Lekhah Dodi

Its importance in the esteem of Jewish worshipers has led every hazzan 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 siddurim directing the hymn "to be sung to the melody of Shuvi Nafshi li-Menukhayekhi, a composition of Judah Halevi, 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 hazzan, and the refrain is used as a congregational response, but in most Ashkenazic Orthodox synagogues it is sung by everyone together to any one of a large number of tunes. This includes the Orthodox Synagogues who employ this element and Synagogues under the Modern-Orthodox umbrella.

This beloved piyyut 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.

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.

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),[4] while Sephardic congregations based in the Jerusalem and Aleppo rites omit verse 4 and verses 6 through 8, as they make reference to agony[5]:

In the Sephardic rite and Chasidic tradition the last section is recited as such:

Hebrew Wikisource has original text related to this article: לכה דודי

• List of Jewish prayers and blessings

• Lecha Dodi Hassidic version free style by Cantor Fahlenkamp all verses with lyrics YouTube video
• Lecha Dodi with Sephardic last verse YouTube video
• לכה דודי/Lecha Dodi- אסף נוה שלום verses 1-5 only. YouTube video
• Audio file "Lekhah Dodi" MP3
• Audio file "Lekhah Dodi" MP3
• Lekhah Dodi with music from The Jewish Learning Group from the Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center
• Lekhah Dodi tunes and recordings on the Zemirot Database

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "^{article name needed}". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. "Lekah Dodi"