There are very few musical composers who can say that their melody is sung every day by hundreds of thousands of children.

Cantor Moshe Nathanson—who I’m guessing very few of my readers are even familiar with—is one of them.

Who was Cantor Moshe Nathanson, and why might he be the most famous Jewish musician that you have never heard of?

Nathanson is the individual who composed the melody that’s universally sung for the grace after meals.

The story of Cantor Moshe Nathanson and the melody of Birkat haMazon is one of those wonderful Jewish stories in which something that feels ancient, eternal, and almost biblically ordained turns out to have a surprisingly recent—and very human—origin.

There is also a wonderful irony: millions of Jews have sung Nathanson’s melody, often assuming that it was handed down from their grandparents and great-grandparents in Europe, when in fact it was composed in America in the late 1930s, less than 100 years ago.

Moshe Nathanson was born in Jerusalem in 1899 and grew up in a traditionally Orthodox environment. As a young man, he studied music with the great Jewish musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, the man associated with the preservation and popularization of Jewish and Middle Eastern musical traditions. Nathanson eventually came to America, where he became a cantor and an important teacher and promoter of Hebrew music.

He became the longtime cantor of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the New York synagogue founded by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan that became the center of the emerging Reconstructionist movement. Yet Nathanson’s musical influence crossed denominational lines: he taught in Orthodox Jewish schools, including the Yeshivah of Flatbush and the Crown Heights Yeshiva, and directed music at Jewish summer camps.

In the 1930s, Nathanson was heavily involved in Jewish education and summer camping. He noticed something that Jewish educators have probably noticed for centuries: children don’t particularly enjoy mumbling Birkat haMazon.

The prayer is long. It contains unfamiliar words. It is recited after everyone has just eaten and is ready to leave the table. And unlike many of the prayers in the synagogue, it didn’t have one universally compelling melody that made children want to sing it.

At Camp Achvah, where Nathanson served as music director, he set out to change that.

The melody emerged in 1938, when........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)