Paying homage to the piyyut

April 6, 2011 - 9:15 AM by Jessica

An ancient page of piyyut

If you’ve got a free night one week, and you’ve got a hankering for singing ancient tunes, check out Kehilot Sharot, or Singing Communities, the groups around the country that take time out each week to learn and sing piyyutim, ancient liturgical poems that have been around since Mishnaic times. There are Piyyut Shabbats, at which people gather at a hotel and sing their way through the weekend, and Piyyut festivals, at which piyyut choirs gather together to sing in a kind of Glee-like piyyut mash-up.

What’s fascinating about the trend – besides the renewal of an ancient song trend – is how the piyyut gathers groupies across a wide divide. There are religious and secular folks, young and old, men and women, across all cultures, ethnicities and types. Take a Kehillot Sharot meeting in Jerusalem on recent Monday night: Nine men, nine women, with half of the men wearing kippot and most of the women in pants, which means you don’t really know who’s religious and who’s not.

One more thing: Many of us are familiar with piyyutim, we just may not know that we are. Ever sung “Adon Olam,” at the end of a Shabbat service? Or “Yigdal”? Both are piyyutim, as is “Lecha Dodi,” that well-known part of the Kabbalat Shabbat service. Many piyyutim, like “Adon Olam”, follow some poetic scheme, with an acrostic following the order of the Hebrew alphabet or spelling out the name of the author.

Musician Ehud Banai recently recorded this version “El Adon,” one of my favorite piyyutim sung in the Shabbat morning service: