Yonatan Razel

Composer: Yonatan Razel

Year: 2014

“S ometimes it takes a personal miracle before one can really comprehend and relate to the words “Katonti mikol hachasadim — I am diminished by all of Your kindness” Yaakov Avinu’s prayer of gratitude and supplication before his encounter with Eisav which ends with his plea of “Hatzileni nah — Please save me!” In Yonatan Razel’s stirring “Katonti ” the singer-composer added another verse to the end of the song: “For Your kindness is great upon me and you have saved my soul from the lowest depths.”

Yonatan Razel experienced his own miracle of salvation a few years back when his four-year-old daughter Rivkah fell off a porch and was in a coma for weeks. While thousands around the world were praying for her recovery Rivkah suddenly woke up and was eventually healed. People who knew the story assumed that his powerfully moving song “Katonti ” was an ode of gratitude for Rivkah but Razel says he actually composed it years before as a tribute to his grandfather cellist Mark Rozelar who was one of Razel’s early music influences.

“It was my grandfather who introduced me to the concept expressed in this pasuk” Razel says. “He was deported from his hometown in Holland and when he found himself on a transport going to Sobibor he managed to jump off the train and save himself. He survived the war and made aliyah baruch Hashem. Later in his life he spoke to me about the night he jumped and fled into the forest: ‘I had nothing but the clothes on my back and now I have a whole family with grandchildren in Eretz Yisrael ’ he told me. After he passed away I composed ‘Katonti’ in his memory.”

American-born Razel was raised in an unusually musical family — his brothers Aharon and Yehuda are singers and musicians in their own right. “Well we are Leviim” he says — where natural gifts were combined with a strong emphasis on education. “I was raised in the world of classical music and I still have some songs I composed when I was around seven or eight written out in musical notation. In fact on my upcoming album there is a song ‘Olam Hafuch ’ which incorporates a tune I composed as a ten-year-old. My compositions and arrangements come from the world of classical piano and string music Brahms and Mahler. Yet for the past 20 years I’ve also been a follower of chassidic and spiritual styles and have come to appreciate the power of a Carlebach niggun.”