The life & Legacy of
Debbie Friedman
FROM THE LINER NOTES OF SONGS OF THE SPIRIT (2005)
At once joyful, uplifting, soul-full, modern, elegantly simple and deeply anchored in Jewish tradition. This is the singular combination of qualities that makes Debbie Friedman's songs so singularly beloved, and which have earned her a cadre of "chasidim," devoted fans for whom her music is a central part of their spiritual practice.
In her nearly 35 years of composing, Debbie has forever changed American Jewish prayer and song, with her music now part of the prayer tradition at many synagogues and camps. What really sets her apart from the dozens of other Jewish singer-songwriters around today is her gift for writing music that is at once deeply authentic and also quickly sears itself on the listener's heart. Most of it is rooted in our sacred texts but composed in a way that is easily learned and enjoyed by people even if they've never before read the particular psalm or Biblical passage on which a song is based. The lyrics often combine Hebrew and English, and are set to exquisite harmonies.
Even if they've never before heard her song "L'chi Lach" ("Go Forth," based on the chapter in Genesis in which God instructs Abraham to leave the land of his home, promising blessings in return), for example, people hearing it for the first time are singing along in full voice just a few bars in.
However people first encounter Debbie's music–through one of her 20 albums or at one of the feminist seders whose songs she has written–it invariably makes a strong impact.
And whether she is on stage at Carnegie Hall in front of thousands of people, playing for hundreds at a synagogue or singing for a dozen people at a Jewish healing service, Debbie brings the same gifts; gorgeously meaningful lyrics, a warm voice which spans the alto and soprano registers and, most of all, an open heart.
And her gentle, folk-based melodies sound just right to Debbie's baby-boomer peers, whose musical tastes, like her own, were shaped by the 1960s and early 70s. Her egalitarian sensibility and unselfconscious feminism have made her beloved by a wide range of Jews. Her music is ageless, timeless and transcends denominational boundaries.
One Orthodox woman said, after hearing Debbie play at a Jewish education conference, "I've been praying all my life but today was the first time I felt like I was really davenning."
"People are hungry, really hungry" for a sense of spiritual connectedness, Debbie says. "Jews of every age are looking for a place to live their Jewish lives and to put their Jewish hearts."
"No one—really, no one—rivals Debbie Friedman in providing contemporary Jewish spirituality with music that gives worshippers their voice," said Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, a professor at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in New York. "Here is a musical genius wed to Jewish authenticity and a keen sense for what today's men and women seek both artistically and religiously in the 21st century."
All of it springs from a deeply religious place for Debbie. While she was growing up, the third of four children, her father was a kosher butcher and at first, the family belonged to a traditional synagogue. But when she was five, her family moved from Utica, New York to St Paul, Minnesota and joined a Reform congregation.
And, while Debbie insisted that she attend Hebrew school in a traditional congregation, she also became deeply tied to the Reform movement, working in its camps and youth groups. It was there that she first wrote and tried out most of her early songs, which found an immediately enthusiastic audience.
"There was a whole world of text that needed to be set to music. It was wide open," says Debbie. Using her music, "kids were singing prayers and we weren't using James Taylor anymore. We were using tefilla (prayer) now and it was really working. People were really singing and davenning and it was exciting."
Debbie has been composing these songs, which have become part of the canon of contemporary American Jewish liturgical music, since 1972. She showed early musical promise, singing opera at 18 months, but no one had any inkling then that her compositions would become something that Reform movement cantonal students would one day be required to learn.
Today many of her songs, like those written by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, are sung by people who have no idea who composed them, but who come back to them time and again for their beauty and depth.
The first song she wrote was to the "V'ahavta," from the part of the most central Jewish prayer, the Sh'ma, which says "And you shall love God with all your heart."
She was 20 years old, sitting on a bus on her way from New Jersey to the Port Authority to meet her grandmother when it came to her. "I just heard it in my head," Debbie says. "A lot of times I just hear the stuff in my head."
She'd been playing guitar for a couple of years, after picking one up when she was 16 and working as a babysitter at Camp Herzl in Webster Wisconsin. "I play by ear so after a few notes I picked up what the campers were singing. "Then I started playing Peter, Paul and Mary songs and Judy Collins."
Peter Yarrow, of Peter. Paul and Mary has said "I've sung with her and watched her perform many times, sometimes in the wee hours at spontaneous gatherings during Jewish educational conferences. Hers is the music of jubilation and confirmation," he told the Baltimore Jewish Times. "It is a call to community and commonality that rages against the darkness and spreads light."
Soon she was working as a summer camp song-leader. A couple of months after composing her tune for "V'ahavta" she played it for the kids at camp, who responded by standing up, putting their arms around one another and singing along. When she saw how it moved them, she knew she was on to something. While there she began writing other songs as well, including her compositions for "L'cha Dodi" and "Mi Chamocha."
"It was catching on like wildfire." she says. "The very first thing that caught on was the V'ahavta, which took the country by storm" across the Reform movement, which today is American Judaism's largest denomination.
But it all started with the kids in the movement's camps, and within a few years the music was getting picked up at Conservative movement-affiliated camps and youth group gatherings as well.
"Mi Chamocha" (Who is Like You, God?) came to Debbie while she was strumming the America song "A Horse With No Name," which was a hit that year. "Playing the chords it just turned into Mi Chamocha," she says.
Soon after that, in 1973, a Reform rabbi she met at the camp, who also had a synagogue in Chicago, commissioned her to compose a Chanukah cantata for his congregation. "He said 'I don't want what happened to Irving Berlin to happen to you,' " she remembers. "He said 'I want you to continue to write Jewish music and stay with us.' "
It was with the help of that rabbi, Sam Karff, that she put out her first two albums, Sing Unto God and Not By Might, Not By Power.
During a discussion group at a Reform youth group winter regional gathering, in her early 20s, Debbie was noodling around with her guitar and wrote "Not By Might, Not By Power." At a similar conclave, sitting on the floor, she wrote "Im Tirtzu." (If You Will It).
Also in 1973, an uncle of Debbie's died and she wrote a suite composed of 7 songs to comfort her aunt and cousins. The suite was based on Song of Songs entitled Arise My Love and included "Kumi Lach," "Arise My Love" and "Dodi Li," (My Beloved is Mine) among others. "Arise My Love" was the first song she wrote for that suite, taking it straight out of the Shir HaShirim text."
Debbie wrote a new version of the prayer for travelers, "Tfilat Haderech," because she found its traditional language too negative. "I love the idea of having a blessing when we go on our way, but hated how negative it was, so I just flipped it around," she says.
One of her earliest songs not based directly on Torah or prayer book text was "Sing Unto God." The inspiration for that came from her experience in her high school choir, where they had sung a distinctly Christian song based on that theme. Debbie had moved back to Minnesota and was working at a department store. "I'd take no lunch or coffee breaks and would go teach music at my alma mater with the plan that I was going to make a demo tape," she says.
While today the Reform movement is more traditionally oriented, in many ways, than it was when Debbie started out, she was responsible for integrating some of Judaism's traditional elements back into it.
Take the idea of the messiah, for instance—someone whose arrival traditional Jews pray for each day. Debbie was working at Reform movement Camp Swig in the mid 1970s, and on Mondays they abstained from meat in order to raise campers' consciousness about world hunger. "I was thinking about looking at someone else's life, and how you have to put yourself in other people's place. You have to have an awareness of everyone around you," Debbie says. That led her to write "Ani Ma-amin" ("I Believe"), the opening lines of a traditional Jewish prayer about believing with perfect faith in the coming of moshiach.
Of her song "V'sham'ru," Debbie says "I don't know where this song came from but it haunts me. That one just comes pouring out of my kishkes. I was living in Los Angeles, sitting at home, and it just happened. I cried when I sang it, but then I got myself together."
"You Are The One," written in the early 1990s, is one of her favorite songs, Debbie says, even though it centers on seeing God reflected through nature and "I don't like to be outside. I'm allergic and I'm Jewish, and my idea of a good time is to be inside with air conditioning," she says, laughing.
A close friend who worked as a naturalist and park ranger showed Debbie prayers written by Reb Nachman of Bratslav who died in 1810 at the age of 38, and taught through parables and stories which are still studied by many today.
Like so many of her songs, "Modim" popped out of Debbie fully formed. She was teaching about the traditional Amidah portion of the prayer service at a Jewish educators' conference. "I didn't have a melody for it and the people I was teaching with wanted one, so I left the room and went into the hall. Seven minutes later I came back in with this. We were all just hysterical laughing. I played it and people there recorded it for me. It became a very powerful piece," she says.
The song "Al Tasteir (Don't Hide Your Face)," which she based on Psalm 27, is a particularly personal song for Debbie. "It's a response to the internal chaos that reflects the chaos in the world.
There continue to be times in my life when I hope that God won t turn away from me. Particularly because I need the strength and the wisdom to be able to know how to do this work," she says. "Before I do a concert I sit in the back room and ask God to help me find the right words, tell God 'I need You to help me to find the way to find the right words to reach these people and help bring Your words and Your life to them.'"
Debbie wrote the song "Build This World Together" for Maynard Wishner, who had been leading the Jewish federation movement but in 1995 was too ill to attend its annual convention. "This is what he stood for," Debbie says of her friend, who died not long after. I took little pieces of text and linked them together."
The song "Light These Lights," which some people sing before they light Shabbat and holiday candles, was written while Debbie was in Manhattan—this was in 1995, before she moved to New York—staying at a hotel before leading one of the early feminist seders run by Mayan: The Jewish Women's Project of the Jewish Community Center of New York.
"I heard the tekhinah they were using," she says of one of the informal prayers written by devoutly pious women, "and I just sat on the bed and it just came out, just poured out of me. I just played it and it came out the way it is," she says.
The Ma'yan-run feminist seders, which ended in 2005 after attracting thousands of women (and a few men) over several nights each year in New York, quickly became synonymous with Debbie's music.
Now it is sung by literally thousands more women each year in the women's and feminist seders run all over North America by synagogues, Jewish community centers and women's Torah study groups.
A few years back there was a remarkable sight to see at the largest annual Jewish convention. Over a thousand convention-goers in business suits packed into a ballroom and swayed arm-in-arm as they sang Debbie's prayer for healing, the "Mi Shebeirach," leaving some of them unexpectedly teary-eyed.
It was a jolting charge to the spiritual batteries for many of those at the General Assembly of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for local Jewish federations, a meeting which is usually just a mass meeting of technocrats, funders and fundees.
Singing Debbie's music together "was like being cleansed inside," said Marci Erlebacher, an employee of the Syracuse, New York Jewish federation, at the time.
One of the newer songs on this album, "The Water In The Well," has a funky salsa-like beat. It came out of Debbie's reading through "The Book of Legends," the exhaustive compilation of rabbinic commentaries, extracted from the Talmud and arranged by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky published first in Odessa in 1809.
The well of water which Jewish tradition tells us followed the prophetess Miriam through her travels in the desert, sustaining the Israelites after they fled Egypt and its enslavement, is said to have dried up when she died. Commentaries in "The Book of Legends" say that the figs and vines dried up without her well to sustain them. "I think everybody has a little piece of Miriam's well with us," Debbie says. "That's part of our connectedness" to the Jews of the past and our shared history.
Debbie has also written some popular Jewish music for children—her English and Hebrew versions of the Alef-Bet Song, "The Latke Song" and The Dreidel Song" among them. Her music has been licensed to several kid-related video projects, including Hanukkah Tales & Tunes and a Barney in Concert video, in which the peripatetic purple dinosaur sings "The Alef Bet Song."
The Tree of Life division of Hallmark has even published Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah and all-occasion greeting cards featuring excerpts of Debbie's lyrics.
Debbie celebrated the 25th anniversary of her singing-songwriting career by performing at three consecutive sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, where she prompted people to put their arms around one another and embrace each other as they swayed to her moving music. Not every performer can turn her first appearance in the august and storied concert hall into such an intimate experience.
In addition to performing at between 40 and 50 concerts in a typical year, Debbie is also taking her music and message overseas. In the summer of 2004 she went with Project Kesher and about 150 American Jewish women to the former Soviet Union, where they met with about another 100 women there, and Debbie sang for them on the Volga River.
She has, of course, been invited as a cantorial soloist at synagogues throughout the country and at many of them, her music is now part of their regular liturgy. But her influence is not confined to the Jewish sphere–along with Jewish schools and camps, churches and their music and youth groups also use Debbie's music for teaching and worship.
Debbie is the founder of Hava Nashira, an annual song-leading workshop at the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, and has taught on the faculty at special programs run by a diverse set of institutions, including the Duke University Divinity School, Brandeis University, Franklin Pierce College and the Kalsman Institute at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.
Debbie wrote one of her most beloved compositions, a melody for the traditional plea for peace, "Oseh Shalom," in 1981. "I was just sitting at the piano and it just came," Debbie says. "This is one of my most popular songs. It has a little bit of that chassidische flavor."
In everything she writes, Debbie integrates a feminist perspective, adding in references to the Biblical matriarchs and references to God in feminized Hebrew language.
Celebrating women, and filling in the white lines in between the black letters of living Torah, where women's voices and experiences are absent from our traditional texts, has spurred Debbie to write many of her best-loved songs. She is the first female composer to contribute significantly to popular Jewish liturgy.
When two friends of hers, Savina Teubal and Marcia Cohen Spiegel, decided to mark their 60th birthdays by creating a new ritual called a "Simchat Chochmah," or Celebration of Wisdom, Debbie wrote music to accompany them, songs which today are among her best-loved and most often sung.
For Savina Teubal's ritual, which was in 1986 and is believed to be the first Simchat Chochmah ever held, Debbie wrote "Bruchot HaBaot," "L'chi Lach" and "Kadish D'Rabanan" (The Rabbis' Blessing).
For Marcia Cohn Speigel's ceremony Debbie wrote "Miriam's Song" and "Mi Shebeirach," which today are sung at just about every women's and feminist seder, and Jewish healing service and baby girl's welcoming ritual around.
"The morning of the event I went to the traditional text and just translated it," Debbie recalls. "We held the tallis up to make a chuppa so that people could come and stand under it. When we asked the congregation if anyone wanted to come under the tallis, like 150 people came up. That's the day that the Jewish healing movement began. I have goose bumps even now," Debbie says.
"It was the day people said aloud I need help, I need healing."
That movement has taken off, with Jewish spiritual healing groups in several cities from the San Francisco Bay area to New York. In Manhattan each month for the last decade Debbie, with Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, has run a Jewish spiritual healing gathering where she sings and people—dealing with challenges like cancer and depression—come to join her in song and meditation, and leave feeling strengthened and consoled. They began at Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side, moved to the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, another synagogue, when Rabbi Strassfeld switched congregations and are now held at the Jewish Community Center of New York.
"I'm deeply moved by some of the things people say to me, like when they get their chemotherapy they listen to the Mi Shebeirach, or that their child died or their leg got amputated, and that in some way my music helps them get through it," Debbie says. "You just don't ever know what people are going through."
Her sweet song "The Angels' Blessing," which is based on the bedtime prayers, was written on the occasion of a women's gathering in Los Angeles with writer Esther Broner and others. "Esther was using that text for a talk and that morning I wrote the song." Debbie says. "It percolates for a long time and never comes out until the last minute."
She is also one of the few women appointed to the Honorary Committee for the Celebration of 350 Years of Jews in North America. Among the other awards she has been given are the prestigious Covenant Award for outstanding contributions to Jewish education, the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Performing Arts from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Jewish Fund for Justice's Women of Valor award.
Lo Bashamayim He. This line from Deuteronomy tells us that the Torah is not in heaven but here on earth. With her singular combination of divine gifts, an angelic voice, an open heart and feet firmly on the ground, Debbie bridges that span. And through the music she brings us—she is quick to call herself a vessel, a conduit—we cross that bridge, too. "I love that I've been given the reward of being the shlichah (emissary) of this music, honest to God," she says. "I get to see people's faces, their tears and their joy too. It's a great trip, you know?" Debra Nussbaum Cohen, July 2005
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