Rabbi's Blog

Lu Yehi - Let it Be - Kol Nidre 5783

Lu Yehi, Lu Yehi, Ana, Lu Yehi
Kol shenevakesh - Lu Yehi.

May it be, may it be - Please - may it be
All that we seek, all that we ask for - may it be.

These words are very familiar to some of us and probably not at all to others. They are from the chorus of a very popular song by Nomi Shemer written in 1973.  Forty nine years ago, pretty much to the day on both calendars, the awful Yom Kippur war broke out in the Sinai desert, which is the context for the creative birth of this song.  

Lu Yehi became the anthem of the Yom Kippur war and one of the most beloved and famous songs in Israel's history. It started out as a Hebrew version of “Let it Be,” with Shemer’s words set to Paul McCartney’s tune. Shemer, probably most known for Yerushalayim shel Zahav - Jerusalem of Gold, probably understood the phrase “Let it Be” to mean “would that it were” lu yehi - making it a prayer and a wish “if only!”, rather than a suggestion to leave things alone and let them take their course.  

Nomi Shemer’s husband had just returned from serving in the reserves in the Sinai, and she played the song for him. “He said, ‘I won't let you waste that song on a foreign melody - this is a Jewish war, so give it a Jewish tune.’”  In the midst of the continuing war, Shemer was scheduled to sing on TV and she worked on the melody in the taxi on the way to the studio and performed it live. By the time she reached the Sinai front herself to play for the troops, many of the soldiers already knew it and could sing along. Lu y’hi.

There are many verses to Shemer’s song and the words are powerful. Here are some of them in Hebrew and English.

Od yesh mifras lavan ba'ofek
mul anan shachor kaved
Kol shenevakesh - Lu Yehi.

There is still a white sail on the horizon
Opposite a heavy black cloud
All that we ask for - may it be

What is the sound that I hear
The cry of the shofar and the sound of drums
All that we ask for - may it be

Lu tishama betoch kol eileh
Gam tefila achat mipi
Kol shenevakesh lu yehi

If only there can be heard within all this
One prayer from my lips also
All that we seek - may it be

This is the end of summer, the end of the path
Allow them to return safely here
All that we seek, may it be

And if suddenly, rising from the darkness
Over our heads, the light of a star shines
All that we ask for, may it be

Az ten shalva veten gam ko'ach
Lechol eileh shenohav
Kol shenevakesh - lu yehi

Then grant tranquility and also grant strength
To all those we love
All that we seek, may it be

The story of this song is told in the remarkable book, published earlier this year by the Canadian Israeli author Matti Friedman, Who by Fire - Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.  It tells the story of the brutal Yom Kippur war through almost unknown accounts of Leonard Cohen’s surprise and sudden visit to the Sinai to support and play for the troops.  The role of music during and after that awful war, Cohen’s, Shemer’s, Oshik Levy’s, Yaffa Yarkoni’s, Matti Caspi’s, Meir Ariel’s and others, is presented as a moving backdrop to the stories of devastating loss of life, hope and morale.  

Some of the music at that point had been ‘folksy, entertain the troops singalongs with accordions,’ but Leonard Cohen, an artist I have loved and admired for years and saw live at Red Rocks, brought something different. This was before he had written Halleluyah, Anthem or Who by Fire and he would sing songs in the Sinai like Suzanne, So Long Marianne and Bird on a Wire, which had emotional and spiritual depth, and he also he wrote verses to his song Lover, Lover, Lover while he was there in the Sinai that were never published:

I went down to the desert
To help my brothers fight
I knew that  they weren’t wrong
I knew that they weren’t right
But bones must stand up straight and walk
And blood must move around
And men go making ugly lines
Across the holy ground

Friedman, based on archives, memoirs and conversations with people who were there, describes the role and impact of some of Leonard Cohen’s music like this:

Cohen’s text worked on different frequencies, like the best prayers.  The melody served the function ascribed to music by the Hasidic rabbis, that is, to make feeling and meaning available to those unable or unwilling to understand the words, or even to suggest feelings and meanings for which words fall short.  P.75

And a young pilot who was there called Shoshi, remembers squeezing into a packed theater where Cohen was playing and the only place left was on the floor right in front of the poet artist himself. He recalls “we were two kids in flight suits. I remember him looking at us a lot...The war was at its height. We had losses. It spoke to me. The melodies were familiar.  We didn’t understand all the words, but it penetrated the heart.” P.76

The power of music to penetrate the heart and help us access feeling and meaning goes way beyond the ravages of war, of course, and many of us can relate to this through our own experiences of music opening us up to deep emotion.   It certainly connects to the power of Yom Kippur itself where the combination of music, liturgy, prayer, ritual and community allow us to ascend and transcend. It was only a few months later back on the Greek Island of Hydra that Cohen started writing Who by Fire, riffing on U’netaneh Tokef, the haunting prayer at the heart of these Days of Awe. Although he never stated it publicly, it seems extremely likely that this creative masterpiece, derived from our liturgy, came from his experience just after the previous Yom Kippur, in the middle of the war in the Sinai desert.

Who by fire
Who by water
Who in the sunshine
Who in the nightmare
Who by stern command
Who by his own hand
Who in the midst of love
Who by the angry mob
And who shall I say is calling

One of the most moving stories in the book is of Beit HaShita, a secular Kibbutz in the north of Israel devastated by the loss of eleven young men in the Yom Kippur war.  In 1990, seventeen years later, the beloved songwriter Yair Rosenblum visited the kibbutz and ended up writing a new melody for U’Netaneh Tokef, recruiting Hanoch Albalak, a member of the kibbutz with a beautiful voice, to sing it at the end of the ceremony on the erev Yom Kippur that year. The singing “broke open the gates of heaven” and moved the whole kibbutz into silence and tears and reverence. A deeply religious moment on a secular kibbutz. Rosenblum’s melody spread, becoming the most popular for the prayer, and capturing the imagination of religious and secular Israel alike, as Nomi Shemer’s song had seventeen years earlier. . 

Music, prayer and poetry are deeply connected to the soul and to the soul of this day in many ways. 

I am particularly struck by the musical and linguistic differences I opened with between Let it Be and Lu Yehi.  One of my birthday presents to myself this year was The Lyrics by Paul McCartney, which has all the words to every song he wrote along with the story behind the song and some wonderful photos.  Let it be. Sir Paul, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1997, says of that song that it’s about having a sense of the complete picture, about being resigned to the global view.  People have always assumed it’s a religious song because of “Mother Mary comes to me,” but Paul’s mother was called Mary and came to him in a dream during the tumultuous time when the band was breaking up and said to him, “everything will be alright. Let it be.” Paul says, “it’s always been a communal song about acceptance.” In a very sweet interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air a few months ago, Paul shared the story of one of the band’s early road trips in the 1960s. A broken windscreen during a snowstorm led to one of the Beatles's most harrowing moments. Stuck on the side of the road, facing freezing conditions and a broken down van, it was a very bleak situation! Even in the direst of situations, though, McCartney claims that the band continued to stay positive. In his words (and accent):

We’re sitting around, and somebody said, ‘Well, what are we going to do now?“And then one of us, I can’t remember which, said, ‘Something’ll happen,’ and it was like, ‘Wow, that is the greatest quote ever!’ Because in life, when you’re facing these crazy things, something’ll happen, and it always seemed to console us. ‘Something’ll happen."

Lu yehi is not a translation of Let it be, as the Hebrew word lu almost always expresses a wish, a hope, a prayer.  There is a profoundly important place for our prayers and rituals to be about an acceptance and integration of what is; an embrace of the messiness and imperfection and finitude of life with love and compassion and the trust that “something’ll happen.”  And our tradition is also full of the opposite, of challenging and confronting what is and demanding that it be different, that circumstances change, that there is a loving God in this world who hears and answers our prayers. Whatever we might mean by an answer to prayer.  Abraham and Moses in the Torah and various characters in the Talmud, most famously Honi the circle maker, audaciously challenge God, demanding a different outcome!  Our intense cycle of vidui, our confessional prayers and selichot, prayers of forgiveness, are a subtle blend of both of these paradigms. We want radical self-acceptance for who we are in spite of our flaws and we want to believe that we can change who we are, to become better versions of ourselves.  Let it be. Lu y’hi.

And in a more universal sense, as we begin this day with its five services from now until neilah and the power of the fasting, for what aspects of our community, our country and our world do want to say “let it be'' and what are our deepest, deepest prayers for this country and world that we want to be different, imagining, even if we have doubts, that our collective prayers may have some intercessory power and we say lu yehi, please, please may it be, kol sh’nekavesh lu yehi.  All that we ask for, yearn for in this broken world, may it be.  Our haunting and beautiful music throughout the journey helps us, already started with that emotional piece of Kol Nidre that we just chanted.  The words of Kol Nidre are not inspiring poetry like the lyrics of Shemer, Cohen or McCartney, it is a legal formula that transforms this sacred gathering space into a courtroom drama, as we ask to be released from the promises and vows that we have made and will make that we will not keep, but the music and the ritual make this an evocative and emotional opening to this powerful day that brings many of us back to distant, haunting memories that penetrate our hearts. 

Like Naomi Shemer and Leonard Cohen in the deserts of war, the powerful music has the capacity to help us to open and to feel, to derive meaning beyond words, giving us the courage, perhaps, to wage the inner war within ourselves, releasing ourselves of the demons of negativity.  Joey Weisenberg, founder and co-director of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, who has been my main musical inspiration in preparing for these Days of Awe, writes in his wonderful book The Torah of Music, which was a gift to me years ago from Hannah,

“Music is the process of listening carefully to the world around us and offering our own songs back to the universe. In this way music is fundamentally woven into the Jewish spiritual process.  When we sing, we not only create a cozy cultural blanket that warms us, but we weave praises into the fabric of the universe.” P.113

Another favorite music artist of mine, Tom Waits, wrote the line in his song San Diego Serenade, “I never heard the melody until I needed a song.”  We need the songs, so let’s hear the melodies and let them penetrate us and open us to moments of let it be and moments of lu yehi having the wisdom and courage to know the difference.