Mazel Tov. Mordechai Ben David and Verdiger, seventy. Yes yes, that’s the number. suffix. Including the double envelopes.
Tuesday this week, Election Day, marks the seventieth anniversary of his presence in the world. He was born in 1951 in the United States, to his parents R. David and Malka Verdiger, a couple of Holocaust survivors from Europe, and as a child he entered the world of poetry when he sang on the records of his father, the famous cantor.
Usually for a birthday bring a gift. Probably on a date like this. But when it comes to Mordechai Ben David, what is not given to him – we will remain debtors. After all, he has been giving us gifts for almost seventy years. It is difficult to overstate its founding role in shaping the culture – forgiveness, worship of God – of entire generations.
Every album of his, every performance, almost every song, are a deep touch to the soul.
I wrote “almost every song”, because you do not have to connect to every song of his, it is a matter of taste, but there is no doubt that our birthday groom creates for decades a continuous soundtrack that accompanies the religious experience of hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world. True, in Hassidic music today there are countless singers who sing, each in his own talent, each in his own style, but Mordechai Ben-David is the best of them, the oldest of them, and most importantly – the first of them.
In fact, he is (with the help of the composers and arrangers who have worked with him all these years) the father of Hassidic music as we know it today. Before him were great cantors, there were musicians of Hasidic courtyards, there was R. Shlomo Carlebach who is a genre in itself, but he Mordechai Ben David was the first Hassidic singer. He was followed by everyone. Including the wondrous Abraham Fried.
So I thought to myself that on the occasion of the solemn date we might make some sort of interim summary of the gifts he has given us to date. We will thank him for them, and we will thank the voter for singing songs that brought this great light to the world this week seventy years ago. Just at the right moment. In a generation that was, and still is, so much needed.
Does that sound like a blast to you? So let’s try to remember what the Jewish world got from the music of Mordechai Ben David.
Belief in the eternity of Israel (“For he will not forsake, for the Lord will not forsake, for the Lord will not forsake with him”)
In order to understand the songs of Mordechai Ben-David, and more than that the mental place from which he sings from the age of zero to the age of seventy, and with God’s help many years from now, one must go back a few years before his birth, to the Holocaust from which his parents survived. Of all his generation, born to shady udders. Some lost children and spouses in the Holocaust, remarried and started new families and lives.
The work of Mordechai Ben David is a work of a classic second generation. And I’m not just talking about heartbreaking songs that commemorate the martyrs of the Holocaust (such as “Know”), but all the songs. Just about everyone. Also, and perhaps most importantly, the happy ones.
There was a Holocaust, six million Jews were murdered, we remember it every day, but we keep going. We not only live and build and establish families and institutions of Torah and glorious Jewish life, but also ministers.
Expectation of salvation (“Messiah, Messiah, Messiah”)
But with all the optimism and doing and building, nothing will be perfect here until redemption. There are countless melodies to the words “I believe in complete faith in the coming of the Messiah”, but it is clear that the most famous is “Messiah” by Mordechai Ben David and his partner in the musical work Mona Rosenblum.
This song puts the expectation of Christ on the Jewish agenda like no other song has done before it. By the way, the longing for redemption was present in the music of Mordechai Ben-David years before, in so many songs in Hebrew and English, and also in the song “I believe” that he himself composed (like many of his famous songs). A song that signed daily, for years, the Channel 7 ship broadcasts.
The affection of the land and the fulfillment of the vision of the prophets (“and those who come to the holy mountain and rejoice in the house of prayer”)
Mordechai Ben David was born and lives in the United States, but his heart is in the Land of Israel. This is not a cliché. First of all, on a practical level, he bought a house in Jerusalem and plans to move there soon. Throughout the years, he has been and prays at the Western Wall much more than the average Israeli. I am sure that the separation from the land in the year of the corona was very difficult for him. But let’s leave his private life.
This column tries to summarize the agenda, its platform. The values to which he composed whole generations through music. Well, the Land of Israel is very much present there. I am sure that over the years many Jews have immigrated to Israel inspired by his songs. But it’s more than that. We, too, who were born to live in Israel, felt through his poetry how much it is not obvious.
How exciting it is to have the privilege of living in the prophecy of Zechariah and Yossi Green. And most importantly, we learned with his songs to miss what we lost and that he will return. And you brought to my holy mountain, and rejoiced in my house of prayer. Their ascents and their sacrifices to the will of my altar, for my house of prayer shall be called to all the peoples, ”he sang, with such emotion, the prophecy of Isaiah, that all who heard it could not but believe, not imagine.
Caring for the Jewish Fate (“Let my people go”)
Mordechai Ben-David is also a protest singer, who accompanied many of the great public struggles of the Jewish world in his songs and performances. In the early 1980s, he sang the moving song ‘Hold on’ to prisoner Zion Natan Sharansky and dedicated his album ‘Let my people go’ to the Jews who were behind the Iron Curtain.
A few years later, when a struggle broke out in Jerusalem over the establishment of a large missionary center on the Mount of Olives, he composed and sang the hit “Jerusalem Not for Sale.” In the next decade, the 1990s, the difficult days of Oslo, he released the song “Hebron Since Forever.”
His holiday appearances in the Patriarchate system have become a tradition that has brought tens of thousands of families on pilgrimage to the City of the Fathers.
And how is it possible without mentioning Gush Katif. Performances there have also become a tradition. Mordechai Ben-David was connected to this flourishing land in his life and also in its destruction, when his poem “Prayer for the Poor” became a symbol of the cry of pain for displacement.
Chassidut and connection to the righteous (“A Shabes in Mazibuz”)
We get to live in a generation of “your springs will be scattered across.” Stork books, thirst, stork lessons, close to you. It was not always like that. But long before Rabbi Moshe Shilat was born, Mordechai Ben-David instilled in the masses the light of Hasidism. First of all in his very being, in who he is. It’s so obvious that the big rock star of the religious world looks the way he does.
I’m not just talking about his exterior, yes? Dubla Glickman can also infect a beard and wigs. I’m talking about the inner world radiating out of it. About how he stands on stage, about how he sings, how he prays. He is a singer and he is a follower. You see in front of you a Jew of form. A Jew who is connected to the doctrine of Hasidism, to the work of joy, to the sorrow of the Divine, to prayer, to the sanctity of the Sabbath, to the righteous. And this of course is also reflected in his songs that exposed us, for the first time, to a wonderful world.
Examples? “Shabbat in Mezibuz” to the tune of R. Avi Fishhof, who takes you to the special atmosphere of Shabbat in the Zion of the Baal Shem Tov, and the prayer for the tombs of the righteous, ancient melodies from the courtyards of the Admors that Mordechai Ben David renewed, and of course The definite one, the late Rebbe Marimnitz, the man with whom the acquaintance made Mordechai Ben-David who he is.
The truth is that more than any moving song about the Rebbe, the songs “Odech” and “Y-H Ribon” that erupted from him in the founding years in which he was close to Rebbe Marimnitz testify to what a connection with a Tzaddik can bring about.
Circle of the year (“Rosh Hashana will write and on the day of Yom Kippur fast sign”)
And even before the teaching of Hasidism, the songs and poetry of Mordechai Ben-David gave us a taste for the Jewish circle of the year. For the songs of the holiday, for praise, for the laps and of course for the prayers of the holy days.
Today there are so many songs around Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The month of Elul and ten days of repentance are not long enough for us to hear all the treasures. But for years there was only one tape, “and all believers,” that we would put on tape every year with the coming of the terrible days and hear it in loops. Then we would sing her songs at all the prayers and feasts. Well, it actually lasts to this day.
It is difficult to imagine the prayers of the terrible days without the melodies of “and all believers”, “there is no allowance”, “on Rosh Hashanah” (with his thrilling reading: “How many will pass, and how many will be saved? Who will live and who will die?”), And “In the Book of Life.”
I want to clarify: this was not background music for the terrible days, these were the first songs that defined our terrible days. That gave us the tone, the emotion.
A living relationship with the Creator of the world (“For your mercy is great upon me, upon me”)
The last gift includes all the best in the world. To turn our connection with the Creator of the world, our religious life, into something alive, experiential, exciting, tearful. How do you pray for the education of children?
He who heard Mordecai the son of David standing on the stage of the ashes and begging “Well, may there be a desire before you, O Lord our God and the God of our fathers, that you may do good deeds in your eyes, and walk in straight paths before you and sanctify in your holiness” How do you feel about receiving Shabbat at the Western Wall? Anyone who has heard the magical description in “Just One Shabbos” knows. How do you pray for Jerusalem? Anyone who has heard the cry “Have mercy on your people our form” knows how to pray.
What will redemption look like? Anyone who has heard of Mordechai Ben-David describes in “Someday” Avraham and Yitzchak who will welcome us and Yaakov and his sons who will stand and smile know that there is something to look forward to.
And there are so many more examples (many rare records of old performances have recently surfaced on the wonderful Facebook page “Nostalgic Productions”). Hundreds of songs. Hundreds of gifts for all situations. For weekdays and Saturdays and holidays, for the blessed routine and after severe terrorist attacks, for moments of crisis in the yeshiva and for dancing at the wedding.
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So congratulations, R. Mordechai. We’re so glad you were born. What would we do without you? What would we look like? Thank you so much for the seventy years. The first seventy years. We are waiting for many more new songs, many gifts.
And you know what excites me most about your birthday? Maybe there is someone who will read this column, someone who grew up in other musical districts, will google “Mordechai Ben David” and start the whole story from the beginning.
Do you understand? For him you are not seventy, for him you have only just been born.
• The column is published in Besheva