Let These Moments Stay with Me

The energy of JOEY NEWCOMB’s new album is movement, like a journey to the past coursing through the Jewish soul. Actually, the gifted singer and songwriter composed several of the songs on HOW ARE YOU, REB YID? while traveling — some through the valley of tears in Poland, and others while visiting the holy places of our heritage in Eretz Yisrael.

There’s the song, “Kivrei Tzaddikim,” which came to Joey when he and a group of talmidim were leaving the kever of Rabi Meir Baal Haneis, high above the blue waters of the Kinneret. “We had spent a day davening at all the holy kevarim, and I had this overwhelming feeling of gratitude. How many people in the past could just get on a plane and a bus and be present at the kevarim of the holy tzaddikim? As we got back on the bus, I started to sing, ‘Thank you Hashem that I was zocheh to be by the kivrei tzaddikim, thank you Hashem that I was zocheh to be by the mekomos hakedoshim.’”

Another powerful song, “Moment,” was written on Reb Joey’s first visit to Poland last January. He was traveling with a group from Rabbi Mordechai Yehudah Groner’s yeshivah, Ateres Shimon in Far Rockaway where he is a rebbi, and their first stop was at the Warsaw Ghetto. The old Jewish cemetery and the ghetto walls, topped with barbed wire, were their first visual evidence of the Holocaust, and emotions ran high.

“I knew that we needed to hold on to those waves of feelings, otherwise they would fly away,” Reb Joey says. “Then I recalled the famous Ramban on the pasuk in Shir Hashirim, ‘Im ta’iru… es ha’ahava ad shetechpatz,’ where he explains that one has to crystallize feelings of love for Hakadosh Baruch Hu into a ‘cheifetz’— an object. The low part of the song is this pasuk from Shir Hashirim, and the high part is ‘Hashem, please let these moments stay with me, Hashem, please let these moments change me, Hashem, please let me hold on to what I’ve seen.’”