Here’s a thought: what do you call a Jew in Africa? For more than 150 years South Africa’s Jewish community has been searching for the punchline. Hakol Letovah, the first release of a Johannesburg folk band called Neshima, suggests some interesting answers. The band describes its music as “Afro-Latin-Chassidic” crossover, and the album’s appealing mix of sounds — acoustic guitars, skin drums, penny whistles and Old Testament lyrics — is the aural testimony of an emerging post-apartheid Jewish consciousness.
“Neshima” means “breath,” in Hebrew, and the band’s name has deep spiritual symbolism. Jews believe that the soul resides in the breath, and the Hebrew spelling of the unpronounceable name of God is formed by the four aspirated letters of the alphabet. But the name “Neshima” also invokes that rarefied form of breath known as song.
The vocals on Hakol Letova are often subdued, almost overwhelmed by the instruments, and one senses that these songs are not meant simply to be performed and heard but sung along with as well.
The album, according to band members, emerged from several months of rehearsal and experimentation. Along with the hand drumming and the Zulu guitar riffs, kwela sounds feature prominently throughout the album: one rambling, upbeat tune, Nigun Kwela, was developed after several sessions in Soweto with kwela legend Big Voice Jack. These African influences are merged with Jewish ones, notably the songs of the late Shlomo Carlebach, the Chassidic bard whose melodies had a major impact on Jewish popular and liturgical music in the latter part of the 20th century.
Neshima weaves these separate streams together with skillful instrumentation and creative arrangements to produce a collection that is as catchy and entertaining as it is cross-cultural and eclectic.
Neshima, like every South African crossover band of the past several years, owes a debt to the collaboration of Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu. Few among Clegg’s many fans know that he is also Jewish, and although Clegg acknowledges Jewish sources of inspiration, his background is almost incidental to his music. But Clegg emerged during a time when young Jews faced tough choices: leave and forget, stay and conform, or join the struggle and separate from the community. To express one’s Africanness almost always meant to deny or ignore one’s Jewishness, and vice versa.
Neshima is a product of a different era, one in which these two categories of identity are slowly becoming less mutually exclusive. Three of Neshima’s four musicians are in their teens or 20s — Yitzi Tuch, Chanan Rosin, and Shmueli Perkel — all Orthodox Jews who have come of age in the post-apartheid era. For the fourth, 51-year-old Raymond Perkel, the album is the culmination of three decades of spiritual searching and making music.
He is the eldest of five brothers whose divergent individual destinies seem to tell the complex story of contemporary South African Jewry. One brother settled into Johannesburg’s northern suburbs; another emigrated and became an acclaimed journalist in Canada; the youngest two became active in the anti-apartheid movement. Raymond’s own path into the new South Africa is through his Orthodox Lubavitch faith and an inspired worldview, increasingly less rare, that sees Jewishness as a path into Africanness, not a barrier against it.
Likewise, Neshima’s recipe for reconciliation is to seek inspiration not solely in Jewish tradition or in South African culture, but in both at once. The album’s title translates roughly as “all is for good”, and comes from a rabbinical teaching whose words feature in the lyrics of the penultimate song: “If one believes that we are capable of destruction, then how much more that we are capable of construction?” It is a passage that seems to have been chosen for its relevance to contemporary South Africa, and challenges its audience, Jewish and otherwise, to think positively about social transformation.
With Neshima already scheduling overseas gigs, Hakol Letovah may soon reach an even broader audience, and add to the list of South Africa’s innovative contributions to world music.