MBD’s WE ARE ONE album got the freilach niggun it needed, a hit song born of a mitzvah

It was 12:30 a.m. Backstage, exhausted yet exhilarated artists and musicians were winding down after the HASC "A Time for Music" concert in 1999. A breathless young askan suddenly ran across the stage and up to Mordechai Ben David. “There’s a little sick girl who was promised that she could come to HASC tonight, but she is so weak and so immune-compromised that it just wasn’t safe to bring her. Could you come to the hospital now and sing?”

Despite the late hour, the description of the child’s intense disappointment had MBD ready to go along and bring her some of what she had missed. He looked around and saw that Yitzy Bald was still holding his guitar. “Yitz, you’ll come along?”

The small group of singers arrived at the Manhattan hospital at 1 a.m. Wearing masks and gowns to protect the sick girl against infection, they brought the HASC concert into her hospital room.

“It was a live concert, HASC for an audience of one,” remembers Yitzy. “It was an incredible ‘Mi ke’amcha Yisrael’ moment. No one thought then that the child was going to make it through her illness, but I believe that she eventually did recover.”

It wasn’t the only time Yitzy and Mordechai performed together for a mitzvah. Yitzy recalls walking through the hallway of a house in Brooklyn with his keyboard to accompany MBD on a visit to a sick little boy. On the walls were photos of a very cute, chassidish boy with shining, innocent eyes, round cheeks, and curly peyos. When they came into the dining room, the child awaited them on a hospital bed, thin, and sick, with no peyos remaining.

Concealing his emotions, Yitzy began to play music, and MBD to sing. The little boy was happy and excited, choosing songs, not missing a beat.

In a quiet moment between songs, Mordechai mentioned to Yitzy that he was traveling to Israel that night to record an album, “but,” he said, “we’re still missing a freilach song.” Right then and there, the composer and musician began to play something new, and to sing “Emes Atah Hu rishon, v’emes Atah Hu acharon, emes dus is emes dus is emes…”

“I think maybe I had a couple notes in mind before, but the song was just born there, in that room,” recalls Yitzy.

The few singers who were in the Boro Park house took up the niggun with enthusiasm, and MBD recorded it on a little handheld tape recorder. The next day, he was in Gal Kol studios, playing Yitzy’s song for arranger Mona Rosenblum. For Yitzy, the most astounding part of the story is that Mona, who was hearing the song for the first time, wrote the arrangements for the orchestra on the spot — “on some sheets of tissue paper” — so that the song could be recorded. And so MBD’s We Are One album got the freilach niggun it needed, a hit song born of a mitzvah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 868)