Yehuda Veksler: Where Musicology Meets Chassidus
I knew R. Yehuda Veksler as one of those rare individuals who brought together two worlds that, in those days, hardly seemed to meet: professional musicology and the world of Chassidic thought. My encounters with him and with his writings became, early in my own journey, one of the sources of inspiration for the field I today call Torah Musicology.
Crossing the Red Sea — Out of the Soviet Union
Yehuda Veksler (1946–2020) was born in the Soviet Union. As a young man, he completed his musical studies in piano and later graduated from the Gorky Conservatory in composition and musicology. He went on to pursue advanced studies in the analysis of musical works and wrote a doctoral dissertation,[1] but never completed the formal process of receiving the degree: first because of reforms in the Soviet academic system, and later because he had applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union.
R. Yehuda immigrated to Israel in the middle of Yom Tov — on the Seventh Day of Passover, 5739 (1979).
And this is what happened.
He had been waiting for permission to leave Russia, whose gates, as is well known, were then tightly sealed — almost like the gates of Egypt. Suddenly, the long-awaited permission arrived. But the date assigned for his departure was the Seventh Day of Passover, in the middle of Yom Tov.
R. Yehuda telephoned a rabbi or Chassid to ask what he should do. The man muttered a few words and immediately hung up.
R. Yehuda called again and again. Each time, the man hurriedly repeated two words that R. Yehuda could not make out, and then ended the call.
Finally, he understood what the man was saying:
“Pikuach nefesh.”
A matter of life and death.
R. Yehuda understood that he had to board the plane at the appointed time.
But even after landing in Israel, his ordeal was not quite over.
As he left the airport, representatives of the Jewish Agency — or people involved in directing new immigrants to kibbutzim — immediately approached him and said:
“Come. You’re going with us.”
“No,” R. Yehuda replied. “I’m going to Kfar Chabad.”
“No, you can’t go to Kfar Chabad. You’re coming with us!”
Their tone left little room for argument, and none of his protests seemed to help.
R. Yehuda was almost in tears.
Then, suddenly, a man appeared and quietly told him exactly what to say so that they would allow him to go to Kfar Chabad. R. Yehuda repeated the words he had been given — and they let him go.
Later, R. Yehuda would say that the mysterious stranger had been Elijah the Prophet...
And so, directly from the airport, he made his way to the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad.
They told him:
“Go to R. Mendel.”
They meant the legendary Chassid R. Mendel Futerfas.
R. Yehuda studied Tanya with him, as well as with R. Moshe Vishedsky and R. Leizer Nanes, whom the Rebbe had instructed to study Tanya with Russian-speaking Jews.
Not long after arriving at the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad, R. Yehuda had the privilege of traveling to the Rebbe. This was in 5740 (1980).
At the Lag BaOmer parade that year, he and a friend were asked to accompany a group of Russian-speaking children. When the Rebbe began speaking in Yiddish, the children complained to their guide, R. Yehuda, that they could not understand.
We do not know exactly how their message reached the Rebbe. But the fact is that the Rebbe suddenly began speaking in Russian.
It was the first time the Rebbe had spoken Russian in public.
[Here one can watch the Rebbe’s Russian address from that Lag BaOmer parade.]
R. Yehuda also gave weekly classes to Russian-speaking baalei teshuvah through Yad L’Achim in Hadera and at a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Ramot Aleph neighborhood.
Throughout his life, he carefully recorded the striking instances of Divine Providence that he experienced, and asked his children to publish them after his passing. Sadly, those records have not yet been found.
A Chassid and Musicologist: A Source of Inspiration
R. Yehuda Veksler did an enormous amount to spread Judaism and Chassidus among Russian-speaking Jews. Among other things, he professionally translated some sixty Jewish books into Russian from Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, and German.
Having myself spent several years working at Tzeirei Agudas Chabad on the publication of Jewish material in Russian — and having repeatedly encountered the difficulty of finding truly capable translators — I know how important this work was and how great his contribution was.
But I had the privilege of knowing R. Yehuda in another capacity as well: as an expert musicologist who opened a path for me toward studying music through the lens of Chassidus.
This was before the publication of my first book, Negina Le’Or HaChassidus — Music in the Light of Chassidus — in 5770 (2010).
For a long time, I searched for every possible reference to music in Torah sources. Every fragment of information I discovered felt like finding a treasure.[2]
Around that time, I came across old Russian-language issues of Vozrozhdenie (“Renaissance”), published by the Shamir organization under Professor Herman Branover. The journal featured articles by Jewish scientists on Torah and science.
I had first seen these issues at my father’s home. My father came from a background of higher education and science, and seeing the interest with which he read them made me realize that this was serious material of a high intellectual standard.
And then...
In issue no. 10 of Vozrozhdenie, I came across an extensive article on the Alter Rebbe’s Niggun Arba Bavos.
The article included a fine Russian translation of a discourse by the Rebbe Rashab explaining the inner meaning of the niggun,[3] together with a detailed analysis of its musical notation based on that spiritual explanation. The analysis used highly professional musicological terminology[4] and was accompanied by diagrams.
The issue appeared in 5748 (1988), and it is reasonable to assume that, like other Shamir publications of that period, it also reached the Rebbe.
In any case, I immediately became intensely curious:
Who was this Yehuda Veksler, the author of such an impressive article?
I found his telephone number and traveled to his home in Beitar.
I came to him as a young man at the very beginning of my path, seeking his advice about my work. I showed him drafts from what would later become Negina Le’Or HaChassidus.
He genuinely liked what I was writing.
I received tremendous encouragement from him.
In my eyes, R. Yehuda was simply a genius in musicology. I regarded him as I would a professor and a scholar of the highest caliber. His enormous home library of musicology made no small impression on me, and the humility with which he spoke to me only deepened my respect for this remarkable man.
The fact that he valued what I was writing had a special significance for me at that stage of my life.[5]
Looking at the broader picture, much of the inspiration for what I now call Torah Musicology came, in those early years, from articles R. Yehuda sent me in Russian.
In one of them he wrote about the music of Gustav Mahler, showing how a Jewish composer — despite having converted to Christianity for the sake of his musical career — could nevertheless express, on the musical level itself, the cry of his Jewish soul: “A Jew, even though he has sinned, remains a Jew.”
In another article, R. Yehuda turned to the music of Richard Wagner and sought, through musicological analysis, to explain what might be called “the music of the yetzer hara” — the evil inclination — in light of the description of the yetzer hara in the Tanya.
This opened something fundamentally new for me.
It was not only a matter of asking what Torah sources say about music.
It was possible to turn the question around — to look at music itself through the concepts of Torah and Chassidus.
In a certain sense, one of the seeds of what I today call Torah Musicology was planted there.
Above all, however, was his study of the Niggun Arba Bavos. For me, it served as a kind of confirmation that the path I was trying to forge was both valid and important.
Over time, this field became a central part of my own sense of purpose — the particular contribution I seek to bring into the world through the study of the musical wisdom found in Torah.[6]
R. Yehuda once told me about a lecture he had given on music and Torah at a seminar for a group of scientists who were recent immigrants.
Afterward, a deeply moved woman approached him and told him that the lecture had been nothing less than a “lifeline” for her.
Musicians who become baalei teshuvah sometimes experience a painful split between two worlds. When music is rediscovered from within the world of Torah, many of the questions lodged deep in the heart can finally begin to find their place.[7]
In this too, I see myself as following in R. Yehuda’s footsteps.
There was something else he taught me.
Once, I sent him an article in which I analyzed a niggun — one of my earliest attempts at this kind of musical analysis. It was an article on the Tzemach Tzedek’s niggun “Yemin Hashem.”[8]
He thought highly of the article, but then asked me:
“What conclusion do you draw from all this? And how does it help us understand the world of niggun as a whole?”
He made me understand that without a conclusion, something essential is missing.
Those questions have guided me ever since: always to search for the conclusion, and to see every niggun as a complete world in itself.
Every niggun embodies a unique message — one that can also illuminate the broader world of niggun.
Today, when I look back at the road I have traveled since those meetings in R. Yehuda’s home, I understand just how deeply he influenced me.
He was not my teacher in the literal sense of the word. But he was one of those people who, at the beginning of my path, gave me both encouragement and direction:
the confidence that one can approach music with full professional rigor without leaving Chassidus outside the room;
and the demand not to stop at admiration, but to search for meaning, principle, and conclusion.
May his memory be a blessing.
Articles by R. Yehuda Veksler on Music in the Light of Torah
“Niggun Arba Bavos” — an analysis of the niggun originally published in Vozrozhdenie. With appreciation to the Shamir publishing project.
“Mahler and Kabbalah” — see also Negina Le’Or HaChassidus, pp. 42–43.
Notes
[1] His dissertation was titled: Meter in G. F. Handel’s Keyboard Suites: A Systematic-Typological Study.
[2] My book Negina Le’Or HaChassidus contains an almost encyclopedic collection of material in this field. In a sense, all of my later books and projects developed and refined themes already present in that first book. Since then, I have accumulated a great deal of additional material on many of its subjects, and on a few points I have even revised positions I held at the time. Nevertheless, the book retains considerable value because of the breadth and scope of the material it brings together.
[3] This discourse is also the “heart” of my book Niggun Arba Bavos, where I had the privilege of presenting it in an annotated edition. To the best of my knowledge, it is the most extensive explanation ever given not only of a Chabad niggun, but of any traditional Jewish niggun.
[4] There was one point in Veksler’s analysis that I did not understand. R. Yehuda later explained to me that this particular subject was precisely what he had dealt with in his doctoral research.
[5] R. Yehuda’s name appears in the acknowledgments to Negina Le’Or HaChassidus. His positive assessment of my “research” gave me enormous motivation to continue at the time.
[6] My first major work devoted to a single niggun was the book Niggun Arba Bavos, which also included R. Yehuda Veksler’s research. I later published dozens of articles on individual niggunim, many of which appear here on the Torah Musicology blog.
[7] The same principle applies, more broadly, to the entire relationship between Torah and science.
[8] In that article itself, I also acknowledged R. Yehuda in a footnote.
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