Before there was a Diaspora Yeshiva Band, I was studying for Semichah (Rabbinic ordination) and I was teaching a class at the Diaspora Yeshiva on Mt. Zion. Though married, I would often stay after dinner at the Yeshiva and play guitar and sing songs most of which were composed by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. One evening a young man, new the Yeshiva by the name of Allen Rosenblum joined us in the courtyard and he played a mean guitar. We immediately became fast friends. Avraham (as he now called himself) and I became fast friends and eventually started a duo called B’nei Tziyon - the Sons of Zion.

Avraham would often come to my home in the Givat Mordechai neighborhood of Jerusalem for Shabbat. Some of my friends also joined us on Shabbat: Donnie Meyers, Mendel Blochman, Shoime Schwartz and Eliezer Kowalski among them and we sang for hours. We would often extend Shabbat well into Saturday night, have a Melavah Malkah (post Shabbat meal), and sing for hours.

Eliezer Kowalski had composed a song called “Im Eshkachech Yerushalayim – if I forget you O’ Jerusalem,” which became a mainstay of the B’nei Tziyon repertoire. Most of these Yeshiva guys went to the famous Mir Yeshiva near Me’a She’arim and occasionally, we would do a Melavah Malkah in the basement of the Mir. After I returned to Canada, Avraham formed the Diaspora Yeshiva Band that began a revolutionary new expression and interpretation of scripture and liturgy through their music. Many of their hit songs were versions of my compositions.

35 years later, my daughter Layah went to someone’s house for Shabbat and when he found out that she was my daughter, told her about those days of old and gave her a copy on CD of one of our sessions at the Mir, made on cassette tape. This song came from a digitalized copy of that tape that was originally recorded in 1973.

The poetry originates in Tehillim (Psalms) 137:5. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has taken the Children of Israel into exile. By the rivers of Babylon they rest and cry over their exile and the destruction of the holy Temple in Jerusalem. They lamented “Im Eshkachech Yerushalayim – if I forget you O’ Jerusalem, Tishkach Yemini – may I forget my right hand…” Realizing how humbled they were by their captivity, they knew with full certainty that unless they stayed forever focused on the return and rebuilding of the Temple and their holy city of Jerusalem, they would be as powerless as a man without is right arm. It is a song of hope in an age of despair.

We offer this to you as this month’s Rosh Chodesh download because the month of Kislev that now begins contains the popular festival of Chanukah, which celebrates another exile – when the Greeks were defeated by a small revolutionary force that rededicated the Temple and began the rebuilding of Jerusalem.