After a month of reflections, what really made Yigal Calek relevant after five decades?

Photos: Calek family archives

Yigal Calek’s outsized contribution to the world of Jewish music has been all over the Jewish media since his passing on Chol Hamoed Succos. But it’s not just about the songs that have somehow stayed relevant for five decades, or the genre of a boys’ choir that has been adapted throughout the years.

Why are we fascinated by those reunion clips that have gone viral? And why do all those former choir boys — today grandfathers themselves — still consider Yigal their rebbi?

IN a world of viral music clips that blaze and vanish as quickly as musical fads come and go, one clip seems to have a life of its own. It reappears every few months to tug at heartstrings anew. It was filmed in London’s Golders Green on a Chol Hamoed Pesach reunion in 2023 of Yigal Calek and generations of his talmidim. In the crowd are grandfathers who have grown old with Yigal’s music, some of them part of his original trailblazing choir, and their grandchildren who are still growing up with it. It’s a veritable concert of the vintage songs that somehow have continued to be the soundtrack of a new generation.

In the shaky footage, a few of the middle-aged men are strumming guitars, while the dozens present are focused on one central figure: a frail, poststroke Yigal Calek, transported in the music that flowed forth from him all those decades ago.

Last week on Rachel Imeinu’s yahrtzeit, less than a month after Yigal Calek left This World, a small section of the clip again resurfaced, spreading from inbox to inbox, one status and group chat to another: “Kol beramah nishma,” Yigal himself sings as he turns to caress a former talmid. “Rachel mevaka al baneha, mei’ana lehinachem….” As Yigal sings of Rachel crying, his own face is overcome by emotion, and there’s hardly a dry eye in the large room.

But this clip, along with several other reunion videos that have been sent around over the last few years, beg a deeper question than how music stays relevant half a century later. What was it about Yigal Calek that sent his music soaring to such heights, whose tunes somehow redefined and even became part of the canon of our shul service?

After a month of tributes throughout Jewish media, it’s clear that there’s a story behind the niggunim that hasn’t yet been told. Speak to Yigal Calek’s family and talmidim, and it’s clear that the story is about avodas Hashem, about a rich internal world following the words of the neviim that welled up in the form of music notes, about a lifetime of Jewish education, outreach, and chinuch, all underpinned by an unwavering authenticity of which the famed choir of decades ago was only one expression.