People told the Alter Rebbe that he was revealing too many secrets, Benny retells the classic chassidic tale

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

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t wasn't the music that made me a fan, though Benny Friedman can sing. It was something he wrote, several years ago, for this magazine. We were doing a project about camp memories, asking various prominent readers to reflect on what it was that made summer camp special for them.

There were the usual answers about talents and abilities not accessed during the school year, fond memories of trips and ball games. Benny went deeper, saying a vort. He wrote about the opportunity camp presents to show children that even with the crazy T-shirts — and crazy T-shirts are a good thing — the tallis kattan is sacred, that even on sleepless color-war nights — and sleepless nights are great — zeman krias Shema is sacrosanct.

The answer moved me, and it helped me understand the appeal of his music.

The music industry of 2019 is blessed with many superstars, genres, and styles. There’s no end of great voices, many with great marketing teams around them. They’re not so much great artists as they are great brands: Nike, Apple, and Coca Cola dancing on stage, clapping in all the right places, thanking Hashem and their wives in between sets.

Benny’s brand is called “being a great guy.” I’ve seen him at the HASC concert and I’ve seen him doing a supermarket opening with a bad sound system as he hopped up and down between packages of frozen pizza and fish sticks and I’ve seen him sitting upstairs in a Monsey café wearing a black hat but no jacket and he’s pretty much the same guy, always.

Benny came on the scene against a backdrop: the chassidic eloquence and depth of his father, the soulful song of his uncle — and he delivered. He sang pesukim and tefillos, tunes you could sing around your Shabbos table and on Thursday nights in the dormitory. “Kad Yasvun,” “B’shem Hashem,” “Esa Einai,” “Shalom Aleichem,” “Meheirah” — and they were the core product, interspersed with the occasional dynamic Israeli-style anthems, “Yesh Tikvah,” “Todah,” and “Ivri Anochi.”

On a recent Friday morning, he arrived at my home wearing a too-tight Camp Simchah T-shirt, days away from launching his newest album, Kulanu Nelech. This album is a bit of a shift: the lyrics come not from the holy books, but from holy souls and holy streets and holy conversations between people. It’s a soundless kumzitz and more the symphony of every day, the highs and lows, the doubts and worries and triumphs and challenges and victories of life.

Benny told me that many of the experts who’d heard the music before its release had questions and raised eyebrows. There was pushback, a sense that he’d turned his back on his heritage, the Nichoach medleys composed in the Russian underground and the rooms of Rostov, the niggunim of Crown Heights when the chassidus numbered just a few hundred immigrants driven only by spirit and song.

Benny Friedman, people were saying, had turned his back on his musical roots and was going in a different direction.

Benny is a bit of a maggid, a chassidic storyteller. A son of Rabbi Manis Friedman, one of the most eloquent and insightful public voices within Lubavitch, he does that thing where he sits back on the couch and sighs, then drops a punch line as if he’s speaking at a farbrengen with 500 people lining the table.

People told the Alter Rebbe that he was revealing too many secrets, Benny retells the classic chassidic tale. They told him that his chassidic teachings weren’t meant for the masses. The Rebbe told them a mashal about a king’s son who was very sick, and the doctors despaired of his life. One doctor, however, suggested a cure: He advised the desperate king that if the boy would swallow some of the dust created by crushing the crown jewels, he would be healed. The king removed his crown and had his servants remove the jewels, grinding them into a fine powder. Some of that priceless powder ended up on the floor, the precious jewels destroyed and violated:It was a painful sight, but the servants understood. The king’s son needed the life-giving powers of that diamond dust, and the degradation of the crown jewels was well worth it for the cause.