Some of the Jewish music world’s most talented composers are also marbitzei Torah.... it’s about letting everyone hear the soundtrack of the beis medrash
Sometimes it is the pure joy of a special moment that inspires a niggun. The famous “Shalom Aleichem” from Regesh 3 — Shabbos was composed by Rav Brazil one Shabbos 50 years ago. He describes the niggun as a miracle — “I just started singing it!” — and then waited another eight years to release it on the Shabbos album.
“A turning point for me was the day that I got a phone call on the payphone at Yeshiva Shor Yoshuv, where I was a rebbi,” Rav Brazil recalls. “Someone called me to the phone and it was Reb Josh Silbermintz. I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me, but he’d called up to thank me ‘for the tovah I did for Klal Yisrael by giving them Shalom Aleichem.’
“‘What do you mean, everyone has their Sholom Aleichem,’ I replied. And he told me that the widespread melody used in most non-chassidish households for Shalom Aleichem had been composed by a Conservative cantor and that had always bothered him, so he was glad I had composed my tune.”
Rav Brazil is a beis medrash Yid through and through, regardless of his popularity. And there’s no song that reflects that as much as “Yesod Hachassidus Veshoresh Ha’avodah,” a fruit of learning in the beis medrash, as Rav Brazil sat and repeated to himself the first line of the Sefer Mesillas Yesharim again and again. Soon the repetition became a tune, and inspired a complex, four-part niggun that appears on Regesh Vol 11.
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