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When I first heard Boy George’s new song, We Will Dance Again, I was in my car driving back from yet another meeting about security and rising antisemitism in Canada. As the senior rabbi of one of the largest Jewish congregations in Canada, I estimate 30 per cent of my time is spent combating Jew hate and protecting the physical and emotional safety of my community.

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The song speaks plainly about October 7, the hostages, Israel’s right to defend itself and the selective memory that erases Jewish suffering. It opens with a clear moral distinction, “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill / Every last one of us.”

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I had to pull over. I played the song, first released on his X feed, twice because I couldn’t believe my ears were hearing what my soul had been yearning for.

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In fact, it was almost as if he anticipated my astonishment. “If you’re ever confused,” he sang, “I stand with the Jews / I don’t feel brave, I just need to behave like a human”

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Sadly, some among my own Jewish people have been unwilling to take so clear a position of solidarity.

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As he has done throughout his career, Boy George spoke the plain, unvarnished truth as he saw it, social convention be damned, and he set it to a snappy reggae tune you can dance to.

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Boy George has a complicated past. He faced appropriate consequences and has spoken openly about his mistakes. That history should not be erased, but more than three decades as a rabbi have taught me that human beings are more than the worst chapter(s) of their lives.

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Parked on the side of the road, I found an email address for his management and wrote him a letter I never thought he’d answer. But I wrote it anyway. I am a man of faith, after all.

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I told him I wanted to hug him, but that the hug would not be only from me, it would be from thousands of Jews and our allies who have been waiting nearly three years to hear such words from someone with his reach and influence.

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Two weeks later, he walked into my synagogue, and I gave him that hug.

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I have listened to Boy George since I was a teenager dancing to Culture Club at youth group parties and even my prom. I never imagined that one day I would welcome him to the pulpit of Temple Sholom in Vancouver, before nearly 800 allies and members of our Jewish community.

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We learned that evening that the song was inspired by George’s visit to the Nova music festival exhibition in London, England. He told us with clear emotion in his voice that as a singer and DJ who has performed at festivals around the world, he recognized that world. He walked into the exhibit with its carefully preserved dance space, colourful tents, tapestries and abandoned belongings and it was as though he was in his own home that had been violated. He saw the photographs of young people murdered for the crime of dancing. He met survivors and the parents of Jake Marlowe, a British man murdered on October 7. He promised one survivor that he would write a song.