Spirit lives beyond us...

This week a woman named Debbie Friedman died well before her allotted years. She was younger than me and I didn't know her.  I never met her.  She lived in America and I knew little about her private persona. All I knew was that she was a singer/songwriter and her music touched me very deeply.

Debbie wrote music for Jewish liturgy, or rather her music became that which was used in Jewish services throughout the world.  She seemed to be a rather unassuming woman.  I never read much about her or knew of her circumstances, but I knew her voice.  The first time I heard her music I think was when my son was in Hebrew School and studying for his bar mitzvah.  I originally thought some of her songs were a bit 'hokey', a bit soppy and sentimental and didn't give her music another thought.

About a year or two later, when my mother was very sick and dying of cancer I found a tape of Debbie Friedman's music amongst my mother's things.  I began to play it whenever I was sitting with my mum.  The music seemed to soothe her increasingly distressed spirit and without giving it much attention, it began to do the same for me.

This all took place at least ten years before I began chanting and found people like Krishna Das, Jai Uttal and Premal and Miten.  I didn't know then the power of music to feed me on a soul level, I only knew that Debbie Friedman's singing touched something very deep in me and it felt both sad and good at the same time.

After my mother died I took this tape cassette of Debbie singing home with me and threw it into a drawer.  I didn't pull it out again for a few years.  I put it into the cassette player in my car and when I put it on I was once again transported to my mother's bedside and remembering the preciousness of that time.  I also found the music uplifting and sometimes quite beautiful.. her music combines Hebrew prayer with folk-like melody.  I found myself singing along as I drove and the melodies stayed with me for days. some of the tracks were still a bit syrupy for me, but I loved the simplicity of them and the clear sound of Debbie's voice.

A few years later, my dear friend, Pragit, died suddenly and there was one song that kept playing in a repeating loop in my head.  It was a song called Lechi Lach. The words expressed for me a message that I so wanted my old friend to hear and I sang it to myself and played the track again and again in the days following Pragit's death.

"Lechi lach to a land that I will show you
Lech li-cha to a place you do not know
Lechi lach on your journey I will bless you
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach"

The death of this stranger has touched me more deeply than I can express and has taken me completely by surprise. I owe her a debt of gratitude for bringing another source of joyful beauty into my life.  It's perhaps not the best music in the world, it's not Beethoven, hell, it's not even James Taylor, but it helps me to soar above my day to day world and find something of spirit in myself.   

I wish Debbie Friedman a beautiful passage to wherever and whatever comes next.  She was indeed a blessing to so many and I thank her for that.

I have never put links on my blog to anything, but if you want to hear her singing :

Please listen to it here:

http://www.ritualwell.org/lifecycles/babieschildren/babynamingsimchatbat/sitefolder.2005-06-07.5117027380/file.2005-06-30.6510658864