so I am not getting myself involved. I’m just coming to reflect everything altogether. All religions.

MI: So you don’t take a stance on it.

KF: No.

MI: Not as a Jew either?

KF: Not as a Jew either.

MI: What, it doesn’t hurt you if a soldier gets blown up?

KF: Of course it hurts me. It hurts me very much. It also hurts me when a Jewish soldier is killing a Palestinian kid. It hurts me as well. I don’t think the value of my life is more than the value of a Palestinian. I don’t like terrorists. I think they are murderers. But on the other hand, they fight for their own freedom. So I’m not coming to judge. I’m not trying to get into their shoes. I’m not trying to say that I’m pro-Palestinian. I never voted in the elections. I have no opinion about it whatsoever. I think it is something I don’t want to get into. i will give you a hard example. We’re both believers. You are Jewish, you are religious. I’m Jewish too. I believe in the Bible. I sometimes, pretty often, put on tefillin. And I really like my religion. But, if I will take, and it’s just an example so you have to forgive me, if I will take the Bible and I will throw it into a pool which is full of shit –

MI: Chalila –

KF: Chalila – this book is full of holy words. This is the L-rd Himself in a costume of letters. If I will throw it to this pool, all holiness in it is like, banished. It will be kadosh (holy), and when I throw it to this pool, it will be tamei (impure). It’s the same thing about getting into politics. I think that getting myself into politics, into taking sides, is getting myself dirty. I’m not taking any sides, I’m not dealing with it. I’m doing my music. And that’s it.

MI: Alright… well, this land (Israel)… do you really consider it orphaned?

KF: Of course.

MI: Why?

KF: OK. It all begins from the Holy Land. It begins from the Promised Land, promised to Moses. It continues with what I just told you. Something that is kadosh, like this land. It is like a mother. She gives us food, air, stuff like that. Now imagine this mother washed out with blood. It made her to be from kadosh to tamei. Now, instead of it being a holy land, eretz zovat chalav u’dvash (a land that drips with milk and honey), it is a land that drips blood. So, I accept that this is all part of that way and that someone out there knows what He is doing. But seeing it from down here, it’s a holy land that turns out to be an orphaned land. Because of war. Because of confusion. Because of three religions who are supposed to think about morality, about charity, to be the representers of life, of salvation, stuff like that. Instead of that, they are fighting each other. They turned out to be political groups. And they kill their own man in the name of religion which is a very strange and dangerous thing to do. You cannot take religion, as pure as it is, as sacred as it is, and involve it in a politic – which is – like my analogy before, drawing your holiest thing into shit. And this is something that I cannot accept. I don’t take any sides. I respect all religions and I think they are all speaking about the same thing. The conflict that they have, this is something –

MI: Alright, that’s it, we’re gonna fight.

KF: Look. I know you are religious and this is difficult for you to hear. Let me tell you, just an example, about how ‘religious’ is confused. Take Jesus Christ. He was Jewish. He thought, he had some criticism about some of the things about Judaism. He wanted to change that. And now, on his behalf, people are dying al Kiddush Hashem (to sanctify G-d’s name).

MI: It’s in the Talmud, what happened with him. They used to rip it out of the pages in the Talmud in Europe because they didn’t want the Christians to kill them but now they print it again. The whole story.

KF: What, the whole story in which he was flying and the rabbi was shitting on him or something? I don’t buy it. I’m not saying this. I’m saying, look how frightened people were of Jesus Christ. The Jewish people. What did he do?

MI: I didn’t hear it like this! I heard he was making chilul Hashem (desecrating G-d’s name).

KF: He was making Chilul Hashem. See what he was doing back then, is what we are doing today. For one thing…

MI: Wait, what, who, where, we? Who’s we?

KF: The Jewish people. We’re definitely not following Judaism.

MI: That’s for damn sure.

KF: We’re definitely not learning in the yeshiva, not shomrim shabbat, not going to synagogue, we don’t give a shit about nothing. We are more American than we are Jewish today. Now, I don’t have a problem with it. You can quote me that we are more American than Jewish and all our American fans will be mad at me. There isn’t anything bad about being American. It’s just an example. But see what happened with Jesus Christ. He was doing his blasphemy thing. He was doing that. Instead of speaking with him – he was Jewish – instead of coming to him and saying, “Hey listen, let’s talk about it. What’s your problem? Let’s hear what you have to say, let’s speak about it like we speak in chavruta-”

MI: well, they said in Talmud that his rav was wrong.

KF: Right. Because look what happened. They were so frightened that they said “Yo! Crucify the motherfucker!”

MI: (laughs)

KF: And now look what you have today. You have black metal. You have Christianity. You have the Pope. You have the Vatican. You have, I mean, you know the Gremlins movie?

MI: I love it.

KF: so you remember Gizmo?

MI: hey, I love Gizmo. (does the voice) Gizmo.

KF: Yeh, Gizmo. He was so small. But then you throw water on him, and “BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW”. Now, they crucified Jesus. They said, “We’re out of the problem! We crucified the motherfucker! No problem!” Now look what happened. This is the biggest problem we’ve ever had. This is something we don’t know how to deal with. The monsters that were created out of this position are unbelievable. It’s so huge. It’s so big.

MI: But it wasn’t out of the crucifixion that this came, it was from what they made out of it later.

KF: It doesn’t matter. The crucifixion was the act that led to the result. I mean, it was an outcome of this. Maybe if they weren’t crucifying him and just let him speak his bullshit and let him die, maybe it would have ended with some kind of small kind of religion, I don’t know.

MI: But no! You know Zimri and Kozbi? Zimri, he was a prince of Shimon who went and got nasty w. a chick in front of everybody and was like, “Hey, it’s OK, let’s go,” and because of it there was a large plague and a lot of Jews died, and the only reason all of the Jews didn’t die was because there was a man named Pinchas who picked up a spear and freaking killed the guy. Pinchas, this is the guy that turned into Eliyahu HaNavi and he got the covenant of peace, because he knew that he had to sur m’ra (turn from evil) to aseh tov (do good), and you have to know when to cut. You can’t have an arm with cancer on it, and say, well, ok eat me! You have to like cut it. My whole point is, sometimes you have to cut it. If he was doing that much damage…

KF: I don’t agree! You know why?

MI: Why?

KF: I’m thinking to myself, instead of cutting your arm, figure, why did you get cancer? Because if your actions led you to get cancer, you will cut your hand. But, if you will continue, maybe –

MI: Chalila.

KF: Chalila, maybe you will get cancer on your leg, next.

MI: But it’s the same thing, if you say, that there is an Arab coming to kill you. Why? it’s because you did this and this and this. No man, the Arab is coming at you with a knife! You’re gonna say, “Dude, get away from me with that knife or I’ll fucking kill you!â€? You can’t just stand there and be like, how, what.

KF: I decided, for myself, as being a Jew, I don’t take any stance. I will focus all of my focus in order to bring Jews together and to be ohr lagoyim (a light unto the nations).
I don’t want them to think I hate Jesus, I want them to think that Jesus was a Jew-

MI: Heh, yeh, people say that you look like Jesus.

KF: I know. But it’s just a way of looking. Back then, everybody was looking like that. And they just remember Jesus. He’s the most famous from that period. That’s why people say “heh, you look like Jesus,” but back then everybody looked like that.

MI: OK…so now, you have three different religions. The Koran and hadith have all these anti-Semitic quotes, the NT has all this anti-Semitism.

KF: Politics.

MI: No man, it’s the religion, this is all right there smack in the text of the religion.

KF: Rabbis are also saying things in the religion that I don’t agree with. I don’t care if you’re a rabbi, you can be, I don’t know what. You can be Eliyahu HaNavi but if you say this kind of bullshit then get the fuck out of here.

MI: So what are you saying?

KF: I’m saying I have many problems with Christianity as a religion but I don’t have any problem with Jesus Christ as a human being and as a Jew, and for what he said.

MI: So I heard you used to be a dosi.

KF: A What?

MI: A dosi. (me botching up my hebrew, no doubt – ed.)

KF: A dosi?

MI: A religious Jew. What happened?

KF: Well, it started from me being searching myself, asking too many questions. Then I bumped into Rabbi Nachman m’Breslov, which is still one of my favorites till today. I really felt it was speaking to me, ya know?

MI: What was it that spoke to you?

KF: There was like, a lot of comfort in it, It was like, if I can paint it to you was like a father that I’ve never seen came to me and did to me like that (pats an imaginary child on the head). “It’s OK boy, don’t worry about it.” I was blown away from it. And I was, now I’m 29, I was maybe 20. I cut my hair and put kippa on my head, I bought my tefillin and talit which I have till today, and I’m using them. But then, I was confused. Today, I know my mission. Today I know why I came here. Today I know that I came to take my messages with the religions that we use and take them into the world that we are working with, that we are approaching with our music.
I once met this rabbi in the Kotel Ha’maaravi. I was telling him about Orphaned Land, about using prayers and stuff like that. He told me, “You know, you must continue to do it. Even if I was chozer b’tshuva, even if I was religious now and would go to synagogue, we must do this, because no rabbi or mekubal or whatever can go into this world which is the world I work with, which is the world of metal music. These people will not get familiar with those songs, with these words. We did a paragraph from the Bible, if we would not use this in our music.

MI: But that’s for Jews…why would you take a Psalm or something in Hebrew if it wasn’t for them?

KF: I know, but the metal people in Israel, they’re atheistic according to what they say. They don’t believe in G-d and the religious parties of the Knesset really made them even go far away from G-d. So, seeing that in our culture, the jumping and dancing…this is our religion. These people with the piercings and the tattoos and everything, you see them jump like this, they don’t know why they do it but they praise the L-rd.

MI: Then it is for your own, though. For your own people.

KF: Of course. But if you talk for all the world, it’s ohr lagoyim (a light unto the nations), for us, it’s ahavat chinam instead of sinat chinam. Because when I see people, atheists according to what they say, jump like that it makes me happy. It makes them it happy as well. The small flame, candle of Judaism that was left, they will know how to find it in Orphaned Land, in our gig. And this is what I like about it. And this rav, this is what he told me, that I must continue to do it. He told me I’m like undercover, with a metal outfit, but I’m like a religious, undercover.

MI: So what’s El Norra Alila?

KF: You know, the prayer on Yom Kippur? In Neila, where the times are locked, it’s like the song, where we say to G-d, we say before the times are locked, find us forgiveness. Probably, you’ll get to hear it, But I think only Sfaradim sing it (he sings it), they sing like that for a few minutes. This album that I write, was during the period where I became religious and I was exploring the whole thing. This whole album is like some kind of a journey. Searching and looking for yourself, stuff like that. Sahara was more like a commentary on what is going on in the Middle East, Desert Storm, stuff like that. Mabool is the perfect concept album and concept that we ever made. First of all, for a band like Orphaned Land, the whole philosophy and concept of the band, it’s a perfect story.

MI: Well, what exactly is the philosophy of the band?

KF: Trying to get the impossible into the possible. For example, take fire and water. They cannot – they say of barad (the hail that rained down on Egypt during the ten plagues) that it is fire and water together. Even though the water puts out the fire and the fire boils the water, they can get along together. We call it a tango between G-d and Satan. We always like to take opposite things that have nothing to do with each other, like ancient history and distorted guitars, we take religion and we put it into metal music. And see the result, metal people who dance like they’re in a synagogue. This is a concert of Orphaned Land. It’s like taking fire and water together without any one of them deleting the other.

MI: So how is Mabool a reflection of that?

KF: Mabool is a reflection of what is going on here. That’s the concept of Orphaned Land. If we were a holy land, now it’s turned out to be an orphaned Land. I’ll give you an example. A woman. When she is tme’ah (impure), she goes to the mikva (ritual bath). And when our clothes are dirty, we send them to the laundry. So a mabool is like a mikveh for the nature. In Parshat haMabul, they say, v’tishachet haaretz – the land was corrupted. It is not only land that was corrupted. It was man. Man were so corrupted that the land was corrupted, because man and the land, they held connection. If our land, which is a holy land, turns out to be corrupted, it is now an orphaned land. It has to be washed out by the flood. It has to be turned into an ocean land. And then, a new beginning, again, to be a holy land.

MI: OK, listen. Now we’re gonna fight. First of all, you sound like a Satmar. What is this? They say that the land is tumah. The land’s not tumah! It has halachos, listed, where it says that whoever lives in Eretz Yisrael in a city full of heathens has it much better than someone who is living outside of Israel with a bunch of religious Jews. It says all of these things, that someone who lives outside of the land is like he has no G-d. At all times,anywhere. Don’t tell me this! It’s not true.

KF: Look. This land is the Holy Land. Go to the Beit HaMikdash. It was the holiest place we ever had. Now, bring blasphemy into it. And the Beit HaMikdash will be ruined! OK? So this is what happened. This land is very holy, it is the holiest land on earth! But, doing the things we were doing on this land is like putting blasphemy into the Beit HaMikdash. Holy Land, Orphaned Land. The Beit HaMikdash was ruined!

MI: But there’s something that says that if someone stays in Eretz Yisrael, even if they don’t know anything and don’t keep anything, that Eretz Yisrael is michaper (atones) for them. And that we, here, that if you don’t get thrown out of the land, then you’re a tzaddik. Even if he’s eating pig and it’s a Jew, there’s something in him that makes him a tzaddik.

KF: Of course. This is what I told you. Jewish people at our shows that have tattoos, that don’t have anything – there is only a place of darkness, the way they describe themselves, the way they declare themselves. And then I see these small tiny sparks within them.

MI: Look, like you said before, if someone throws a chumash (one of the five books of the Torah) into a pool of shit (G-d forbid and I would hate to be the person who would do such a thing) but look, if you pick it up and wash the crap off of it, it’s still good.

KF: It’s not the same. I will give you a much harder example now. If someone rapes a baby –

MI: Chalila.

KF: Chalila – it will never be the same. You can see the baby, you can wash it, you can send it to psychiatrists, you took something out of him. You stole something out of his innocence, his holiness. Why do they say that a woman who was raped, she’s michulelah. Hu chilel otah. Because she was holy, and he took something out of her. The land has become corrupted because of the actions of man. The land is not corrupted. The land is nothing but giving up pure love. It gives us fruit, vegetables. So much, you know? You can see the love of G-d everywhere. People don’t see it but I can sometimes look at an apple for half an hour, cause I don’t understand how this thing grew out of the ground and into a tree. How I’m taking it, eating it and I enjoy it.

MI: You make a bracha?

KF: Of course I do.

MI: Good. Yeh, I see you also keep your bathroom door closed, that’s a sign of a religious person.

KF: Yeh, I lock my bathroom door and I always close the toilet lid down.

MI: Yeh, and you keep it clean too. Sometimes, I can go into a single guy’s bathroom and it’s like “AAAAAAAAAAAGHHH”.

KF: I’m trying, I’m trying. I’m doing my best, because I know I’m surrounded by darkness. This is etz ha’daat (tree of knowledge) here. This is like confusion everywhere, this is like toilet everywhere. This is not Paradise, this is not Gan Eden. I know where I’m living, and I know where I came from. I look at this apple and I’m amazed. Because somebody put it in my hand. It was growing. The water came out of the sky, fell to the ground. The tree was like, climbing up, the apple was ready, somebody picked it up, brought it to where I got it, and I only paid one shekel to get it. This is true love, this is true love. I know that the land is not corrupted. I know that the land is mother. It has the ability, it has the way of a mother treating her own children. This is the land. But, we act like people who spit in our parents’ faces. So the land is corrupted. Because we rape our mother, we make our mother have a bath in our blood, we spit in our father’s face, we piss on our father’s face-

MI: Oy yoy yoy.

KF: This is what we do.

MI: Speak for yourself, dude.

KF: Look, we’re all one, OK?

MI: Yeh, it’s very hard for me to deal with.

KF: We are all in the same boat, we are all responsible for each other, so this is what we do. OK, so we’re not doing it individually, but this is what we all do. We can’t say, “hey I’m doing taryag (613) mitzvot, I’m free, WHOOO! Thank G-d!

MI: Yeh, I was talking to some guy that said the Leviim were safe because they didn’t have a part in doing the chet ha’egel (sin of the golden calf). They say now, that every punishment that the Jews get, no matter what, is because of chet ha’egel. He was like, “No, they’re put in situations about it, but they still don’t get punished.” I’m like “Dude, what are you talking about, they get it just like the rest of us.”

KF: I think everybody gets it in their own way, I don’t know….back to Mabool…it’s very apocalyptic, it’s very reflective of what’s happening here. We sing in seven different languages. I will not sit and say that what is said on the album happened, with the tsunami, but this is the way we saw that things were going to happen. The album was released in February of 2004. Look at the cover. It’s a tsunami. There was a mabool in India…

MI: (whistles “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” theme in a spooky manner)

KF: We’re not kind of prophets or something. But musicians definitely have the ability to put themselves out, artists in general, also, and put themselves out of the picture, stand outside and start painting it, you know. This is what we did with Mabool.

MI: Scary.

KF: I’m seeing myself, very much close to G-d, even though I’m not making taryag mitzvot, and sometimes I sin, sometimes I smoke on Shabbos, sometimes I drive on Shabbos, I’m doing very awful things, you know? But I’m saying, if my mission was to be a secret agent…

MI: I don’t agree. I think if you kept Shabbos..you know that whatever work you do on Shabbos, you lose out. And you know that if you miss out by not doing work on Shabbat, you get it later. All these bands would be huge if they didn’t work on Shabbat, they’d be huge.

KF: Look, everything you say is true. This is what they say about Shabbos. But take a police officer and take an undercover officer. The undercover officer is inside with drugs, with drug addicts and he’s with people that kill each other. now, he’s looking for the problem, that if he finds it, he solves everything. If he finds the chief of these gangs, of the Mafia, of the drugs, of whatever it is and kill him, he finishes the problem. Now, on his way to doing that, sometimes he needs to use drugs. Sometimes he needs to kill other people. He’s a police officer, OK? He has to do all of these things. He has to use drugs, sell drugs, kill people. I don’t know what.

MI: But who says you have to break Shabbat? You can play Thursday.

KF: He has to do his best to complete his mission.

MI: People will come to you on Thursday. They will come to you on Sunday. They will come to you on Wednesday.

KF: Sometimes I have to perform with my band on Friday. What can I do.

MI: Tell ’em no! Be like, “Not this time, baby.”

KF: I can’t do it. First of all, I’m one out of six. I cannot force my agent – it’s a very tricky game. because G-d is so merciful, and so giving and loving, sometimes He will say continue to do it. If you know me, and you know my way, and if you’re doing what you do on my behalf, continue to do what you do. I know you’re in the world of metal. The world of blasphemy. I know you’re in the world of I don’t know what. You cannot make taryag mitzvot, you cannot make Shabbat. You can’t make a blessing every time you eat, you will throw too much attention. You are an undercover agent, OK?

MI: Would you bleed on it? Are you 100% sure?

KF: Look, almost every day, I won’t say every day but at least once a week, I’m speaking with G-d. I’m begging him to lead me to do whatever I do on His behalf. I’m swearing to him that I have no other king than Him. I’m swearing to Him I want to do everything that I do only to bring Him back to His orphaned child. And this is what I want to do. Nothing else. And I ask every week. Every chance that I can. Even now, I ask Him to guide me because you cannot see nothing at the end of the day. We are full of questions because we are in darkness. Light is truth. If I put you in a house right now that you don’t know, I will put you on the eighth floor, and it’s a very big house, and I will tell you, “Find your way out,” you will start with the questions. “Where am I?” “Where’s the light?” Is it the kitchen? Is it the living room? Is it the balcony? Then you will say “OK, I have to make my first step,” but you don’t know where to go. Then, the first right after this wall, you make your first step into the wall. You will fall into a table, chas v’chalila this is just an example, fall into the glass table, break it, cut yourself and get wounded. Why? Darkness. But when you are in light, I can put you in the same house in light, and you only have to question “Who put me here?” and “What the fuck am I doing here?” Then you see, living room, light, door, out. You have answers. You know where to go. You don’t have to get yourself injured or wounded. This is darkness. So I don’t see anything, but I just ask Him to guide me, and to do it good.

MI: So what do you want people who have never heard of you to know about you?

KF: Well first thing I want them to know is as a band, we are not a white metal band, we are not a black metal band, we are not a death metal band, I hate definitions. We’re a metal band. We reflect everything we see. And we’re a very interesting band because at the end of the day you can see a metal band coming from this region for the first time of I don’t know twenty years of metal music. So this is very interesting, and give Orphaned Land a chance, try to read the lyrics as well because everything is very deep and conceptual in our way. The music, the lyrics, is related to what happened in our lives. And I think that everyone can find a piece of himself inside of our music. This is definitely life in music. It’s like a light bulb in a room of darkness. When you put it, everything is enlightened. Like at our concert. You were there. People see the light. And it is not our light. We are nothing. A musician is just a channel for this light. It’s not our light, we are nothing, we are nothing more than anybody else, but we have a very important message, to fill the world with light.

MI: Cool. Now they’ll really think you look like Jesus.

KF: Jesus was cool. By the way, about the black metal bands, if you want my opinion, if you get really thick into the bottom of it, I think they have nothing against Jesus. I think they have a very strong thing against Christianity and the Church. But Jesus…they all look like Jesus. With their long hair, and their beards…

MI: And their corpse makeup, yeh…(starts discussing the intricacies of which way you do devil horns, which way you face, which way it looks like a goat)