some Lecha Dodi weirdness
-
so Lecha Dodi has approximately way-too-many-to-count tunes, so it's not too surprising each family has its own tune of choice.
my dad's family is Kochi, and we love singing, so for "the lyrics are the least interesting part of a song" young Talya it was pretty easy to notice our tune for Lecha Dodi was a bit out of place - we usually don't have tunes that are this fast and syncopated (compare with the Kochi tune for Shalom Leven Dodi, which is actually on the higher end of rhythmicality in Kochi tunes).
i always just assumed it might have been a Yemenite tune we adopted - the Kochis were always very close to the Yemenites, our traditional pronounciation of Hebrew is almost the same and the great rabbi Nehemia Muta came to India from Yemen, so i'm pretty sure we do actually have a few tunes borrowed from the Yemenite Jews. i didn't investigate this though.that was until Shvesters, two singers i follow on YouTube who are very much Ashkenazi, published their adaptation to the very same tune, saying it's the usual one they sing at home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWacGlIpbSIso i did some digging and it turns out this tune isn't Yemenite, oh no. it's Polish-Litvener. (in hindsight now knowing a tad more about the various traditions of Jewish music one could notice this doesn't actually sound very Yemenite, but i didn't know that as a 13-year-old.)
so now one question remains. how on earth did the Polish-Litvener tune become the one my dad, his siblings and all of their cousins sing??
-
As an Ashkenazi Jew born in Israel, in hindsight I realised these recent years how most of the tunes my family new and even the synagogue we went to (on those rare occasions) were Yemenite. These pas years I always thought it was the way for my parent- esp. my dad, to "feel" more Israeli, the way east European Jewry was/is always "frowned upon", the whole story of the weak Jew and so on.
But maybe the cultural mix-and-match went both ways? Sounds a bit too good to be true, I know. Would be interesting to hear more stories like yours... -
@niamh it's possible, and considering the fact we do have this data point of Lecha Dodi i'd say it's probably the explanation, but it is very much an outlier - my dad's family otherwise kept a whole lot of their original tunes, even when much more common ones are available. as a comparison, the only Passover tune that we don't sing in the traditional tune is Echad Mi Yodea and that's because that one to my knowledge had the common tune overtake virtually everywhere and i don't know of a single person who doesn't traditionally sing the common tune.
and also, even for Lecha Dodi - the tune we sing is an Ashkenazi tune, but not the common one. The common one (at least in Israel) is actually the one written by Zeira in 1952.
