Hasidic Niggun

A niggun is a song without words. Hasidim sing melodies on neutral syllables — 'yai dai dai', 'bim bam' — on the principle that the highest prayer transcends specific text. The melodic range is modest, and the tunes circle on themselves with small variations each time around. The modal language overlaps with Klezmer (the Ahava Rabbah and Mi Sheberach modes among others), giving the music its characteristic mixture of longing and elation. Niggunim are sung in synagogue, at the rebbe's table on Shabbat, at weddings and during periods of personal contemplation. Shlomo Carlebach's 1960s and 1970s recordings (he died in 1994) made the form known to many non-Hasidic listeners.

Hasidism is an 18th-century Jewish religious movement founded in Ukraine by the Baal Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer, c. 1698–1760), who taught that joyful, embodied prayer is the highest form of worship. Each Hasidic dynasty — Lubavitch, Breslov, Bobov, Satmar, Ger and others — developed its own corpus of niggunim, transmitted orally from rebbe to followers. The Holocaust devastated the Eastern European communities that carried the tradition; surviving Hasidic communities in Israel, the United States and elsewhere rebuilt and continue to compose new niggunim today.

Settle in for repetition. A niggun returns to the same phrase many times, and the small variations — a slight ornament, a longer breath, a sudden harmony — are what move the prayer forward.

Shlomo Carlebach's recorded niggunim are an unusually accessible entry — warm-voiced, melodically clear, listenable without prior knowledge of the tradition.

Some niggunim are attributed not to a composer but to a vision — the Baal Shem Tov and various later rebbes are said to have 'received' specific melodies in dreams or in moments of revelation, after which their followers learned them by ear.