“I wanted to create new music to fulfil the something deep inside me —the otzar (treasure) in my own heart”

The title track of SIMCHA JACOBY’s debut album, HA’OTZAR SHEBALEV, is the reason he ventured to invest in producing a full music album. The Toronto-born singer, now living in Lakewood, has been celebrating Klal Yisrael’s simchahs for ten busy years as a singer on the wedding circuit. But for him, music goes beyond the nightly gigs.

“I’m a musical person. I connect with music more than just on the dance floor,” he says. “And I wanted to create new music to fulfil the something deep inside me —the otzar (treasure) in my own heart.”

The song “Ha’otzar Shebalev” was composed and arranged by the talented Udi Damari, who has composed many hits. The concept expressed in the simple yet profound Hebrew is that while a person searches the world over for that elusive treasure, always seeking the next big thing, what is of real value can be found right there in his own hearthis uniqueness as a child of Hashem. It’s a message that Jacoby has absorbed as he carved out his own niche as a litvish singer, and is now resonating with so many people universally.

After Succos last year, Jacoby felt that the time had come to put out feelers and start work on his own project. He teamed up with producer Binyomin Schlesinger and dusted off the sheaf of his compositions that had accumulated over the years.

“I started composing as a bochur, long before I was singing. The hard part was picking what to use,” he says. In the end, five songs for the album came from Simcha’s collection, while the others were added from composers Yitzy Waldner, Yitzy Berry, and Sruly Lipschitz.

“The song ‘Oisek BaTorah’ is very close to my heart, as I spend my mornings learning in kollel,” Simcha says. “I needed to come up with a dance song for the album. I was focused on these words, based on several sections of Gemara that state how the Shechinah is close to a person who learns Torah, and I was trying to come up with a melody for them. Composing under pressure is not usually successful, but this time, it worked out great.”

The track carries the recognizable fingerprints of Motty Ilowitz and his impeccable Yiddish lyrics, and Avrumi Berko with his leibedig dance arrangement.

Simcha is especially excited about the track “Leshanah Haba,” a collaboration with Abie Rotenberg, whose music he’s been admiring for years.

“I’ve always been attached to the emotional expression in Abie’s English songs, and I wanted to work with him and sing his music,” Simcha says. “I flew to Toronto with my producer, and we sat with Abie for ten hours, stopping only for Minchah and Maariv. We spoke about the words ‘Leshanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim,’ which everyone sings at the end of weddings, events, and even sheva brachos speeches. Our aim was to add a dimension to reconnect with the real meaning of the words, so we’re not just parroting them. By the end of our session, Abie had come up with this beautiful song with stunning English lyrics.” With arrangements by Leib Yaakov Rigler and an upcoming music video, the song — sung together by Abie and Simcha — will surely help listeners connect with its essence.

Mic Drop

Choir Practice

Work-life balance is something every performer contends with, but what about when those performers are just children? Many parents feel that singing in a choir gives their child confidence and builds them up to succeed in the classroom too, yet practicing and performing make huge demands on a boy’s time and energy.

Shimon Chaim Lichtman, assistant director of the popular Boro Park-based Yingerlich choir, says that the boys, who are constantly busy with studio work and performances, get together almost every day for practice.

“We have ongoing engagements, and they need to know the songs by heart,” Shimon Chaim says. “These are kids, and they have to practice enough that if they were woken in the middle of the night, they’d know the songs perfectly.”

Performing in public is something the boys get used to, but nevertheless, some events are intimidating. A few months ago, this past summer, Shimon Chaim was producing the choir at the massive Adirei HaTorah event, where he knew the schedule could be slightly unpredictable.

“They had requested that we sing Moshe Goldman’s ‘Ki Lekach Tov.’ But as we arrived at the event, and the eight-year-old would-be soloist saw the size of the crowd — about 30,000 people — he told me that he just couldn’t do it.” Shimon Chaim had to think quickly. Fortunately, just two weeks before, the choir had sung a different Moshe Goldman song, “Reb Yaakov Omer, haolam hazeh domeh leprozdor,” at a different event, with another boy as soloist. He made a decision to switch “Ki Lekach Tov” for the other song. A week later, at another, less daunting event, the original soloist sang.

Kids choirs usually sing on a lower key than professional adult vocalists, because the boys voices are lower-pitched. However, there are some rare boys who can reach notes that even adult vocalists generally can’t, making their gift something truly special.

“Sometimes even though you see the boy singing, you can’t imagine that the notes are actually real,” Lichtman marvels. “During one rehearsal, the night before we recorded Yingerlich Through the Years, one of the boys sang the high solo in the song ‘Kadish.’ It was so high that the sound engineer came running to give this boy the solo mic and record him. People come over to me and ask if that voice on the recording is real.”

Two years ago, the choir was scheduled to sing at a dinner, and Lichtman found himself giving an important solo to one particular boy. The singing went down well, but he felt uncomfortable because he knew this boy had a twin brother who wasn’t a star singer. When he met their father and mentioned this, the father explained that it had actually worked out perfectly. In fact, the other twin was the one who usually shined in school and in camp, and the one who was such a talented singer was a struggling student. Singing solo had boosted his confidence, and the boy’s rebbi had said that he’d recently started to speak up in cheder for the first time.

The Yingerlich choir breaks up for camp, but when Lichtman takes a break afterward to recover from his own summer as assistant head counsellor, parents of the choir boys are already calling him to find out when the boys can start again. Not only do the boys want to get back to the choir, the rebbis say that they concentrate and learn much better when their healthy and fun outlet is waiting for them at the end of the day.

It’s not always easy to make decisions that can directly affect a boy’s ego and esteem, Lichtman admits, “but when singing helps a boy to learn better and daven better and develop into a better mensch, that’s a beautiful feeling.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1085)