Lekha Dodi (Hebrew: לכה דודי; also transliterated as Lecha Dodi, L'chah Dodi, Lekah Dodi, Lechah Dodi; Ashkenazic pronunciation: Lecho Dodi, Biblical: Lekhah Dhodhiy) is a Hebrew-language Jewish liturgical song recited Friday at dusk, usually at sundown, in synagogue to welcome Shabbat prior to the Maariv (evening services). It is part of the Kabbalat Shabbat ("welcoming of Sabbath").
Contents
Lekhah Dodi means "come my beloved," and is a request of a mysterious "beloved" that could mean either God or one's friend(s) to join together in welcoming Shabbat that is referred to as the "bride": likrat kallah ("to greet the [Shabbat] bride"). During the singing of the last verse, the entire congregation rises and turns to the west towards the setting sun, to greet "Queen Shabbat" as she arrives.
It was composed in the 16th century by Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, who was born in Salonika and later became a Safed Kabbalist. As was common at the time, the song is also an acrostic, with the first letter of the first eight stanzas spelling the author's name. The author draws from the rabbinic interpretation of Song of Songs in which the maiden is a metaphor for the Jewish people and the lover (dod) is a metaphor for God, and from Nevi'im, which uses the same metaphor. The poem shows Israel asking God to bring upon that great Shabbat of Messianic deliverance. It is one of the latest of the Hebrew poems regularly accepted into the liturgy, both in the southern use, which the author followed, and in the more distant northern rite.
Melody
Its importance in the esteem of Jewish worshipers has led every cantor and choir-director to seek to devote his sweetest strains to the Shabbat welcome song. Settings of Lekhah Dodi, usually of great expressiveness and not infrequently of much tenderness and beauty, are accordingly to be found in every published compilation of synagogal melodies.
Among the Sephardic congregations, the hymn is sometimes chanted to an ancient Moorish melody, which is known to be much older than the text of Lekhah Dodi. This is clear not only from internal evidence, but also from the rubric in old prayer-books directing the hymn "to be sung to the melody of 'Shuvi Nafshi li-Menukhayekhi'", a composition of Judah ha-Levi, who died nearly five centuries before Alkabetz. In this rendering, carried to Israel by Spanish refugees before the days of Alkabetz, the hymn is chanted congregationally, the refrain being employed as an introduction only.
In some very old-style Ashkenazic synagogues the verses are ordinarily chanted at elaborate length by the chazzan, and the refrain is used as a congregational response, but in most modern (Orthodox) Ashkenazic synagogues it is sung by everyone together to any one of a large number of tunes.
This beloved piyut is sung to many different melodies throughout the world, including melodies from India, Central Asia (Bukhara), Yemen, Kurdistan, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus. Wherever Jews gather for prayer on a Friday night, there one can find Lecha Dodi being sung.
Old German and Polish melodies
At certain periods of the year many northern congregations discard later compositions in favor of two simple older melodies singularly reminiscent of the folk-song of northern Europe in the century succeeding that in which the verses were written. The better known of these is an air, reserved for the Omer weeks between Passover and Shavuot, which has been variously described, because of certain of its phrases, as an adaptation of the famous political song "Lillibullero" and of the cavatina in the beginning of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro." But resemblances to German folk-song of the end of the seventeenth century may be found generally throughout the melody.
Less widely utilized in the present day is the special air traditional for the "Three Weeks" preceding Tisha b'Av, although this is characterized by much tender charm absent from the melody of Eli Tziyyon, which more often takes its place. But it was once very generally sung in the northern congregations of Europe; and a variant was chosen by Benedetto Marcello for his rendition of Psalm xix. in his "Estro Poetico-Armonico" or "Parafrasi Sopra li Salmi" (Venice, 1724), where it is quoted as an air of the German Jews. Cantor Eduard Birnbaum ("Der Jüdische Kantor", 1883, p. 349) has discovered the source of this melody in a Polish folk-song, "Wezm ja Kontusz, Wezm", given in Oskar Kolberg's "Piesni Ludu Polskiego" (Warsaw, 1857). An old melody, of similarly obvious folk-song origin, was favored in the London Jewry a century ago, and was sung in two slightly divergent forms in the old city synagogues. Both of these forms are given by Isaac Nathan in his setting of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies" (London, 1815), where they constitute the air selected for "She Walks in Beauty", the first verses in the series. The melody has since fallen out of use in English congregations and elsewhere.
Text
The full version of the song (note that many Reform congregations omit verses 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 which make reference to messianic redemption), while Sephardic congregations based in the Jerusalem and Aleppo rites omit verses 4 through 7, as they make reference to agony:
In the Sephardic rite and Chabad Chasidic tradition the last section is recited as such: