This year, this niggun was an anthem because we showed it. He’s always there for us, but this year, we were there for Him too.
She is, technically, my boss, so she has the final say, but if you’re reading this, it’s because she understood my need to write about it just the same, because the song has become deeply personal. Oh, so personal.
I have long been enamored by the Twerski family, their music along with their Torah, chassidus, and outreach, but in this case, it isn’t the melody of “Hoshia Es Amecha” alone that makes me consider it a legacy song.
In the shul in which I daven, on the first Yom Kippur we were a kehillah, just after N’eilah, we sang ‘L’shanah Haba’ah b’Yerushalayim.’ But then the rav started to sing another niggun — “Hoshia Es Amecha,” and that became part of the most exalted moments of the year. Later, I learned that Rav Shlomo Freifeld sang the same niggun after N’eilah, and his rebbi, Rav Hutner, would sing it after Mussaf on Hoshanah Rabbah — the culmination of three months of intense tefillah.
Great tzaddikim incorporated a song composed here, in America, making it part of a repertoire featuring songs that were centuries old, brought over from Hungary, Russia, or Poland. (Note: The song wasn’t composed in the Brooklyn part of America, but in the Milwaukee of 1960. A year later, Rabbi Twerski would take it across state lines to Pittsburgh, city of steel and bridges. The song would come to celebrate a nation made of steel, and the bridges that keep them connected.)
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