Background Music  

These are the days that we connect to our past, but we also want to let our past connect to us — the influence of the traditions, messages and legacies of our predecessors on our lives, knowing that we came from someplace meaningful and wanting to pay it forward. What were the songs that played, helping us forge our bonds with those legacies? Some family connections for the people who’ve been creating our soundtrack all these years

Rabbi Baruch Chait

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

Way back when I attended Mesivta of Eastern Parkway, I was in the school choir led by Rabbi Seymour Silbermintz. He taught us a choir piece called Hallelu, which I think actually came from my uncle, the chazzan Rabbi Zecharia Meinz. Over the years, I’ve taught the piece to the boys at Maarava, and still sing it with them every Shabbos at the seudah. It’s an oldie, but they love it nowadays, too. It has a few different parts, which really lend themselves to the achdus of choral singing, and
a part that I sing solo.

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

My father, Rabbi Moshe Chait, a shul rabbi and later the rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Yerushalayim, had a very nice voice and loved music. He even taught me to play the harmonica. He had three brothers, all rabbis, who put together a record called The Yeshiva Melodies of Chofetz Chaim when I was a little kid, and that was a big influence on me. They were talmidim of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Williamsburg, and they loved to sing and harmonize together. Their record is a collection of old yeshivah tunes from Europe, songs like “Yevareich es Beis Yisrael” and “Kol rinah viyeshuah be’ahalai tzaddkim… Yemin, yemin, yemin Hashem osah chayil.” I guess you could call them the Rabbis’ Sons’ Fathers!

As a side note, our first Rabbis’ Sons record was supposed to be called Songs of Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva, as it was really a fundraising project for the yeshivah, which our families were deeply connected to. But when the rosh yeshivah, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, heard the 60s guitar-influenced music, he said he would rather the record be called something else, so we changed it and went for something with a bit more of a catchy ring.

WHAT I TOOK FROM MY GRANDPARENTS

My father’s mother would join us for Shabbos, and she loved to sing the old-time “Menuchah Vesimchah” that she’d brought along from her life in Poland. We included that niggun from my childhood Shabbos table on the Kol Salonika Volume Five, Songs of Shabbos album.