Perhaps one of the most well-known, yet least understood schools of music in all of Judaism is the deceitfully simplistic nigun. These wordless tunes have been chanted throughout generations. It is the soundtrack of our people. But where did the nigun come from, how has it evolved, and what role does it play in modern Judaism? These may seem like unanswerable questions, but I, America’s Rebbitzman, have put in the time and research to answer them all.

With something so simple as a song without lyrics, one might assume that the nigun predates all other liturgy, but you’d be wrong, DEAD wrong. The story of the nigun started over five hundred years ago in the Yeshiva of Bratislava, by a less-than-apt pupil named Shmini Ben Yoseph.

Every morning during shacharit, he was surrounded by people praying so fast and accurately that he had no hope of keeping up. While his peers shuffled back and forth with the spirit of prayer, Shmini would shuffle in anxiety. To help hide his ignorance, Shmini would just mumble as he shuffled, “Oy yoy oy yoy oy oy yoy vey.”

One day after mincha, his friend Lev asked him about his bizarre prayers. Shmini confessed everything. But rather than being ridiculed for his actions, word spread of what he was doing, and like wildfire, this proto-nigun infiltrated the yeshivot of Europe. Whenever a yeshiva bocher had a late night at a hora rave or got lost in a debate over whether a French braided Havdalah candle was kosher, only to find themselves in shape to recite Modeh Ani the next morning, they would instead mumble Shmini’s tune; “Oy yoy oy yoy oy oy yoy vey.”

By the end of the 1500’s, there would be over 3000 different niguns on record. In that time, it transformed from a “bent-over” cure used by overly extracurricular rabbinical students into the legitimate........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)