The Ever-Singing People

Nessa Rapoport

I am a woman of Ashkenazi rabbinic descent who has been obsessed since I was a child with the global music of Sephardi/Mizrachi piyut, the devotional poems and music of the Jewish people across the centuries, from Andalusia to India.

Piyut [p’YOOT], derived from the Greek word from which "poem" is drawn, is sung in Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Ladino, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and many other languages of the countries where we found ourselves, as well as originating and sung continually in the land of Israel. We have chanted piyut on feast days and fast days to celebrate, grieve, yearn, and praise.

Jews are from everywhere, with music that has been porous to the cultures in which we dwell and to which we disproportionately contribute. Among my favorite decidedly non-sacred examples is “White Christmas,” written by Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin in 1888, who fled as a child with his family from the pogroms of his Russian shtetl to create much of the Great American Songbook and offered the world a Christmas “just like the ones I used to know.”

Hardly.

Music cannot be confined within borders or boundaries. It belongs to all of us, to every imagination, transcending any attempt to own or contain it. Countries that have declared themselves our mortal enemies have listeners who love our music and reach out to say so in comments on YouTube. We are, in golden eras and beleaguered times, the people of eternity.

In the words of the virtuoso paytan, R. Haim Louk: “All the people of Israel began with a prophecy, the prophecy of our great teacher, Moshe. And there is no prophecy without song.”

Of tens of thousands sung by communities of our people, here are seven that accompany me through my days. (Having inherited plaintive chants and lullabies from Poland and Russia—with a soul to match—I am especially ardent about melodies in a major key.)

It is essential to have an address, to know where you come from, to live in authenticity with cultural confidence, to recognize our responsibility to one another, and to embrace particularity in order to be truly universal.

Piyut is an encounter and an awakening.

Link to playlist for the following piyutim. For mah navu alei, see link below. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcfmAD7DzVrI

Persia/Iran: ashreichem, Morin Nehedar

Morocco: el chai, The Piyut Ensemble, Yad Ben-Tzvi

Iraq: mah navu alei

https://piyutnorthamerica.org/recordings-by-tradition-1 [scroll down to “Melodies from Iraq”: mah navu alei], Piyut North America

India: tzur mishelo, Rahel Musleah

Turkey: ki eshmera, The Parvarim

Balkans: Quien supiense y entendiense, Yehoram Gaon

Yemen: im nin’alu, Ofra Haza