Monday, November 14, 2011

New, awesome niggun

This Hasidic fiddler is incredible! And such kavana! Look at the fervor in his eyes! Can you feel the holiness? Only what, exactly, is he playing?

Find out after the jump!




The tune is Lord of the Dance, a 20th century Irish hymm, with Torah true lyrics such as these:

I danced on the sabbath when I cured the lame,
The holy people said it was a shame;
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high;
And they left me there on a cross to die.

The "holy people" doing the whipping, and the stripping are Jews of course. Their victim is Jesus.

Hasidim have a long history of appropriating gentile music for their nigunim. Chabad uses the French National anthem on Yom Kippur, and as Life is with People documents, many sects took Russian and Ukrainian love songs and drinking songs. The after-the-fact justification is that such appropriations are a form of "rescuing" the song from its secular exile. I am not aware of any such rescuing of an anti-Semitic hymn, however.

The original:


Upbest with Micheal Flatley




Hat tip Upikoros, who has some other interesting things to say


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