Yedidi Ro'i Mekimi

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Hebrew: ידידי רועי מקימי (My Friend, My Shepard, My Support). Circle dance by Mitch Ginsburgh, 2026.

Each aspect of this work is independently interesting. We take them in order.

The Lyrics

The words were written by Rabbi Israel ben Moses Najara, who was born in Damascus in about 1555. He later moved to Safed, but after a pogrom in 1579 his family moved to Gaza, where Najara eventually succeeded his father as Chief Rabbi of Gaza (a position which is currently vacant).

Najara was among other things a liturgical poet. He wrote hymns, poems, piyyutim, sermons, and commentary. His most famous work is likely Yah Ribon Olam, sung by Jews of many traditions on Friday night.

This particular poem, Yedidi Ro'i Mekimi, is an allegory based on sheep and shepherds—indeed, every stanza ends with the word "tzoan" (sheep). There is a fascinating connection with the Tanach: the end of the first stanza is "עַל מִי נָטַשְׁתָּ מְעַט הַצֹּאן" ("with whom have you left those few sheep [in the wilderness]"). These are the exact words of Eliav, oldest brother of David, upbraiding David for abandoning his post as shepherd to battle Goliath (1 Samuel 17:28). Similar allusions are rife in Najara's works.

(Not everyone was a fan of Najara. Hayyim Vital, a contemporary and a Kabbalist, attacked Najara, accusing him of using foul language, being a drunkard, being a homosexual, and having sexual relations with non-Jewish women. It's hard to take these denunciations seriously, since Vital based them on mystic revelations rather than on fact. Najara was also criticized for poetry describing God and Israel as a married couple, but there is a longstanding tradition of this metaphor, especially in the allegorical translation of the Song of Songs.)

The Music

The tune we dance to is a baqasha, a song sung in some Sephardic Jewish communities on Shabbat morning from after midnight until dawn, especially in winter when the dawn comes late. The order and structure of the baqashot can be extremely complex. This particular baqasha comes from the Moroccan sequence, which was heavily influence by Najara. In that tradition there is a separate baqasha for each parsha of the Torah; the melody for this dance is the Moroccan baqasha for parshat Vayeira (Genesis 18:1–22:24, including the Akeda). Yedidi Ro'i Mekimi is also sung by Lubavitch to a completely different tune that has its own interesting story.

The meter of the tune is unusual, as is common in the Moroccan tradition of baqashot. It consists of two measures of three beats each followed by four measures of two beats each: 3-3-2-2-2-2. This meter repeats without exception through the entire song, though the pattern is very hard to hear during the outro.

The recording we dance to is by Yigal Haroush, from his album A'ira Shachar ("I Will Awaken Dawn"), a collection of Moroccan baqashot. Curiously, in the original, the meter of the intro is different; it is 3-3-2-2-2 until the singer enters. This has somehow been "fixed" in the recording for the dance, where the intro too is 3-3-2-2-2-2.

The Dance

The dance consists of five parts, which Mitch calls "bits" rather than "sections" or "parts". The entire sequence repeats twice and then ends with the seccond bit in the third repetition.