From Moscow to the Jerusalem Temple: The Story Behind The Lost Music
From Moscow to the Jerusalem Temple:
The Story Behind The Lost Music
Five flutes stand on the stage.
Behind them, images unfold across a screen: fragments of an ancient world, architecture, light, stone. Live music is woven into a story about the Levites who once sang in the Temple, the instruments they played, and a musical world that has largely disappeared from the ear.
At the center is Rabbi Lev Leibman, a musician and researcher whose life has come to span two worlds that once seemed to belong to entirely different stories.
One is the world of the conservatory: technique, repertoire, performance.
The other is the world of Jewish texts, Hasidic thought, and a question that has occupied him for years:
Today, those worlds meet in The Lost Music, a stage production that grew out of years of research and nearly fifteen years of evolution before live audiences.
To understand how it came into being, however, one has to go back to Soviet Moscow— to a boy who already knew quite a lot about music, and almost nothing about what it meant to be Jewish.
“But Jews Are Bad”
Leibman’s mother still remembers the day he came home from kindergarten having discovered something unsettling.
He had overheard a conversation among adults and somehow understood that his family was Jewish.
He was Jewish. He simply had almost no idea what that meant.
The remark was less a conviction than an echo of the Soviet world in which he was growing up.
Years later, the irony is difficult to miss: the child who knew almost nothing about his own Jewish inheritance would devote much of his adult life to recovering one of its least familiar musical worlds.
Judaism was largely hidden from him. Music was everywhere.
Leibman began studying music at the age of five. What began in childhood became increasingly serious: formal training in Moscow, continued studies after immigrating to Israel, scholarships in national flute competitions, and eventually participation in an international competition.
By his mid-teens, the direction of his life seemed almost self-evident.
Music was not an extracurricular interest. It was the world in which he had been formed.
Then, at sixteen, he turned away from the path that had been laid out before him.
The Shabbat That Changed His Course
The change had been building gradually.
After his bar mitzvah, Leibman continued meeting with a rabbi once a week. At first he understood relatively little of what he was learning, but he felt that he had encountered something too precious to leave behind.
Eventually, once a week was no longer enough.
He began coming to a yeshiva to study with a chavruta, a study partner.
Then came one Shabbat.
At sixteen, Leibman left the academic music track and entered the world of the yeshiva. For his parents, at least initially, the decision was difficult to accept. From the outside, it could easily have looked like the end of a promising musical trajectory: years of flute study, competitions, and professional training exchanged for the study hall, Talmud, and Hasidic thought.
But something unexpected happened there.
Leibman discovered music again.
A Hasidic Text Opens a Door
The first bridge back was the niggun.
In Chabad melodies, Leibman encountered something his professional musical training had not quite prepared him for: melodies that could at times be structurally simple, yet seemed capable of touching depths that were difficult to account for in musical terms alone.
He was captivated by them.
Then came another discovery.
One day, he opened a discourse by Rabbi Dovber Schneuri, the second Chabad Rebbe, known as the Mitteler Rebbe.
He expected a Hasidic text.
Instead, he found himself reading an extended and remarkably intricate discussion of music that stretched across dozens of pages.
For someone formed in the conservatory tradition, it was startling.
Leibman knew musical theory and the world of professional performance. But here, inside a Hasidic work, he encountered music through an entirely different conceptual language—as part of an exploration of the human soul, inner experience, and spiritual life.
Two worlds that had until then seemed largely separate began to converge.
The question was no longer simply how music is made.
And what might the Jewish intellectual and spiritual tradition have to say about it?
Then Came the Levites
One subject gradually began to exert a particular pull: the music of the Jerusalem Temple.
For many people, “the Song of the Levites” is a familiar phrase with a rather indistinct image attached to it. The Levites sang. Instruments were played. Psalms were performed.
The deeper Leibman went into the sources, however, the more an entire musical civilization began to emerge.
A choir. An instrumental ensemble. Musical roles and procedures. Ancient instruments. Traditions of performance. Discussions of tones and musical structures. Sources scattered across the Talmud and Midrash, halachic literature, Kabbalah, and Hasidic thought.
No single source told the whole story.
To see the larger picture required gathering fragments written in different eras and disciplines and placing them alongside one another.
Curiosity became research.
And the research gradually became a central undertaking in Leibman’s life.
Over the years, he collected sources, compared them, and tried to reconstruct— as far as the evidence allows—a broad picture of the musical world of the Levites.
That work eventually became his book, Shirat HaLeviim (The Song of the Levites), devoted to the singing, instruments, and musical culture associated with the Temple service.
But at a certain point, even a book no longer seemed enough.
An Evening in Jerusalem
In 2012, the research met an audience for the first time.
About two hundred women gathered at Or Chaya College in Jerusalem for a lecture by Leibman on the music of the Levites.
There was no Lost Music yet.
There was a lecture.
Sources, explanations, slides—a first attempt to take a world that lived primarily in books and place it, for one evening, before a live audience.
But a lecture about music contains an almost unavoidable problem.
Sooner or later, words stop being enough.
The playing entered the lecture.
And over the years, it assumed a larger and larger role.
Research was joined by personal story. Story was joined by a visual language. Video art entered the stage—not merely as decoration, but as another way of giving form to a vanished world.
The single flute expanded into a palette of five.
And the lecture kept growing.
Nearly fifteen years after that evening in Jerusalem, it is difficult to call what happens onstage a lecture at all.
The lecture had become a stage work.
When the Research Took the Stage
In the current production of The Lost Music, Leibman performs on five kinds of flutes. Around the live music is a world built from video art, personal narrative, and discoveries drawn from years of research.
The result resists easy classification.
It is not a concert in the conventional sense, although live music is at its center.
It is not a lecture illustrated by musical excerpts.
And it is not a film projected behind a musician.
There is a circular quality to the story.
The boy who entered the world of classical music in Moscow eventually left that path for the yeshiva. Inside the yeshiva, he found music again. That rediscovery led him into Jewish musical thought, from there into the musical world of the Temple, and eventually back to the stage.
In a sense, he left music only to discover another musical world waiting for him.
The boy in Moscow who barely understood what it meant to be Jewish now stands before audiences telling the story of one of the oldest chapters in Jewish musical history.
And research that began among books and manuscripts has returned, finally, to the place music naturally seeks:
Can We Really Hear Music from Three Thousand Years Ago?
It is perhaps the most obvious question.
There is no recording from the Jerusalem Temple. Much of its musical world has disappeared, and many questions will likely remain unanswered.
For that reason, The Lost Music does not claim to offer a definitive reconstruction of a concert performed in ancient Jerusalem.
Its ambition is different.
It gathers what the sources do preserve—the instruments, structures, stories, ideas, and traditions that have reached us—and uses them to open a window onto a musical world that has largely vanished from cultural memory.
What instruments were associated with the Temple?
What role did the Levites play?
How was their song organized?
What did later Jewish thinkers believe music could do?
And what happens when those fragments are placed not only before the intellect, but before the ear and the eye?
The past, in this approach, is not displayed as an artifact behind glass.
It is allowed to become present.
That may help explain why the reactions Leibman has received often have little to do with any particular historical detail.
After a performance in Rostov, Rabbi Shmuel Stolin, the city’s Chabad emissary, told Leibman that he had never received reactions like these after an event. People kept calling.
At a high school in Be’er Sheva, principal Einat Midovnik recalled students sitting absorbed for an hour and a half and not wanting the encounter to end.
The subject may be ancient. The response does not seem to depend on an audience arriving with a prior fascination for antiquity.
The doorway is music.
The Music That Remained
In one sense, The Lost Music is the place where the separate threads of Leibman’s life finally meet: the child in Moscow, the conservatory-trained musician, the yeshiva student who discovered an unfamiliar world inside the niggun, and the researcher who spent years following the traces of music once heard in the Jerusalem Temple.
That first lecture before some two hundred women in Jerusalem is there, too. Nearly fifteen years later, it has become a stage production, but the question that gave rise to it remains.
Perhaps that is why the title The Lost Music describes more than the subject of the production.
It also describes the journey that created it.
A search for music that disappeared from the ear, but left traces behind.
After years spent following those traces through books, melodies, research, and sound, they have found their way back to the stage.
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