And that was in spite of the major family health challenges that were the backdrop of Naftali’s life. He was the ben zekunim, and when his mother, who had developed serious health issues, was about to give birth to him, the doctors told his father that they’d have to choose between her and the unborn child. His father ran to his rav, Rav Reuven Yosef Gershonowitz, rosh yeshivah in Netivot, who told him not to worry.

“Rav Gershonowitz asked what my mother’s father’s name was,” Naftali relates, “and when my father answered ‘Naftali Yosef,’ he said, ‘Promise to name your son after him, and by the time you get back, everything will be fine.’ Now, my father didn’t even know whether it would be a boy or a girl, but when he returned to the hospital, they told him, ‘Mazal tov, you have a baby boy!’”

But soon afterward, Naftali’s mother developed cirrhosis of the liver and spent the next decade in and out of the hospital. Yet that didn’t stop her from being Tifrach’s premier chesed address.

“My mother was madhimah, amazing and selfless,” Naftali says. “Both my parents were my prime role models.” His father, a talmid chacham and long-time baal tefillah, is still learning full-time at over 70.

When Naftali was 14 and in shiur beis of yeshivah ketanah at Tiferes Tzion in Bnei Brak, his mother traveled abroad for a liver transplant.

“It was very hard for me,” Naftali remembers. “I was the only one not married, my parents were in chutz l’Aretz, and I was alone. Plus, they told us to prepare for the worst, that the transplant didn’t take — in the end, she lived for another 11 years, but at the time, I couldn’t find myself. So I moved to Yerushalayim to Yam HaTorah under Rav Shmuel Raber. Rav Raber was a balm for my soul — he’s a very open-minded mechanech, sees things multicolored instead of black and white, and was the first person who really understood me. When I meet him today, I always make sure to tell him how he changed my life.”

“I didn’t know Eli and Yitzy when I first came to Kol Torah. I was a new kid in yeshivah, and didn’t even play an instrument.” But they pushed Naftali Kempeh forward, and today, the trio is inseparable

After yeshivah ketanah, Naftali went on to Yeshivas Kol Torah in Bayit Vegan. At the time, he didn’t know it, but it would later prove to be the launching pad for his music — because that’s where he would eventually meet and become best friends with Yitzy Berry and Eli Klein, two talented chavrusas who would morph into a music team of their own — today considered among the top composers, producers and arrangers of Jewish music.

“I didn’t know them at the time. They were a little older and I was a new kid in yeshivah, busy sitting and learning,” Naftali says. “I also had another side to me, this undefined drive to somehow make a name for myself, to be a person who influenced others. I never imagined it would be with music though. I didn’t even play an instrument, although I was always composing songs — most of them not very good ones — and I’d also become somewhat of a kumzitz expert since my teenage years, where bochurim and even other organizers would ask me to help with the playlists.

“Meanwhile, I had a friend learning in another yeshivah in the neighborhood whose rosh yeshivah wouldn’t let him keep his guitar in the dorm, so he asked me if I could keep it in my room. I started plunking around on it. Then another friend taught me the basics, wrote out a few chords for me, and I bought one of those guitars-for-dummies books by Shai Barak.

“After a few months I could play a bit, and I noticed that people actually wanted to listen to me. We’d sit around Leil Shishi or Motzaei Shabbos — I wasn’t really a good musician, but if you know a few chords and everyone is singing with you, you can sort of fake it.”

And that’s when he had his first encounter with Yitzy Berry, who together with his chavrusa Eli Klein, were considered the music stars of the yeshivah. “I was just a little shiur alef guy playing a bit of guitar, and one night I’m in my room trying to figure out the chords for ‘Kad Yasfin Yisrael,’ which must have sounded a little grating, when suddenly I hear from the next room, ‘E minor, not G!’ Then Yitzy Berry opened the door and helped me play it right. I was a little embarrassed, but also flattered.”

The three became and remained best friends, Eli and Yitzy moving into the world of composing and production, while Naftali was carving out his own niche on the kumzitz scene.

“When I was around 20, there was this big Carlebach movement in the yeshivos, where bochurim from all over would get together and sing Carlebach,” Naftali relates. “I loved it, I knew all the songs, I would come with my guitar, and that’s really how it started. One friend told me, ‘There’s going to be a kumzitz on the radio, do you want to come to the studio?’ I thought, why not, so I came and played and sang a little. Then another person says, ‘We’re making a sheva brachos, can you come and play?’ It happened so gradually that there really isn’t one point where I can say ‘This is how I started.’ It was so slow that I didn’t even realize it was happening.”

Together with Shmueli Ungar at a recent concert in New York. Naftali was surprised that even celebrity Shmueli still gets a little stage fright at the beginning

Playing at a friend’s sheva brachos is one thing, but breaking into the music world of the yeshivos is another level. Yet Naftali found himself doing kumzitzes almost every night for yeshivah camps, Leil Shishi gatherings, siyumim, and other yeshivah-related events. His mellow voice, big range, and skill on the guitar were surely part of the draw — but it was the way he drew emotion out of both instrument and audience that really became his calling card. Yeshivah bochurim tend to go for flashy, fun, or upbeat tunes. It’s the rare performer who can capture their inner yearning for something deeper.

Naftali says he learned the secrets of the trade from kumzitz king Shmuel Greineman, whom he knew from Tifrach (although Greineman is a bit older) and who had since moved to Tzfas and reintroduced the yeshivah community to the genre of slow, contemplative song paired with messages of inspiration and meaning.

“I would follow him around and play in the kumzitzes he led,” Naftali says. “I learned a lot from him, especially about how to read a crowd. It’s not just about bringing a guitar and singing, it’s about finding a shared language with the crowd, about opening up and getting them to open up.

“People think you can sell a crowd anything, but that’s not true. The crowd is very smart, and very discerning. And all you have to lift up that crowd is your guitar and your personality. You have to keep your finger on their pulse all the time and read how they’re responding. Which story are you going to tell? Which devar Torah? Shmuel’s secret is that, even if he doesn’t look typically yeshivish [he has long hair and wild peyos], he’s a person with deep tochen. His stories are real and they touch people, and the crowds tune in to it. Without that depth, you can’t fool them — even if you happen to sing nicely.”

Naftali began his tours with Greineman quite shy before an audience, but Shmuel cured his young friend of that. “Once we were invited to the sheva brachos of a boy from Ponevezh, when suddenly Shmuel’s guitar string broke, and he turned to the crowd and said, ‘Okay, Naftali Kempeh, now it’s your turn to sing!’  So with no choice, I stood up and sang. I remember it so clearly — it was like being pushed off the diving board. As we were leaving, I turned to Greineman and said, ‘Shmuel, I think I got over my stage fright.’”

(But he learned that stage fright is natural, even for seasoned performers. “When I was performing together with Shmueli Unger on my last trip to the US, we were together before the show and I saw he was nervous.  I asked him, ‘Shmueli, you still get stage fright?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, a little, at the beginning, every time.’”)

“The world of the yeshivos is very discriminating, so I needed a gimmick.” Naftali’s hair was a bit longer, but the bochurim just thought that was a little interesting

Naftali took something else from Greineman: He grew his hair a bit longer than the typical yeshivish look, a style he maintained until last year, when he once again became clean-cut yeshivish. “It was a process for both Leah and me. We moved into a new space together. You know, once you hit 30, something shifts. You don’t need to be ‘interesting’ anymore for your self-definition.”

But back when he was first starting out, Naftali explains, he needed a gimmick, something to make him stand out, to draw attention and have people notice him.

“The world of the yeshivos is very discriminating and a little cynical,” he says. “I was 20 years old. If I looked like a typical yeshivah bochur who came along with a guitar and sang, who would even notice me? I was going for the young people, and they thought it was a little interesting — the longer hair, a little Carlebach style. Granted, there were some roshei yeshivah who didn’t like the look so much, but my music was always very pure, not loud, not wild, and the stories kodesh. So the content was a great inspiration and generally won out.”

But not every time. Yet one cancellation, Naftali believes, actually led him to his bashert. He was 24 at the time, and had been invited to sing at the camp of a well-known chassidus, when the Rebbe himself made the uncomfortable phone call to cancel his performance. The Rebbe explained to Naftali that when they booked him, they didn’t realize he wasn’t married, but when the Rebbe found out, he was uncomfortable: He always told the bochurim in the chassidus not to consider working until after marriage. To bring a single young man to the camp as an image of inspiration was, in the Rebbe’s opinion, counter to their chinuch. Then the Rebbe said, “In the merit of your being mevater on this, I give you a brachah that within the year you’ll be married and come to our camp next summer.”

And that’s exactly what happened. That year Naftali got engaged and was invited to run the next summer’s kumzitz.

Naftali’s “look” made his parents a little uneasy, though. Today his father is his biggest fan, but back then, he wasn’t quite sure in which direction his talented Tifrach-raised son was heading. And his mother, who passed away soon after Naftali and Leah were engaged, also raised an eyebrow.

Leah recalls one of her first conversations with her future mother-in-law. “She was already very sick at the time, but she totally embraced me as a daughter, especially since my own mother — who was actually her friend growing up together on Kibbutz Chafetz Chaim — had passed away two years before. She told me, ‘You know Naftali — there’s the Naftali you see who needs a haircut, and the Naftali on the inside.’ It bothered her, but she was also very proud that he succeeded in getting to the hearts of the bochurim.”

Although he’d been composing songs since his bar mitzvah, Naftali Kempeh would probably still be limited to the small circle of Israeli yeshivos, organizing camp kumzitzes and singing other composers’ hits — if not for some pushing from unexpected corners of the industry. No one except himself and his trusty Walkman knew his compositions.

“You can’t teach people new songs at a kumzitz,” he says, “because they want to sing songs they already know. But putting out an album of my own compositions was totally out of the ballpark for me, both financially and even conceptually. Still, I really did want to leave some kind of imprint.”

Meanwhile, his friends Eli Klein [who often played keyboard at Naftali’s performances] and Yitzy Berry were always pushing him to produce an album at their studio. Naftali didn’t have the money for a full album, but at some point, he agreed to release a single.

“Naftali had some great songs,” Eli Klein remembers their thinking back then. “We figured we could record them without pressure, just to get them out there. It wouldn’t be a major commitment.”

Well, if you want to put out either a single or an album, you’re really lucky if you have good friends like Eli and Yitzy, masters of the one-stop-shop studio experience. Much of today’s most popular Jewish music comes out of Yitzy Berry’s bedroom-turned studio in this friendly, soft-spoken yeshivish fellow’s simple Har Nof apartment.

The little studio on Rechov Mishkelov is proof that you don’t need sophisticated ambiance to put out great music. From these warm and inviting daled amos have emerged dozens of albums and songs you surely know and love. But what, in fact, do Yitzy Berry and Eli Klein offer top-tier performers such as MBD, Avraham Fried, Benny Friedman, and everyone in between, all of them beating a path to Yitzy’s apartment?

It could be the way they’re attuned to the young demographic of music lovers, and their strong instinct for which songs will or won’t work for today’s listeners; or their fusion of high professional standards with easygoing, gracious attitudes and the integrity they manage to maintain in what can be a very murky industry; or that despite the big names and high stakes they work with, they’ve remained two yeshivah guys, committed to their standards and values.

But Yitzy has a more practical take. “If someone wants a song for an album, here he gets the full package. We’ll compose the song, record it, arrange it, produce it, mix and master it, do background vocals — a total product start to finish. It’s also very quiet and personal here, and this way we can really feel the energy of the singer, give him that push, that extra encouragement that often makes the song better.”

For Naftali, the dream package came with an added plus — Yitzy and Eli were personal friends and cheerleaders who’d believed in him before he had a single booking.

Naftali chose his composition “B’tzeis Yisrael” — a stirring take on a pasuk from Hallel, with a slowly climbing melody and soaring chorus —  as his first single. Eli and Yitzy helped him record and produce it. But the song was essentially a flop. It didn’t get much airplay on chareidi radio stations and wasn’t featured on chareidi websites.

“I thought it was a great song, a part of Hallel,” Naftali says, “but in retrospect, it’s a long, complicated piece, and who had the patience to listen to something like that from an unknown singer?”

Still, it caught the attention of one person. Journalist, author and radio personality Yedidya Meir liked the song and encouraged Naftali to put out some more original material. So the trio put out two more of Naftali’s compositions, “Ba’avur Avoseinu” and “Niggun Viduy,” but again, they just didn’t catch.

“We were sure ‘Baavur Avoseinu’ would catch on,” says Eli. “A great tune, and words from the davening beseeching Hashem to open our hearts to Torah. We timed the release for Shavuos, and even had Yoni Gerstein do the graphics for a real Torahdig feel, but it didn’t take — until it went onto Naftali’s first album. Today everyone knows it — there isn’t a siyum in cheder or yeshivah where it’s not sung.”

The album, apparently, was the secret to Naftali’s success, but also his biggest gamble.

“After we put out the singles, I was convinced that I was the only one listening to them,” Naftali remembers. “I figured that I should just drop the thought of sharing my compositions — no one was listening to them, so I’d just go back to playing kumzitzes like I knew best.

“But apparently, Yedidya Meir was also listening. He’s not in the music industry per se, but he has a lot of influence and connections, and he’s the type that finds the jewels hidden under the rocks that others miss. He turned out to be a real nudnik, wouldn’t leave me alone. He met me for coffee and wouldn’t let me off the hook. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘these singles are amazing, but they aren’t going to take off on their own. You’ll put out an album together with some more simple, catchy tunes and they’ll all become hits. I guarantee it.’

“Well, between Yedidya and my friends Eli and Yitzy, I let myself be persuaded, even though it seemed like financial suicide. But would you believe it, that first album, Leyachdo Shemo, somehow became an instant success — and Yedidya was right. The songs that were the total flops rose to the top. I remember going into a local shul on Rosh Chodesh and suddenly I heard the chazzan singing my tune to ‘B’tzeis Yisrael.’ I nearly cried.”

It was a pretty daring step on Yedidya Meir’s part. What if the album had failed?

“I just knew Naftali’s songs would be winners in the end,” Yedidya tells Mishpacha. “From the first song I heard — that was ‘B’tzeis Yisrael’ — I spotted the talent, the originality, and also the simplicity. You don’t have to be a big genius to see there’s something special here that can really take off. I gave it a lot of air play on my morning variety show, and not only on Rosh Chodesh. You know, there are so many tunes to these words, but here comes someone new, pretty unknown in most circles, and I was curious to know who this young fellow was. Mostly, I sensed his humility.”

Yedidya admits that for all his initial enthusiasm, he couldn’t guess how wide a reach Naftali Kempeh would eventually have. “And that really makes me happy,” he says, “not just for him — that a relative unknown made it big — but for the young generation of music consumers who, unfortunately, are growing up on a lot of substandard noise.”

Yitzy Berry says the success caught him off guard as well. “We never expected it to be a hit,” he says. “For us, it was more like fun. We’re in the studio anyway so it wasn’t a major investment for us, and we figured, it’s good material and maybe someone will like it. Naftali has the songs, we’re good friends, we have the studio, so why not? It was like doing an album in our pajamas. It was fun, it was our pleasure, it wasn’t really business or commercial.”

Eli says that although Naftali was considered pretty much of an unknown, there was actually a big audience out there who already knew him. “Oh,” they’d say, “he was in my yeshivah, in my camp, at my friend’s sheva brachos.” It was, as Eli says, like planting on fertile soil instead of in a desert.

Around that time, Eli encouraged Naftali to get a manager, because although he knew music, he didn’t know anything about business. That’s when Naftali hired Shalom Wagschal as his producer, which opened up new venues for him, around Israel and also in the US, which, for Naftali, was a chiddush.

“For a kid from Tifrach, traveling to America was like a dream I could never imagine,” Naftali says. “Everything there seemed so big, on such a grand scale, all the wealth and opulence… I admit it, I came back and everything here felt so small, provincial and even claustrophobic. There the houses are big, everyone has a car, it just seemed so comfortable.

“I even told my wife, you know, people are really living well in America. I told her how I asked a friend there if he was planning on coming to live in Eretz Yisrael, and he said, ‘Sure, in a box.’ I understood him. Everything seemed easier, bigger there. And everything here seemed so hard. I’d been appearing at a lot of events in the New York area, and each time it was hard for me to fly home. But I wasn’t comfortable with this feeling, and I wanted to find some words I could sing that would connect me back to Eretz Yisrael.”

It happened on one of his trips. He was in shul davening Minchah and waiting for the chazzan to begin, when he pulled a sefer off the shelf and flipped through it: And there he found words of the Vilna Gaon: “Chemdas kol Yisrael… I praise Hashem that I am traveling back to the Holy Land… the source of desire for all Yisrael and the object of Hashem’s desire…”

“I knew I’d found my words, and decided that as soon as I returned home, I’d put them to music. But the very next day, Eli Klein, who was always my traveling companion and music manager, and I met Yossi Green at a reception, and I showed Yossi the words. He invited us to his home and within ten minutes he had the song ‘Chemdas Kol Yisrael’ [on album #2, Ana Eilech].’”

After three years of traveling back and forth, Naftali says he’s now grateful to be back home in Eretz Yisrael, in Yerushalayim. And he wrote another song to express that. It’s the popular “Chosheiv al Yerushalayim (Thinking of Yerushalayim)” from his latest album, K’malach (his third album in four years). The words were inspired by Shlomo Carlebach’s famous interlude in his “Im Eshkacheich Yerushalayim”: “If you would have asked a little Yiddele on the way to the gas chambers what are you thinking about, he would answer, ‘I’m thinking of Yerushalayim, I’m on my way to Yerushalayim.’ If you’d stop a little Yiddele on his way to Siberia, what are you thinking about, he would answer, ‘I’m thinking about Yerushalayim, I’m on my way to Yerushalayim…'”

“Those words seemed almost like a cry to me,” says Naftali, “and they inspired me to compose my own song with these words, a hymn full of our hopes and dreams for our return home. Today I’m in the place where I feel, no matter how good it is there in America, it’s not good for me, and I wanted others to feel the longing and the joy of living here.”

Music consumers sometimes assume that finding lyrics is easy — just open up a siddur or Tanach and presto — and writing the tune is the real work. But Naftali says it’s the opposite. If the words don’t touch the heart of the singer, then the best voice, and the most creative melody, won’t do it.

“Even holy, lofty words like ‘Shema koleinu,’ for example — if the words don’t touch you personally, it won’t work. Your niggun won’t work. I believe the words have to touch you personally, they can’t be too high or too holy. People today want words that can touch them, with a niggun that’s totally singable. When you’re at a kumzitz, you want to be able to actually sing the song, not just listen to a fancy arrangement.”

In a way, that was a problem with “Baavur Avoseinu.” The words were like a repeat of the classic “Avinu Av Harachaman,” and who wants to copy words that already work?

“It was like writing new music to Chaim Banet’s ‘Machnisei Rachamim’ — who would want to try that?” says Naftali. “There was already ‘Avinu Av Harachaman,’ so I thought, what can I add here to really make the song personal for me?”

Really, if the Tanach is full of thousands of words and pesukim, why would any songwriter want to “re-use” a pasuk that’s already been composed by someone else?

“It’s not so simple,” says Eli, “and that’s really what Naftali brings to the market. He works really hard to find words, not like some composers today who, it seems, pull pesukim out of a hat and tack on a melody. And really, there aren’t so many words that are appropriate: You’re not going to sing about shechting korbanos, or about Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, or about tzaraas. And words that worked once, there’s a good chance they’ll work again.”

Yitzy agrees. He says that the hardest part is finding great words. “Once you have the words, the tune just flows from there. It’s tricky with words because they have to touch you in a certain way, not be too heavy, just the right mix of hope and light and prayer. For example, as soon as we had the words to ‘B’zechus HaTorah’ for the big Dirshu siyum, we knew we struck gold. As long as we wouldn’t ruin it with a substandard tune, we knew it was something that could touch everyone.”

Sometimes, though, a melody with no words is the most powerful. That’s the koach of a niggun, and Naftali created one of the most exquisite ones to come out in recent years. It’s called “Viduy” — and he actually wrote it on his mother’s deathbed soon after he was engaged to be married. But the interesting thing is that it’s not a sad niggun at all.

“My mother suffered for many years, but no one knew, no one could tell,” Naftali relates. “She was so full of life, so full of chesed — she was a mother to so many people, and honestly, it took me years to come to terms with her death. Until today, I feel that my success is largely because of her, that she’s advocating for me in Shamayim and still being the best mother.”

He wrote the niggun on his last visit, hours before she passed away. “She was no longer conscious,” Naftali says, replaying the scene that never leaves his mind, “but the doctor said, ‘she probably hears you, go ahead and talk to her.’ It was Erev Shabbos, and the whole family was singing Shabbos songs around her bed. Then after everyone left, I stayed on and continued to sing for her with the guitar, composing this niggun for her. Whenever I sing it at a kumzitz until today, I feel like I’m connecting to her soul.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many hours to discussion there was whether to include me in the program.” At the Dirshu siyum, where a litvishe singer was an innovation

As a yeshivish singer from the litvish world, Naftali has another challenge that goes beyond penetrating lyrics and a hartzige tune. “When it comes to chassidim,” he says, “there’s a lot of music that’s an integral part of life: There’s the Leil Shishi and the tish and the zitz and the boteh, and a lot of action and singing around the rebbe.

“But in the litvishe world, Torah learning takes up 95 percent of the energy, and there’s a lot of suspicion and raised eyebrows if someone becomes a singer. I just returned from the world Dirshu Halachah siyum in the US, and you wouldn’t believe how many hours of discussion there was whether or not to even include me on the program, because the tzibbur doesn’t trust litvishe singers.

“The chassidim can do it because they’re singing in front of the Rebbe, it’s part of life over there, but in the litvishe world they think, ‘If he’s a singer, he’s probably OTD.’ The truth is, I’m not out to change anything, and I’m extremely sensitive to what and how I perform and what I’m singing. And when we’re working in the studio, we check every single digital note a hundred times to see that it doesn’t sound ‘too modern.’”

Maybe that’s part of Naftali’s success. He’s pretty strict about the music he wants to produce. He’s not aiming for a formal orchestral production or a high-tech trance. When you play a Kempeh song, you should be transported to the simple, soulful mode of an authentic kumzitz. That’s why he insists that every part has to be totally singable (even the intros are singable niggunim and not fancy symphonic arrangements), and that the instrumentation mimic the sound of a kumzitz. That means no lush string section and no brass. He’s found his sound and stays in his own lane.

“And,” says his good friend Eli, “he really has the voice of a baal tefillah, more than a singer. It’s a voice people can connect to, can identify with.”

Today Naftali is king of the kumzitzers, but in this field, nothing lasts forever, and obsolescence is a natural fallout of the industry. Is he afraid other young people will move in on his territory?

“Of course, there’s always the fear of losing relevance,” he says, “especially in this field, and especially the older you get. I’m not selling milk and bread that people need for sustenance. I’m selling the last thing on the sustenance chain — no one really needs us for survival — so that’s why it’s so important to stay relevant and interesting.

“Look, there are always new people trying to break in. I wish everyone success, and I certainly don’t have aspirations to have a monopoly. So I’m concentrating on always moving myself forward, so that when someone else comes in, there will be room for him, too.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 907)