“Wait, birdy, wait! It’s not yet the right time... until The One Above decides”

When I was a young child, I had no idea as to the meaning of the famous chassidish-Hungarian song “Sol a Kokosh Mar” — I always thought it had something to do with a recipe for a Hungarian kokosh cake.

Actually, the song is about a unique-looking bird with yellow feet and a pearl-white beak, flapping its blue wings to a beautiful sunrise over a green forest. The bird is waiting to go home, yet from the heavens, a sound is heard: “Wait, birdy, wait! It’s not yet the right time... until The One Above decides.”

The song was brought to the Jewish world by the first Kaliver Rebbe, Rav Yitzchak Isaac Taub zy”a, who lived at the end of the 1700s and was known for composing many popular chassidic melodies, often adapting Hungarian folk songs and adding Jewish words. He believed that these tunes originated in the Beis Hamikdash and were lost among the nations over the years. He proved it by explaining that after the non-Jew taught him the tune, the gentile immediately forgot the song, because it never belonged to him in the first place.

The most famous of these “redeemed” tunes is “Sol a Kokosh Mar.” The Rebbe overheard this tune being sung by a young Hungarian shepherd, recognized it as one of those holy niggunim, and immediately bought the song from the young boy, who then promptly forgot it. The Rebbe realized that this Hungarian folk song was actually a parable of the galus: When can this special bird, obvious not from around here, out of place, always different, finally go home? To the bird’s query about returning home, the Rebbe added the words, “But when will that be? When the Beis Hamikdash will be rebuilt and the city of Zion be restored.” The bird asks, “Why is it taking so long?” The answer, “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land….”

The song was recorded on several Yiddish albums over the years, and was rerecorded in both English and Hungarian on JEP Vol. 5, It’s Never Too Late, a comeback album released in 1997 after an 18-year JEP hiatus. The child soloist on that album was none other than an 11-year-old Beri Weber. For Beri, who grew up in a Hungarian family, the song was already familiar, and he belted it out with all his heart. The English lyrics were sung by Bumy and Bency Schachter and Ali Scharf, and the song ends with an inspirational narration by Nachum Segal.

The song’s English lyrics were written about the early years of the first Kaliver Rebbe, who had lost his father at a very young age. One day, a certain disciple of the Baal Shem Tov heard the eight-year-old future Rebbe singing, and immediately felt that this boy had an elevated soul. He asked the boy’s mother if he could take the boy to see Rav Shmuel Shmelke of Nikolsburg, one of the gedolim in Hungary. Reb Shmelke adopted little Yitzchak Issac, who later, of course, became the revered Kaliver Rebbe.

His inheritor several generations later, Rav Menachem Mendel Taub z”ya, the previous Kaliver Rebbe who passed away in 2019, sang this song at hundreds of weddings and events over the years, but perhaps the most dramatic rendition was when he returned to Budapest in 2014 for a Holocaust memorial ceremony. There’s an unusual memorial display on the banks of the Danube River in Budapest — a collection of bronzed shoes of various sizes and styles affixed to the boardwalk where thousands of Jews were ordered to line up and take off their shoes before being shot, their bodies falling into the river.

At the 2014 gathering, hundreds of religious and non-religious Jews alike came together to join and pay tribute to their martyred brethren. At that point, the Kaliver Rebbe took the microphone and sang “Sol a Kokosh Mar,” accompanied by a choir of children. It was a testament to the song’s rightful place in Jewish history.

The first Kaliver Rebbe knew the message: Mashiach cannot arrive until the right time, and the only One who is privy to that is HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

We say Ani Maamin every day and we believe that Mashiach is coming, yearning that he arrives today, praying that the time is finally right.

May Hashem show us this beautiful, colorful bird so that we may sing this song together in the Third Beis Hamikdash.

Special thanks to Rabbis Moshe Hauben and Yosef Chaim Golding, producers of the JEP series.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1023)