Come My Beloved

About this version

One of the most beloved hymns in Jewish liturgy.

«Lecha Dodi» — "Come, my beloved" — is one of the most beloved hymns in Jewish liturgy. It is sung in synagogues around the world every Friday evening as part of Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming of the Sabbath as a bride. The original Hebrew text was composed in the 1540s by Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, a kabbalist of Safed, and has been set to countless melodies over the centuries.

This recording is a contemporary setting — original music and an English adaptation of the Hebrew text — meant to give a new generation of listeners direct access to what Lecha Dodi has always been about: welcoming the Sabbath as something beautiful, gathering shoulder to shoulder, and standing side by side.

The album «Jewish the Musical (We Belong Together)» is written for children ages 7-12. The English text is intentionally simplified, so that kids in Hebrew schools, family Shabbat tables, and JCC classrooms can actually sing along — words that, in their original Aramaic and ancient Hebrew, would otherwise stay out of reach for the youngest generation.

The intent is reverent and community-minded: a song you can carry into a JCC, a classroom, or a Shabbat table without giving up either the meaning of the original or the energy of singing it together today.

🕯️ History & context

Safed, 16th century: the bride is the Sabbath.

Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz (c. 1500–1576) was a kabbalist and poet living in Safed (Tzfat), the mountain town in the Galilee that had become the center of Jewish mystical thought after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Together with Rabbi Yosef Karo, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, and later Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari), the Safed circle reshaped Jewish prayer and mysticism for the next 500 years.

«Lecha Dodi» — literally "Come, my beloved" — was Alkabetz's contribution. He took an image already present in the Talmud (the Sabbath as a bride to be welcomed) and built it into a nine-stanza Hebrew poem whose first letters spell his name as an acrostic: שלמה הלוי — Shlomo HaLevi.

The Safed kabbalists used to walk out into the fields at sunset on Friday to greet the Sabbath. Alkabetz's poem became the script for that walk — and within decades, every synagogue in the Jewish world had taken it inside, into the Friday-evening service. Today, you can walk into any synagogue on Friday night anywhere on earth, and you will hear it.

For younger voices

There's also a Teen Version.

Same Friday night, fresher arrangement. The Teen Version reworks the music for a younger ensemble and lightens a few lines — written for kids and teens in Hebrew schools, youth choirs, and family-Shabbat sing-alongs. The bones of the prayer are the same. The voice is theirs.

Part of the Tradition Reimagined playlist (RIGLI / @RigliMusic).