Ode to a Familiar Tune

 There are certain Jewish melodies that feel as if they have been around forever. One of them is the melody we often sing for “Etz Chaim Hi” as we return the Torah to the Aron Kodesh. Most of us probably assume that it is an old melody, passed down through generations. It isn’t. The melody was composed by Tanchum Portnoy, who passed away recently on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, at the age of 75. Portnoy composed “Etz Chaim Hi” in the early 1970s, when he was just 22 years old, and it was recorded on his 1975 album Tanchumim. Within a generation, it had become so familiar that people assumed it was a traditional melody. The music publisher Velvel Pasternak once found it identified simply as “traditional” and corrected the attribution. The story of Tanchum Portnoy is particularly meaningful because of the legacy he inherited from his father, Rabbi Eliezer Portnoy. Rabbi Eliezer came to the Mir Yeshiva as a young orphan with virtually nothing. He spoke about wanting to make a name and a lineage for himself. This was accomplished in a most unexpected manner: when he helped save the students of the Mir Yeshiva (he personally dealt with the famous Japanese diplomat Sugihara) during the Holocaust, enabling hundreds of young men to escape. Those students went on to create their own names; build families, communities and Torah institutions. Tanchum, in his own way, left a far reaching legacy. His melody became part of Jewish life beyond those who knew him personally. A tune he wrote as a young man became something that thousands of Jews would sing, decade after decade. It is particularly appropriate to talk about a familiar tune on Shabbat Shuvah, because that is what teshuvah is meant to be: a return to something familiar. The Gemara in Niddah teaches that before a child is born, an angel teaches the fetus the entire Torah. Then, just before birth, the child forgets everything it learned. Why teach us the Torah only to make us forget it? Rav Soloveitchik explained that this occurs so that when we encounter Torah during our lives, it should never feel completely foreign. On some level, we have already encountered it. Torah is familiar to us. Learning is, in a sense, always recalling and never really starting from scratch. This familiarity is true not only of Torah learning, but Torah living as well. Shabbat, davening, chesed, connection to Hashem and responsibility for other Jews are not foreign concepts that we need to introduce into our lives. They should feel natural, even familiar, because they are part of who we are. It may be possible for someone to forget and become distant. We may drift away from certain aspects of tradition or ritual, such that some elements of Jewish life may feel less familiar. But the Torah assures us that somewhere beneath that distance is something familiar. That is what makes teshuvah possible. Hashiveinu Hashem eilecha venashuvah, chadesh yameinu k’kedem. “Return us to You, Hashem, and we will return. Renew our days as of old.” Teshuvah is a return. We are not being asked to become someone entirely new. We are being asked to return to something that is familiar, something already part of our identity. That is the meaning of k’kedem, “as of old.” We may have forgotten, we may have drifted, but the Torah, the mitzvot and our relationship with Hashem are not foreign to us. They are familiar in a deep and essential way. A melody written only fifty years ago can become so familiar that we assume it has been around for generations. Perhaps familiarity is not really a measure of how old something is, but of how deeply it resonates with who we are. Hashiveinu Hashem eilecha venashuvah. Bring us back to You, Hashem, and we will return. Because deep down, we never really left.