Shalom Aleichem (Hebrew: שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם, "Peace be upon you") is a traditional song sung by Jews every Friday night upon returning home from synagogue prayer. It signals the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, welcoming the angels who accompany a person home on the eve of the Sabbath.
Contents
Words
The lyrics, in Hebrew, are as follows:
According to Sephardi pronunciation, the song in Hebrew is transliterated as follows:
Shalom alechem malache ha-sharet malache elyon, mi-melech malche ha-melachim Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu. Bo'achem le-shalom malache ha-shalom malache elyon, mi-melech malche ha-melachim Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu. Barchuni le-shalom malache ha-shalom malache elyon, mi-melech malche ha-melachim Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu. Tzet'chem le-shalom malache ha-shalom malache elyon, mi-melech malche ha-melachim Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu.The words to the song translate as follows:
Peace upon you, ministering angels, messengers of the Most High, of the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. Come in peace, messengers of peace, messengers of the Most High, of the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. Bless me with peace, messengers of peace, messengers of the Most High, of the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. May your departure be in peace, messengers of peace, messengers of the Most High, of the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.☼ NOTE: Mizrahi (not Sefard) tradition includes a penultimate verse, beginning בְּשִׁבְתְּכם לשׁלוֹם, "May your rest here be in peace ..." and the final verse has a בְּ inserted in front of the צ, which does not change the meaning of the last verse.
Rabbi Jacob Emden, in his prayerbook, Bet El (1745), criticized both the use of the hymn (on the grounds that supplications on the Sabbath and supplications to angels were inappropriate) and its grammar—arguing that the inclusion of the prefix מִ at the beginning of every second line (i.e., mi-melech) was bad form, as it rendered the passage, "angels of the Most High, away from the King who rules over kings". He therefore deleted that מִ, thereby reducing mi-melech to melech, and that deletion has been emulated in some other prayerbooks (apparently a small minority) such as Seligman Baer's Siddur Avodat Yisroel (1868), the Orot Sephardic, and Koren's Mizrahi (but not Koren's Ashkenaz or Sefard) prayerbook, although it makes the musical meter a bit awkward.
Melodies
Many different melodies have been written for Shalom Aleichem.
The slow, well-known melody for the song was composed by the American composer and conductor Rabbi Israel Goldfarb on May 10, 1918 while sitting near the Alma Mater statue in front of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and first published later that year as "Sholom Alechem—שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם" in Friday Evening Melodies by Israel and his brother Samuel. The famous Goldfarb song is often presumed to be a traditional Hasidic melody. I. Goldfarb wrote in 1963, "The popularity of the melody traveled not only throughout this country but throughout the world, so that many people came to believe that the song was handed down from Mt. Sinai by Moses." In the Preface to "Friday Evening Melodies" the composers articulated the goal of avoiding the extremes of both the free-form emotive Eastern European musical liturgical style and the classical Western European musical structure of "Israel Emancipated."
Lately, a modern, exuberantly joyful version of this melody has been popularized by Idan Yaniv and Kinderlach.
As one of her last acts, Debbie Friedman shared her beautiful and haunting "Shalom Aleichem" with Rabbi Joy Levitt. Friedman believed it was this song that would become her legacy.
The Faster Common Traditional Melody was composed by Rabbi Shmuel Brazil.