EPISODE 4: Lecha Dodi
Shabbat Unbound is the world's longest Friday night Sabbath service, stretching over eight episodes. Instead of rushing through all the Friday night Shabbat prayers in one sitting, like we might in a classical synagogue environment, we're taking our time diving deep into one prayer each episode through song study and sacred conversation. It's the most original and traditional way to engage in the transition into Shabbat, taking each prayer as its own world with its own Torah to teach us. Miriam Terlinchamp, Lex Rofeberg and an incredible group of musicians invite you to discover what happens when Shabbat slows down. The fourth episode focuses on Lecha Dodi.
SHOWNOTES
[1] Source for writing Lecha Dodi. Rabbi Chaim Vital (1543-1620), student of Arizal (Rabbi Isaac Luria, 1534-1572), writes in his Pri Etz Chaim (Sha’ar Shabbat) the Arizal’s precise procedure for Kabbalat Shabbat:
He would go out into the fields and first recite Psalm 29 (‘Mizmor l’David’). Then he would say bo’i kallah three times, followed by Psalm 92 (‘Mizmor Shir l’Yom haShabbat’). That was it! The Arizal would then return home, and had another set of rituals around the meal table. One of these was to recite the words Zachor v’shamor b’dibbur echad ne’emru, to recall the mitzvah of Shabbat in the Ten Commandments. Recall that in the first passage of the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus, God says zachor et yom haShabbat, to “commemorate” the Sabbath day, while in the second passage of the Ten Commandments in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses recorded it as shamor et yom haShabbat, to “safeguard” the Sabbath day. Our Sages explained that God had said both words simultaneously—the people heard zachor v’shamor b’dibbur echad, to “commemorate” and “safeguard” in a single utterance.
[2] Miriam mentions bridal imagery in Lecha Dodi and Sabbath practices in general. Here is a sweet article about mystic love by Sara Crispe in her www.myjewishlearning.com essay, “Love Lessons from Lecha Dodi.”
[3] Love this rendition of Lecha Dodi? Great! Check out Batya Levine’s other recordings and compositions on her website www.batyalevine.com. Batya’s newest album “Yivarechecha” focuses on blessings and is a downright magical compilation of gorgeous and resonant music.
[4] If you want to listen to some of the other nearly 1,000 tunes for Lecha Dodi, we have a few special one’s highlighted on our website at: www.judaismunbound.com/shabbat5785. There’s one set to “All of me” by John Legend, another by “The Jews of Uganda”, a Bretzlover chasidic tune, and more!
[5] Want to watch the music video of our version of Lecha Dodi? Great you can find it here.
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Music: Podcast theme music
Miriam: Shabbat Unbound is an experiment in sacred slowness, eight episodes, eight prayers, and a whole lot of heart, plus a little bit of magic. Instead of racing through the liturgy, like we're late for something, we're pausing to really taste each prayer, to sing it in ways you've never heard before. And to discover what it might mean for our lives right now. Whether this is your first time listening or you've been with us the whole way, we are delighted that you're here. This is our fourth episode, and we're finally at the point in the Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday evening worship service, where we are ready to fully greet the Sabbath with the words and melodies of Lecha Dodi. I'm Miriam Terlinchamp. I'm joined by Lex Rofeberg, and this is Shabbat gloriously unbound.
Lex: For Lecha Dodi we chose a melody from Batya Levine. I chose this melody because it feels to me like it fits the meaning of the prayer. In the chorus, it repeats Lecha Dodi Likrat shabbat. This is a chorus that talks about beckoning one's lover. We mentioned in the Yedid Nefesh episode that we start the Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy with a flirtatious, basically erotic poem. Lecha Dodi is the crowning moment of the Kabbalth Shabbat service, and it too is very flirtatious. Lecha Dodi, Come on over, Come on over, My beloved. That's the spirit of this prayer. We literally stand and welcome in our lover, The Shabbos Bride. And so we brought this melody from Bat yaLevine that helps us lean into that spirit, that flirtatious kind of relationship to the divine that we're taught is not necessarily our primary relationship, but which we can absolutely lean into on Friday nights.
Music: Lecha Dodi playing
Miriam: Lecha Dodi is an exceptional prayer. It's an acrostic that spells the name of its author, Shlomo Alphabetz, who Settled in Tzvat in 1535. It has a mix of Talmudic and prophetic phrases in its chorus and the title. Our Words, Lecha Dodi Likrat Kallah, Come My Beloved, are straight from Song of Songs. There's a lot of bridal imagery in it, and at the very end of the prayer we are encouraged to rise to welcome Shabbat as a bride. It's not just Lecha Dodi as a prayer that has this bridal imagery. A lot of what we do on the Sabbath includes this imagery. So we're supposed to understand that the people's covenant with God is embodied with the Sabbath. We take some of the attributes of a wedding, like dressing in white or making a fancy meal. We sing and delight always to honor that covenant, much like a marital covenant. There's a rabbinic text that speaks to the origins of this metaphor in Breishit Rabba 11. The text goes something like this. In the beginning, every day of the week had a partner. Sunday had Monday, Tuesday had Wednesday, Thursday had Friday. But Shabbat, the Sabbath, had nobody. And so Shabbat goes up to God and complains and says, Hey, what about me? Don't I get a buddy? Don't I get a partner? And God says, good point. Your buddy, your partner, your beloved, your soulmate will be the people of Israel. And the way we're going to honor this bond is through the covenant. Remember the Shabbat And keep it holy. Kodsho. That's Exodus 20. So if it's a wedding partnership kind of thing, then where are the vows? Isn't that the central part of a wedding? Well, we have that too. And that's from Hosea. It goes, “and I will espouse you forever. I will espouse you with righteousness and justice and with goodness and mercy, and I will espouse you with faithfulness. Then you shall be devoted to the Lord”. So, the vows then are saying, the way I'm going to love you is by doing my best with everything that I have to make the world feel the way it ought to feel. A world of righteousness and justice, a world of goodness and mercy, a world of faithfulness and faithful action. It's so aspirational, right? Like it's so beautiful to imagine a world oriented in that way. And it's not so different than any other vow we might make during a wedding ceremony… to have you and to hold you for better or for worse when you have no idea what's coming next. It's a hope, it's a promise to enter into an agreement through a relationship and earn trust and say, I share in your dream of possibility. And Shabbat, is that a moment of deciding to choose a different story of the world? My teacher, Walter Bruegemann, of Blessed Memory, talks about the Pharaonic Empire, the age in which the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. In that story of Pharaoh's world, you are what you build. You are what you do. You don't own your time, and no matter how many pyramids you build, more is always more, it's never enough. That's Pharaonic time. And then there's also God's time. God's time is to believe that you have enough. You have enough time, and that we can be like God and rest to lean into the seventh day saying, Hey y'all, this is, this is very, very good as it is. Sabbath is different from any other marker of the covenant. The first time we see a sign of the covenant is after the big flood with Noah. And it's a rainbow. And the promise is one directional where God turns towards humanity saying, I won't try to undo creation again. I promise. Here's my rainbow. The second time we see a sign of the covenant is more relational. It's God with humanity saying you'll be mine. And the way we're going to acknowledge that is through a blood covenant. It's a circumcision. The third time is here with Sabbath. The gift is a different story. The Israelites get to join in to the story of possibility and abundance and engage in the aspirational vow for a different world by practicing it and activating it in the now. It can't happen all the time. We can't live in a Sabbath world all the time. We absolutely can live in it some of the time. We get to microdose that Messianic age, and you can do that in any way, in anywhere that feels like you're honoring that call to acknowledge God's time. This is why the Lecha Dodi prayer with all its thousand different melodies serves as a liturgical marker between all the warmup psalms before this moment and the Kabbalat Shabbat service, and actually being in Shabbat, it's the marker between the intense energy of preparing for Shabbat, of setting down the work where the work ends fully, and we enter into Sabbath. Shabbat is the ultimate role play for the Messianic age by standing to welcome in the Sabbath energy. By calling in a new story, wearing the clothes of the Sabbath, tasting the feasts of the Sabbath, reminding ourselves of the shared vision of a world by practicing, engaging and inhabiting a world that is clothed in justice and goodness.
Music: Lecha Dodi Likrat Kallah
Miriam: We pause now for a moment of healing, grounding ourselves first in our bodies, searching the physical places in need of healing and also the spiritual ones. Begin by imagining a light within, focusing on that light, letting it grow into your limbs, up through your chest, into your head, and when that light feels full, full of healing and love and possibility. Let it extend beyond you to the people that you love, to your family and your friends to your neighbors. Call in. The people specifically who are in need of healing Call in, also, those whose needs we cannot see, whose invisible grief and pain is also in need of our love. Extend that light into the city, into hospital beds and nursing facilities and prison cells. Let that light travel all the way down to our country's borders. Let's extend to each person who seeks refuge. Send that light across the oceans into places of deep fear and war and hunger. Let that light travel the whole globe, extending and connecting its energy until it finds its way all the way right back here to where that light was first started. Finding its way all the way back to where it first began to our broken hearts. Reminding ourselves that healing begins first within.
Music: Healer of the Brokenhearted
Miriam: One aspect of Shabbat that often gets overlooked, or maybe just not shown a lot of attention around, is the act of blessing other human beings. We know that we sanctify the Sabbath through blessing wine or acknowledging the bounty before us by blessing the bread, by opening up the sanctity of Sabbath with the lighting of candles In some households, the parents bless children or they bless the matriarch of the house. And in a congregational setting, I think if there's an offering and a potential moment, the rabbi might bless their congregation. But this is a podcast, so what does blessing other human beings and receiving blessing ourselves look and sound like in this format? What we're trying to do in this episode, and also through Shabbat Unbound as a whole, is to elevate Sabbath consciousness as a technology for activating meaning in our own lives. Jewish tradition is rich in formulas for blessings in our lives. It's a gift that we have to call in our ancestors, to rely on ancient materials and amulets in order to activate that love for ourselves and the greater world. In this case, I'd like to bring to you an original benediction, an original blessing that is sourced from all these different places in Jewish tradition and also outside of our tradition. My friend and teacher and composer, Ric Hordinski wrote this incredible blessing. It's sourced from the Jewish tradition and also from Buddhist tradition, and also from his own life. He invites the receiver of the blessing to be showered with love and compassion, to get everything that they need in their lives, but not everything that they want. It's a beautiful balance, this world energy around blessings, and I think it's the perfect fit for Shabbat, especially this kind of Shabbat way of being, an alternative, multi-dimensional, beyond time kind of way of blessing that's speaking to a very specific way of looking at Sabbath. There are teachings that the Sabbath is one-sixtieth of the world to come. Well, that's interesting. Like, how do we know about what's possible in the world unless we taste some of it? One of our jobs in this moment and in this world is to cultivate hope through possibility, and we need reminders of what that can look like. And that can be freedom from oppressive acts, it can be resisting from the capitalist drive of the world, it can be feeling deeply into a state of rest and belonging. And I also think it can be to measure our blessings in that we can imagine a world where everyone has what they need but not what they want as a very holy and pure vision of what the next world could be like. This world, but just.
Music: Song, Benediction
Miriam: We've just received a blessing, not for everything that we want, but for what we truly need. And maybe that's the most honest prayer that there is, and also a perfect doorway into Shabbat. Because the Sabbath doesn't give us more time. What Shabbat gives us is a different relationship with time. Shabbat itself is a gift, not more time, not fewer burdens. The world doesn't just disappear behind us. We get a different relationship with time altogether. And it's also why it takes so much energy to cultivate that energy to welcome it, to let things set aside, to reimagine what time can be, and to let that Sabbath consciousness permeate our entire being so that we can return back to the world renewed through meaning and presence.
Music: Song, Lecha Dodi
Miriam: And that's Lecha Dodi. The ultimate role play for the Messianic Age where we dress up, rise to our feet and call out our vows to a different kind of world. Thank you for standing with us today, for practicing what it feels like to live in abundance rather than scarcity, and to microdose the world as it ought to be. In our next episode, we're sitting with Shema and Veahavta. We call out, listen up, you God wrestlers, it's all one and love is how we prove it. Until then, may you catch glimpses of the world that you're building one Shabbat at a time. Shabbat shalom.
Music: Podcast theme music
Miriam: Gratitude to Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, for making this Shabbat Unbound podcast possible. Shabbat Unbound is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound, created by MiriamTerlinchamp and Lex Rofeberg, directed by Joey Taylor. Produced at Monastery Studios, sound engineering by Justin Newton. Original podcast, theme Music and Arrangements by Ric Hordinski and Art by Katie Kaestner. Thanks to our musicians Ric Hordinski on guitar, Andrea Summer on vocals. Matt Wiles on bass, Josh Seurk camp on drums. And very special thanks to our featured composer of Lecha Dodi, Batya Levine. Check the show notes for bonus material. And Lex did an amazing job compiling all the different kinds of melodies and texts that you can read. And if you love this podcast, that's wonderful. Consider joining us for our monthly live Shabbat Unbound events. You can find the next one on our website at www.judaismunbound.com/shabbat unbound. And always we'd love to hear from you. And you can find us at hello@judaismunbound.com.
