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With
Faith
A good friend called one night in January 2004 upset by the
thought that she was losing the friendship of my wife and me.
She was comparing her relationship to us with new friends of
ours she had met, and her mind was doing a number on it. I
felt her upset and the pain associated with it even though
it was all a fiction made up in her mind. After I got off the
phone I sat down and asked that a song come through me to help
me clear the upset I felt. The theme of faith, and how we tend
to lose it when we are upset, jumped out. I wrote the song
as a prayer and as an affirmation of the faith one needs to
live life consciously connected to the Creator no matter what
emotional upsets come to try and knock us off balance, leaving
us feeling isolated and alone.
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to music ]
Take
a New Road
During the early part of the summer
of 2003 I drove up to Boston from Brooklyn to take time away
from my family to begin my first book. My first day in the
city I was guided to discover the theme of the book; seeing
the Tree of Life from Kabbalah as a road to freedom. I knew
I had to visit Lexington and Concord - two of the most famous
sites of the American Revolution - to learn about the freedom
fighters who helped create the United States of America. The
next day as I walked on Lexington Common, I felt the energy
of the men who gave their lives there for the yet-to-be-born
United States. As I sat on a bench at the edge of the commons
with my guitar in hand, “The shot
heard round the world,” the famous line uttered by Thomas
Paine, flashed through my mind. The unstoppable energy of the
freedom fighters of the Revolution inspired a song about finding
a different road to freedom than the one they chose.
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to music ]
I Choose
Us
Soon after we settled in to our new
apartment in Brooklyn in February 2003, my wife asked me what
I wanted for our anniversary. I didn’t know! I asked her,
“What do you want?” She quickly answered, “A
song.” A few nights later after she and Jacob (our son)
went to bed, I sat in the living room and was graced to write
I Choose Us in honor of our second anniversary. Even though
it wasn’t my intention at the time, I knew after I wrote
it that it was a song of commitment and undying love to God
as well as my beloved wife.
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to music ]
Fill Me
The spring of 2000 was a major turning
point in my life. Many things were opening up and changing.
During that time my Kabbalah teacher guided me to sing songs
to the Creator (I wasn’t known for my singing at the
time). Around the same time I got interested in playing guitar
again, after not playing it for many years, because of a friend
who loved to play and sing spiritual songs. One Saturday afternoon
I sat in my Jerusalem apartment and opened myself to let a
song come through me. Within a few minutes, out of the silence
came a melody and soon after Fill Me,
my first composition, was effortlessly born.
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Love
Can Flow
This was one of the first songs I wrote
in the spring/summer of 2000 at the start of my call to write
songs. I wrote it as a prayer requesting that love would flow
through me the way I knew in my heart that it could. I didn’t
play it much until it was time to choose songs for the album.
I always loved it, and knew that it was to be part of Take
a New Road. Adam did
a brilliant job arranged the music; he added a chorus (we worked
on the lyrics for it together), and the version on the CD was
born!
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Open
the Gates (a prayer)
The song was inspired by a meditation
I did on righteousness in November 2002. The phrase, “The
righteous sees with compassion in his heart” came to
me in Hebrew during the meditation. I added verse 19 from Psalm
118 and the song was born as a heartfelt petition to open the
gates of righteousness. When we originally recorded the songs
for the album, Adam arranged a powerful version of it that
became Open
the Gates (an affirmation). I loved that version, and
yet knew that one with the original meditative, prayerful intention
had to be on the album as well. Chris Ishee captured that essence
in his remarkable arrangement of the song.
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The
Wind Knows
In September 2000 I left on a 2 1⁄2
month spiritual journey to India, Nepal and Tibet with my wife
to be and two friends. The high mountain plains and the people
of Tibet affected me deeply. Even though the country had been
under occupation since 1959 and its cultural and religious institutions
decimated, the Tibetan people were joyful and radiant like no
other people I had ever met. Upon our return to Israel in January
2001 I sat down one afternoon and meditated on the experience
of being in Tibet. I felt as if I was back on the vast, desolate
and strikingly beautiful high desert of that land. The song
came out of that meditation and the powerful experience of being
there.
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to music ]
Let
Me Always Know
For the Jewish New Year of 2002, I
joined my mother and sister at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper
East Side of Manhattan. At one point the rabbi spoke of the
verse that is above many aron
kodesh, the Holy Ark that houses
the Torah. The verse Shiviti
HaShem L’Negdi Tamid, (Psalm
16:8), means ‘I
have set God before me always.’ A few weeks after the
holiday I was inspired to write this song, keeping in mind
the primary theme of Rosh HaShannah: God’s kingship over
all of Creation. For me, remembering Who is King helps keep
me humble and my ego in the back seat.
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to music ]
Shine
My wife and I were married in Cyprus
in February 2001. We moved out of my apartment in Jerusalem
before we left for the wedding weekend and returned to stay
in a friend’s house in a small community called Nataf
on the way to Tel Aviv. His house was perched above a hill
that had an unobstructed view across the countryside to Tel
Aviv and the Mediterranean beyond the city. One night I sat
on the back patio with my guitar to watch the sunset. The song
came to me spontaneously. A week or so later was the anniversary
of my father’s death (called yahrtzeit in
Yiddish). We honored my father’s memory in the house
at Nataf. During the memorial, my wife suggested that I sing Shine in his honor. It felt
so right to sing it to him that day. I felt that he was very
pleased I did it. Since that time I always think of my father
when I play the song.
When Adam was working on the arrangement for Shine, he felt that the song needed a chorus. In a burst of inspiration
he added the music and lyrics to it. When I heard it I knew
that it was right. He was amazed when I told him what the song
meant to me, and how perfectly his lyrics fit the memory of
my father passing on.
[ return
to music ]
Open
the Gates (an affirmation)
See Open the Gates (a prayer).
[ return
to music ]
Freedom
is My Way
I had lived in Boston from February
1984 through August 1991 and had never gone down to the Old
State House to hear the Declaration of Independence read on
July 4th. I knew the week that I was back in Boston to start
my book (2003) that I would be there that year. By the time
July 4th arrived, I was already filled and inspired by the
spirit of the men and women who fought for freedom during the
time of the Revolution. As the Declaration was read from the
balcony of the Old State House, tears came to my eyes. It had
been read from that very spot every year since 1776. I was
honored to stand with my fellow Americans knowing that it is
up to us to continue the world-changing experiment in liberty
that the Founding Fathers started. I went back to my friend’s
apartment in Brookline later that day and wrote Freedom
is My Way.
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to music ]
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