At TBZ, we delight in singing niggunim (wordless melodies), whether during services or at various life cycle events. Like the founders of Hasidism, we believe that through singing niggunim, we can lift our soul to higher dimensions of spiritual experience. At TBZ niggunim sometime serve as a substitute for spoken word-prayers, as we sing in a quiet, slow and meditative way. More often, you will find us singing with a lot of hitlahavut — with passion and ecstatic joy.
The following essay describes the Hasidic Niggun in greater detail. You can find more information at Liturgica.com.
"Eighteenth-century European pietism led to eastern European Hasidism, which borrowed directly the motifs of Lurianic Kabbalah. Its founders, Israel Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, were convinced that God was best worshiped out of a sense of great joy. Music and dance were the most important means for releasing the soul from the influence of the shards of evil.
The Hasidic theory of the niggun — a melody without lyrics — maintained that melodies, too, contain divine sparks, so that defiled melodies can be redeemed by being sung in sanctity. Further, melodies, like souls, are of divine origin, yet not all are equal. There therefore exists a hierarchy among the various kinds of niggun. The lowest melodic form is simply an expression of joy. Higher up are liturgical songs that express the inward meaning of the prayers. But the highest melodies are those created by the tzaddikim, Hasidic leaders and saints; the musical patterns of their songs were believed to express secret Kabbalistic ideas.
A melody's place in the musical hierarchy varied also with its relationship to a text, in that melodies with texts are like souls with bodies, whereas melodies without texts are like pure souls. Therefore the Hasidim composed many melodies with any text and sang them with nonsense syllables such as ya-ba-bam or doy-doy-doy and the like.
At times, such wordless niggunim served as substitute prayers: a long wordless melody would be followed by a hasty recitation of the corresponding prayer. Read More. . .
