Exaltune records presents "the road 2 bobova"

"Conversations with Salman Berl" by Henri Schöngut

“Music is an outpouring of the heart… the heart brings us closer to eternity… as well as nearer to the world around us.” He spoke these words softly, as if pronouncing an obvious fact, while stroking his long white beard. This is the message that Salmen Berl, a Hassidic Jew, a descendant from a long line of religious Jews going back to the 18th century transmitted to me, a 21^st-century man with a fascination for sacred, liturgical music. A lot of time has passed since the birth of the Hassidic movement in Eastern Europe. And yet, listening to Salmen Berl one would believe it was only yesterday. In those days, persecution reigned. Religion had become belief… superstition. Crushed by hard labour the poor, uneducated Jews no longer cared about studying, reading or teaching. They left these tasks to a few clerks – the Midnagdim rabbis. These men were literate, cultivated but lived in an intellectual ivory tower and were not able to give any hope whatsoever to those overwhelmed by pogroms, devastation and hunger…and doomed to a hopeless future without a horizon.

And yet one of the Midnagdim called Baal Shem Tov (the Master of the Good Name) had an idea quite revolutionary for his time (although quite evident to contemporary man): “No need to be a scholar in order to talk to God, to pray and to hope.”

This charismatic movement, which originated in the villages of Eastern Europe, rapidly spread across the whole world. It carried with it a slight nostalgia for the Shtetl, the home village. Even now, Hassidic communities still carry the name of the village where they originated. The Bobover, for example, come from Bobova, a small town in southern Poland, whilst others come from Lubavitch, Modzitz, and Belz.

When these communities moved ‘from over there’ to Western Europe, North America and Israel, the people took with them barely more than the clothes they were wearing. But most importantly, they carried with them that typical music from Eastern Europe, a deeply religious music mixed with traditional and profane songs. The rhythmic repetition of verses serves to keep the beat, to mark time. The syncopation of a frenzied dance helps one to elevate the soul, or at least to forget one’s daily worries. In the religious spirit of that time, as well as in the present, this experience was, and can still be, mystical. Joy and dance lead to a trance, allowing the dancer to enter a higher dimension. Thus trance becomes a social tool for elevating a whole community which, if only for an instant, can laugh away its sufferings and humiliations and, within the space of a dance, enters into a union with superior values, and hereby surpasses the sum of its common potential.

Trance unifies man with true enchantment.