The Spirit and the Soul

To understand the significance of the Moshe Yess legacy requires a little time travel back to the Jewish world of the 1970s and 80s. My father had grown up removed from his Jewish heritage, becoming a virtuoso musician of many different styles. He shared stages with big-name bands, doing highly paid gigs across the country. But the crazy lifestyle started to catch up with him, to the point where one night, alone in his hotel room in Vegas, he was overcome by a fit of shaking, and he knew something had to change.

In 1978, he had met one of the original Chabad shluchim in California, Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, who persuaded him to take a break and go to Eretz Yisrael. There he enrolled in the yeshivah Dvar Yerushalayim, learning with Rabbi Yosef Krupnik. At the time my father thought “Jewish music” meant liturgical music, and that his own musical career would have to be sacrificed on the altar of Torah. But Rabbi Krupnik told him he had the wrong concept about Jewish music. “The kashrus of the music is in the words, not the music,” the rabbi told him.  My father was shocked — and pleased — to find
that out.

Rabbi Krupnik helped him understand that if you’re born with a huge gift, then that gift comes from Hashem, and it would be a terrible waste to forsake it. The tikkun for his past should not be to abandon his music, but to transform it into a positive, kosher form.

There were three other guys at the yeshivah who were musicians — one of them was Shalom Levine, who had studied with Pablo Casals. The four of them formed a band, but two dropped out and it became just my dad and Shalom in a band called Megama. My father wrote the songs, and Shalom played the viola and served as his straight man in their goofy between-song dialogues.

Their songs became as much a staple of Jewish music as gefilte fish. People found them very meaningful, especially the waves of people who became frum in the 80s and 90s. His most famous song, “My Zaidy,” captures the fear that if they didn’t revive their connection to Judaism, their families would end up completely assimilated. They could identify with songs like “The Prayer Book Blues,” about entering shul and having no idea where the place was in the siddur. Megama music became standard fare at Chabad houses and kiruv organizations.

Baalei teshuvah were thrilled to have kosher music that was more like the folk and coffeehouse music they were accustomed to, played with the professionalism they were used to. Composer/musician Gershon Veroba, whose own roots were in secular music, once told me that it was a huge relief for him when he first met my father back in the early 1980s.

“For the first time, I met somebody who was successfully incorporating the music I knew into performance,” he told me. “He was the first person to do original English-language, mainstream-sounding Jewish music with songs and instrumentation that I respected, and that’s what I also wanted to do.  For me, that was major.”

Abie Rotenberg, who collaborated with my father on The Marvelous Midos Machine series, says that the song “My Zaidy” was what inspired him, 40 years ago, to write English lyrics about Jewish and Torah themes.

Although my father’s words were Jewish and inspired, his style was admittedly more secular for those times. The FFB crowd took longer to warm to him. Years ago, when I lived in Montreal, we had a neighbor from Manchester who told us, “When I was a girl, we weren’t allowed to attend Megama concerts.” This was true in some places in Israel, too. But as Nachum Segal has said, the Jewish world owes a debt of gratitude to Megama for giving a more American flavor to Jewish music, and for documenting what baalei teshuvah could expect as they took on a frum lifestyle.

The impact of my father’s music was highlighted when we were sitting shivah for him in 2011. He passed away young, at age 65, after battling cancer for ten years. One of my visitors was Rabbi Yisroel Bernath, a Chicago native who had a Chabad shul in Montreal. I used to daven at his shul when I lived in Montreal, and Rabbi Bernath would often ask me to serve as gabbai.

“Share a story about your father,” he now said.

I was able to come up with two stories. The first was about an email my father had received from a woman in the mountains of Iran. After hearing his song about the Seven Noahide Laws at a concert, she decided she had to follow them, and it turned her life around. It seemed incredible that a Moshe Yess song had reached all the way to Iran and influenced someone to respect the Seven Noahide Laws.

The second story went back many years prior, after my father and Shalom Levine had released the Megama albums. After listening to the song, “Throw Away That Ham,” a woman wrote, “I koshered my whole kitchen after I heard that song! And today, my family is completely religious.”

Rabbi Bernath was floored. “That woman — she was my mother!” he said, and I was floored, because Rabbi Bernath was so instrumental in helping me become a yarei shamayim.

Today, although there’s a lot of English-language Jewish music on the market, very little mainstream Jewish music caters to the baal teshuvah experience. Even geirim like Nissim Black don’t sing about it. At the height of the baal teshuvah movement, however, my father captured the spirit and the soul of people trying to grow.

Accidental Player

These days I live in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and work as a division manager of a large company doing Amazon sales. As a kid, I learned the value of finding a job that makes a parnassah: My parents had six kids and my father didn’t make much of a living from his music. He used to joke, “Every six months I get a twelve-dollar royalty check.”  My mother taught pre-kindergarten. Back then the Jewish music world was very small, and you couldn’t say we were even middle class — we were below the poverty line.

But even today, most Jewish musicians struggle to make a living. Unless you’re one of the top ten names, doing several gigs a week, everyone needs a side hustle. Even many big people have them. Either that, or they have a day job and make music their side hustle.

Four of us were born while our parents lived in Eretz Yisrael, and the youngest two after our parents moved to Toronto. It was in Toronto that our father teamed up with Abie Rotenberg to work on the first Marvelous Midos Machine and many Journeys albums.

My brother Zev and I were the original test audience for the first Marvelous Midos Machine album. Dad and Abie sat us on a couch (we were about five and four years old) and watched as we listened patiently with wide eyes to the story and songs. But after about 40 minutes we got restless and started fighting — in the middle of a song called Shalom is Peace. Abie says it taught them not to overestimate the impact of their music.

We were also part of the production. Zev was the voice of a character on one of the first MMM albums, and we were part of a scene in which Dr. Doomstein detects bad middos among kids who are playing hide and seek. When they needed a track of a kid laughing, they tickled me — I was the more ticklish one — and recorded it. It was all very low tech back then — I remember them recording sampled sound effects on a Fisher Price tape recorder.

A few years later, we moved back to our father’s hometown of Montreal. In Montreal we weren’t treated as celebrities — my parents were simply a part of the community. My dad was that big, loud, outspoken guy in shul with the eccentric sense of humor. It was when we traveled out of town that we saw our dad was famous.

He was very busy during my childhood, and I was probably the kid who was the most interested in our father’s work. From a young age I was able to watch him work and sit in on recording sessions. He often worked very late at night, because our house was next to the Armstrong factory, and during the day it was so noisy with trucks pulling in and out that he couldn’t record anything. Looking back, I see he was at the forefront of digital production at the time. He used to produce amazing stuff on a Commodore computer — I’m talking before Windows existed. I found it really interesting, and by age 12 I was sequencing songs on my father’s computer.

All the Yess children inherited the music gene, either a nice singing voice or a talent for an instrument, which is kind of funny because my mother, Sharon Yess a”h, was tone deaf. The only song she could sing well was “This Old Man,” and she used to teach every parshah with that melody — kind of like Carlebach composing 500 songs with three chords.

People think my dad was a rock star, but my mother was, too. People used to fight to have their kids in her class, and she ran a couple of gemachs. Abie Rotenberg once told me, “Your dad’s best music was from the years they were together. Your mother brought good Jewish values to the family.” (My parents divorced when I was in high school.) When she was niftar during Covid, I put out an album with 15 songs, many of them about grief. It wasn’t commercial. It was just something I needed to do for myself.

I played piano at six years old and participated in gigs at age eight. But as I grew older, I suffered from social anxiety, so I assumed my participation in music would be on the production end rather than the performance end (I did study music for several years at Concordia University). I had also suffered a setback due to injury: As a kid, trying to be some sort of master chef in the kitchen, I sliced a knife right through my finger. I still have my finger, but to this day, the top knuckle of my middle finger on my left hand doesn’t bend. For a while I gave up on playing music. When I started again it took months to figure out workarounds for my guitar playing, and my left hand still has less dexterity than my right in that finger.

I was sent as a teen to yeshivah in Crown Heights, but when my parents divorced that year, I returned home and finished high school there. Then I continued at a small Jewish college for a degree in graphic design and e-commerce. I went through a wild, on-the-fringe stage for a while as a teen and young adult. But I never strayed completely off — those Chabad niggunim always kept me attached. I always believed in Hashem, even during the times I wasn’t listening to Him. But I always knew I wanted my children to grow up in a frum home and believing in Yiddishkeit, and baruch Hashem, that’s what I have today.

As an adult, I got back into playing for audiences accidentally. I had done a few videos about how to play my dad’s music, and Rabbi Meir Geisinsky from Chabad of the Five Towns reached out to me. “Your niggunim are the best,” he said. I had joined a Chabad online group made up of all sorts of people, and that encouraged me to perform a live video farbrengen with my niggunim one Motzaei Shabbos. The forum administrator loved it.

“This is the first time everyone on the group agrees on everything,” he said. “These are niggunim you’ll never forget wherever you go.”

People found out who I was, and I started playing old Moshe Yess and Abie Rotenberg songs for them, the songs I grew up with and that had shaped me as a musician. Eventually someone asked, “Can you do stage performances?” Ever since, I’ve been doing live performances here and there.

Currently I’m the only one of my siblings who performs. Piano is really my main instrument, but I play guitar on stage. It’s a smaller instrument that feels less like a mechitzah between me and the audience. I own about ten guitars in total, mostly Ovations (the same guitar my father played) because they have a nice sound and a round back and are more affordable than brands like Martin or Taylor. One of my favorites is a cobalt-blue Ovation I saw in the window of a music store when I lived in Montreal. The store was owned by Yossi Rosenblum, a professional singer who lived down the block from us, and since I had no money but was so clearly besotted by the instrument, he allowed me to pay him 100 dollars a month for over a year. A month after I paid up that guitar, he closed the shop.

Original Treasures

Since I was the Yess sibling with the most tech and production skills, I became the family member who put up a Moshe Yess website and dealt with his fans. A close friend of my father gave me all of his vinyl records and tapes for digital transfer, and I used them to create tracks for the website. But they had been overplayed and were so full of scratches that the music was a combination of crackling with white noise. I tried to clean them up, and people were buying the music, but there’s a limit to how much you can polish something that’s damaged. It was frustrating to have only poor-quality versions of the originals.

I have a mini-museum in my house of my father’s vinyl records displayed on the walls, but those LPs aren’t any better. In the hope that maybe somewhere, somehow, I could find someone with better-quality LPs of my dad’s music, about 12 or 15 years ago I starting posting notices on a site for people to buy and sell vinyl records. You enter the LP or artist you’re looking for, and if a record becomes available, they’ll send you an email. But no one had anything to offer in better condition than the overplayed, scratched ones I already had.

About two years ago, I began researching places that could do a better restoration job with what we had. I called around, and even played with AI mastering to try to make the sound clearer (that was just destructive, because it would cut out the important frequencies along with the noise). It took until last July for me to finally find a place in California that I thought might be helpful, since it does audio engineering for many of the mainstream secular artists. Eric, the guy I spoke to, was very patient and understanding as I explained my situation. When I told him I wanted to convert LPs to 32-bit audio sound, he said, “I can do that. But the best thing would be to give us a brand-new record to work with.”

“But I don’t have one!” I said. That was the whole point.

I hung up the phone discouraged. Was my father’s beautiful music forever doomed to scratchy, second-rate facsimiles?

Later that same day, I opened my email to find a message from the search site. After more than a decade of silence, three people had simultaneously reached out about my father’s albums! Together they had my father’s three records — unopened! I immediately bought all of them. (Someone had a perfect Journeys LP as well, but I already had one of those.) They were in mint condition.

What were the odds? It seemed like nothing short of a miracle, like winning the Powerball lottery three times in a row. (Later, also through the site, I found a compilation of songs from the psychedelic band my dad was part of in the 1960s. He was way ahead of his time, since that music didn’t really take off until the 1970s.)

I immediately ordered all the albums. As soon as they arrived. I was on the phone to Eric again. “How do I ship these to California so they won’t get damaged?”

He walked me through what to do, and soon I was off to the UPS store. Two weeks later I had the audio files for the albums. Eric even scanned the cover art for me and sent it back to me along with CDs he had made of the albums.

The clarity of the remastered sound from the new LPs is next-level. It’s just so rich and good. A CD has 16 bits (a measure of how finely the sound waves are transmitted), a DVD has 24, but the remastered LPs boast a super-high-definition 32 bits. You hear every nekudah. Listening to the originals, I realized I had even gotten some of the lyrics wrong.

Now I understand why many people are buying software that makes digital audio sound like analog vinyl records. A lot of young kids have gotten into vinyl recently. They think it’s cool to hold a physical object in their hands. With streaming, they don’t get that whole experience of looking at an album cover, reading the lyrics sheet, and enjoying the fuller sound quality.

I put my father’s first album, Megama Volume 1, on Jewish streaming platforms at the beginning of September. I plan to release one album a month; fans can now access the second album, Megama Volume 2: G-d is Alive and Well in Jerusalem.

My Own Mission

A few years before my father died, when he was already not well, I told him, “I want you to give me the chords to all your songs.” He answered, “I’d love to give them to you, but I just don’t remember them. But growing up in your generation, you’ll have your own experiences. You have a lot to contribute. You have my blessing to cover my music, but you should be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of me.”

That has become my path, with my own generation and people to influence. Musically, I’m trying to reach people on both sides of the tracks. There are a lot of people in this generation who grew up frum, but have a bone to pick. They say it’s not for them, that Yiddishkeit was forced on them. But feeling upset with your upbringing and people who disappointed you has nothing to do with Hashem. I feel very gratified that Hashem gave me my own mission, reaching out to a micro-niche within a micro-niche. It’s some kiruv rechokim but a lot of kiruv kerovim, Jews who are on the fringe but still frum, or have become more modern. Most have personal stories — they saw hypocrisy, they were hurt by someone. In Chabad, there were people who came undone when the Rebbe was niftar.

I now have two albums of my own, Perspectives and Book of Ruth, plus many singles. Most recently, I collaborated with Abie Rotenberg on an adaptation of one of my father’s songs called “Ain’t No Bishul” on the Journeys 5 album, which he produced with Doni Gross. I was privileged to sing some of the vocals, and the preceding track is a beautiful verbal tribute to my dad. For me, this was a dream come true.

I also collaborated with Yaakov Shwekey and 8th Day on a song of my father’s called “Jewish Child” from the first Megama album. Yaakov grew up on my father’s music, and “Jewish Child” had always been one of his favorites. For years he had the idea in the back of his mind to do a version of it, and after October 7, seeing the thirst for connection pouring out of so many Jews, he finally started to move ahead with it, hoping to show unaffiliated people that the frum community is thinking about them and praying for them.

Somehow Yaakov thought of Bentzi Marcus as the right person to do the arranging, even though they’d never worked together. Bentzi was all in. He told Yaakov, “Moshe Yess songs inspired 8th Day’s music.”

In the end, Yaakov asked him not just to arrange but to collaborate, and it was Bentzi who suggested they bring me on board as well — Yaakov wasn’t even aware that my father had a son who performs. I did backup harmonies with them, and Yaakov later said, “You elevated the song a lot, and it’s so meaningful to have you sing your father’s music.” (The original version of “Jewish Child” is available on the Moshe Yess website.)

It seems as if I have found my way forward in my own musical career at the same time as I merited to relaunch my father’s legacy, ever-grateful to be able to share his music in its highest-quality form and make sure it lives on forever.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1033)