🌹 Kabbalat Shabbat
Sacred · English Setting
Come My Beloved
An English setting of «Lecha Dodi» - the 16th-century kabbalistic hymn that welcomes Shabbat as a bride. Original music and English lyrics by Walter J. Kin. Performed by Riglis Band.
About this version
One of the most beloved hymns in Jewish liturgy.
«Lecha Dodi» - "Come, my beloved" - is one of the most beloved hymns in Jewish liturgy. It is sung in synagogues around the world every Friday evening as part of Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming of the Sabbath as a bride. The original Hebrew text was composed in the 1540s by Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, a kabbalist of Safed, and has been set to countless melodies over the centuries.
This recording is a contemporary setting - original music and an English adaptation of the Hebrew text - meant to give a new generation of listeners direct access to what Lecha Dodi has always been about: welcoming the Sabbath as something beautiful, gathering shoulder to shoulder, and standing side by side.
The album «Jewish the Musical (We Belong Together)» is written for children ages 7-12. The English text is intentionally simplified, so that kids in Hebrew schools, family Shabbat tables, and JCC classrooms can actually sing along - words that, in their original Aramaic and ancient Hebrew, would otherwise stay out of reach for the youngest generation.
The intent is reverent and community-minded: a song you can carry into a JCC, a classroom, or a Shabbat table without giving up either the meaning of the original or the energy of singing it together today.
📜 Lyrics (English)
Come my beloved we greet the bride
We're the crew we stand side by side
Hands up hearts up welcome the light
We greet Shabbat we welcome the bride
Guard and remember spoken as one
We're one people and God is one
For praise and beauty for love and song
We turn together where we belong
Come my beloved we greet the bride
We're the crew we stand side by side
Hands up hearts up welcome the light
We greet Shabbat we welcome the bride
Wake from the dust city rise and shine
Dress in your beauty the crown is fine
Lift up your head we're not alone
Hope is awake and we're going home
Come my beloved we greet the bride
We're the crew we stand side by side
Hands up hearts up welcome the light
We greet Shabbat we welcome the bride
Do not be ashamed do not be afraid
We were made small but we'll be remade
Right and left open wide your way
Kindness and joy will lead today
Come in with peace O Shabbat bride
Enter with joy and stay inside
Queen of our week in gentle light
Bless us with rest and hold us tight
Come my beloved we greet the bride
It's Shabbat now we welcome the bride
🕯️ History & context
Safed, 16th century: the bride is the Sabbath.
Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz (c. 1500-1576) was a kabbalist and poet living in Safed (Tzfat), the mountain town in the Galilee that had become the center of Jewish mystical thought after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Together with Rabbi Yosef Karo, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, and later Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari), the Safed circle reshaped Jewish prayer and mysticism for the next 500 years.
«Lecha Dodi» - literally "Come, my beloved" - was Alkabetz's contribution. He took an image already present in the Talmud (the Sabbath as a bride to be welcomed) and built it into a nine-stanza Hebrew poem whose first letters spell his name as an acrostic: שלמה הלוי - Shlomo HaLevi.
The Safed kabbalists used to walk out into the fields at sunset on Friday to greet the Sabbath. Alkabetz's poem became the script for that walk - and within decades, every synagogue in the Jewish world had taken it inside, into the Friday-evening service. Today, you can walk into any synagogue on Friday night anywhere on earth, and you will hear it.
Why an English setting
For everyone who wants in, in their own language.
The Hebrew original is breathtaking - but if you don't read Hebrew, you can spend years standing in a Friday-evening service without ever quite hearing what Lecha Dodi is actually saying. The melody carries you. The community carries you. But the words stay outside.
This English setting is an attempt to let those words come in. Not a literal translation - a singable adaptation, faithful to the spirit, written to be sung together. The original Hebrew is still there, and still primary. This is the door for the next room.
A Hebrew version exists in our archive - recorded but not yet published to streaming. It joins the catalog when the next Hebrew album opens. (We have ~22 Hebrew-language recordings in total:
eleven are already released on the album
«Jewish The Musical (Songs in Hebrew)»; the rest, including this Lecha Dodi, are queued for the next release.)
For younger voices
There's also a Teen Version.
Same Friday night, fresher arrangement. The Teen Version reworks the music for a younger ensemble and lightens a few lines - written for kids and teens in Hebrew schools, youth choirs, and family-Shabbat sing-alongs. The bones of the prayer are the same. The voice is theirs.
Part of the Tradition Reimagined playlist (RIGLI / @RigliMusic).
Teen Version · refrain
Come my beloved we greet the bride -
We're the crew, we stand side by side.
Hands up, hearts up, welcome the light -
We greet Shabbat, we welcome the bride.
Full Teen Version lyrics on the YouTube page.
JewishSong.org