By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–Debbie Friedman, still a young woman, always a poet, died Sunday. If she had earned a few dollars for all the times people have sung, hummed, chanted, or performed one of her hundreds of modern psalms without accreditation or royalties, she would have been a very wealthy woman.
But instead we are left with wealth, a kind of spiritual currency that few synagogues, agencies, or academic institutions ever give us, or are even equipped to transmit. Debbie Friedman, a slight, vulnerable, truly kind person who sang about everything but herself, had a thing with Hebrew scripture and liturgy perhaps unlike anyone else. Most of us in the progressive Jewish community see biblical letters and don’t know what they say or mean. Debbie Friedman had a guitar, a voice like nectar, and a humility that shamed rabbis. She read biblical stanzas and heard melodies in her mind that are now the standard way in which we express our yearnings to God.
This is a loss of international proportions that diminishes Jews and Christians alike—Debbie’s sweet faith and her inspirational harmonies built bridges among people of all creeds who wanted to put some new life into old text. In our own community, she linked American summer campers with tractor-driving Zionists, new converts with stubborn sages, Americans with Israelis, agnostics to literalists, Generations X-ers to Federations CEOs. She was the slim, smiling, short-haired oracle of post-Holocaust Jewish revival who became the natural successor to the King David and his harp.
As a rabbi now for 33 years, I can hardly recall any single liturgical event, campfire, wedding, bar mitzvah, temple dedication, Confirmation service, theological reunion, baby-naming, Hebrew high school commencement, fund-raising extravaganza, bus ride through Israel, Jewish jamming session in Jerusalem, mass service of Reform and Progressive Jews assembling in convocations, or small healing service in a hospital that did include one or more prayers-put-to-song by Debbie Friedman. Debbie got to Carnegie Hall, but she just never left the doorstep of our lives. She wrote God’s libretto.
When she joined us in Jerusalem in 1983 for the international conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, she told me that was going to premier a new melody for an old standard called “Oseh Shalom.” She was unpretentious and dignified as we gathered the delegates in the courtyard of the Presidential residence set in the Judean hills. No one who was there will ever forget the sunlight, the air, and that sound, that divine bit of resonance, gloriously fragile and strong all at once, and Debbie’s haunting, uplifting new rendition of the ancient psaltery. She was as new as the morning, as eternal as those hills.
Con brio, Debbie Friedman.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego