The one zemer at the Friday night table that is not in Hebrew. Israel Najara wrote it in Aramaic in sixteenth-century Safed, and its first letters spell his name. Aramaic is close enough to Hebrew that a learner can follow most of it and far enough that the differences jump out: the definite article is a final vowel instead of a prefix, the relative particle is a single syllable, and the word for "you" is not the one you have been taught. Singing it once teaches you more about the relation between the two languages than a chapter would.
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Key: Dm · 3 chords used ·Dm · Gm · A
84 BPM · 4/4 · one of the slower zemirot, sung sitting, usually late in the meal · five stanzas, each answered by the two-line refrain · to reset the chord panel:
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Four features of Aramaic in nine words. וְעָלְמַיָּא (ve-al-ma-ya) ends in the vowel that means "the" — the article is a suffix, not a prefix. אַנְתְּ (an-te) is "you", where Hebrew says atah. מַלְכָּא (mal-ka) and מַלְכַיָּא (mal-cha-ya) are king and kings with the same final vowel doing the same work. Learn this refrain and the rest of the poem stops being foreign.
God, Master of this world and all worlds, You are the King, King of kings.
קֳדָמָךְ (ko-da-mach) means "before You", and the root is the same one behind kodem, "earlier" — a word that means both in front of in space and before in time. The stanza is two lines long, which is the shortest in the poem.
God, Master of this world and all worlds, You are the King, King of kings.
חֵיוַת (chei-vat) through שְׁמַיָּא (shma-ya) is the same list Genesis 1 makes, in the same order, and עִירִין (i-rin) is a word from Daniel — the only book of the Tanakh with substantial Aramaic in it, which is where Najara got the register.
bringing down the haughty and raising up the bent;
לוּ
lu
if only
יִחְיֶה
yich-YE
he would live
גְבַר
gvar
a man
שְׁנִין
shnin
years
אַלְפִין
al-FIN
thousands
|Gm|Dm|
were a man to live a thousand years,
לָא
la
not
יֵעוֹל
ye-OL
it would enter
גְּבוּרְתֵּךְ
gvur-TECH
Your might
בְּחוּשְׁבָּנַיָּא
be-chush-ba-na-YA
into the reckonings
|A|Dm|
he could not enter Your might into any reckoning.
יָהּ
yah
God
רִבּוֹן
ri-BON
master of
עָלַם
a-LAM
the world
וְעָלְמַיָּא
ve-al-ma-YA
and the worlds
אַנְתְּ
an-TE
You
הוּא
hu
are
מַלְכָּא
mal-KA
the King
מֶלֶךְ
me-LECH
king of
מַלְכַיָּא
mal-cha-YA
the kings
|DmGm|ADm|
God, Master of this world and all worlds, You are the King, King of kings.
מָכִיךְ (ma-chich) and וְזַקִּיף (ve-za-kif) are opposites in the same line — bringing down, lifting up — which is the shape of Hannah's song and of Psalm 146, both in Hebrew. Najara is translating a Hebrew habit into Aramaic and it survives the crossing intact.
Your people whom You chose out of all the nations.
יָהּ
yah
God
רִבּוֹן
ri-BON
master of
עָלַם
a-LAM
the world
וְעָלְמַיָּא
ve-al-ma-YA
and the worlds
אַנְתְּ
an-TE
You
הוּא
hu
are
מַלְכָּא
mal-KA
the King
מֶלֶךְ
me-LECH
king of
מַלְכַיָּא
mal-cha-YA
the kings
|DmGm|ADm|
God, Master of this world and all worlds, You are the King, King of kings.
The lions are Daniel's, and the exile named in גָלוּתָא (ga-lu-ta) is the one Najara was living in — he wrote this in Safed, in an Ottoman province, four hundred years after the poem's Hebrew cousins. יַת (yat) and יַת (yat) are the Aramaic object marker, the equivalent of Hebrew et, and this is the clearest place in the poem to see the two languages side by side.
To Your sanctuary return, and to the Holy of Holies,
אֲתַר
a-TAR
a place
דִּי
di
where
בֵיהּ
veih
in it
יֶחֱדוּן
ye-che-DUN
they will rejoice
רוּחִין
ru-CHIN
spirits
וְנַפְשִׁין
ve-naf-SHIN
and souls
|Dm|A|
the place where spirits and souls will rejoice,
וִיזַמְּרוּן
vi-zam-RUN
and they will sing
לָךְ
lach
to You
שִׁירִין
shi-RIN
songs
וְרַחֲשִׁין
ve-ra-cha-SHIN
and whispers
|Gm|Dm|
and they will sing to You songs and whispers,
בִּירוּשְׁלֵם
bi-rush-LEM
in Jerusalem
קַרְתָּא
kar-TA
the city of
דְשׁוּפְרַיָּא
de-shuf-ra-YA
the beauty
|A|Dm|
in Jerusalem, city of beauty.
יָהּ
yah
God
רִבּוֹן
ri-BON
master of
עָלַם
a-LAM
the world
וְעָלְמַיָּא
ve-al-ma-YA
and the worlds
אַנְתְּ
an-TE
You
הוּא
hu
are
מַלְכָּא
mal-KA
the King
מֶלֶךְ
me-LECH
king of
מַלְכַיָּא
mal-cha-YA
the kings
|DmGm|ADm|
God, Master of this world and all worlds, You are the King, King of kings.
שִׁירִין (shi-rin) is songs and וְרַחֲשִׁין (ve-ra-cha-shin) is whispers, and pairing them is the poem's last move: the loud and the almost inaudible, both counted as singing. Then one place name and it stops.
♫ Singing notes
Slower than the other zemirot, and it stays slow. Around 84 BPM, sung sitting, usually after the faster ones have run their course.
The refrain is nine words and returns five times. Everyone sings it; the stanzas belong to whoever knows them.
The Aramaic will trip a Hebrew reader on the vowels rather than the letters. If you are learning it, learn the refrain by ear before you try to read it.
Many Sephardi and Mizrahi communities sing it to a maqam-based melody rather than the Ashkenazi one, and the two sound nothing alike. Both are correct.
♦ About this song
The acrostic
The first letters of the five stanzas after the refrain spell the poet's name, Israel. He signed his poems this way as a matter of course, which is how the authorship of a sixteenth-century table song is known at all.
Why Aramaic
Najara worked in Safed among kabbalists for whom Aramaic was the language of the Zohar, and writing a table song in it placed the Friday night meal in that register. It is also the language of the Kaddish, so the sound was familiar to everyone at the table even if the grammar was not.
A poem with no Sabbath in it
Nothing in Yah Ribon mentions the Sabbath. It is sung on Friday night by custom rather than by subject, which sets it apart from every other zemer on this site — those are about the day; this one is about the world.
Hebrew: Siddur Ashkenaz, Shabbat, Shabbat Evening, Zemirot for Shabbat Evening, Yah Ribon · The Metsudah siddur, 1981 · CC-BY, via Sefaria, pinned in this repo at content/songs/source/011.json.
English gloss lines authored for this site; the source translation is used as raw material only. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).