The Maggid of Flatbush Pleased Heaven with ‘Nigun Shamil’ on Yom Kippur

When Rabbi Zalman Liberow sang a nigun cherished by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, an old melody of captivity and freedom became a prayer of return.

There are moments in prayer when words are no longer enough.

On Yom Kippur at Chabad Lubavitch of Flatbush, Rabbi Zalman Liberow began to sing “Nigun Shamil.”

I call Rabbi Liberow the Maggid of Flatbush. A maggid is someone who does more than speak. He can awaken something in those who listen. And on Yom Kippur, when Rabbi Liberow sang this haunting Chabad melody, it seemed to me that he was not simply singing for the congregation.

The Maggid of Flatbush was pleasing Heaven.

“Nigun Shamil” is not formally a Yom Kippur melody. It does not belong to the established liturgy of the day. Yet hearing it during the Yom Kippur prayers, I could not imagine a melody more naturally suited to that moment.

Because “Nigun Shamil” is a melody about captivity.

And it is a melody about coming home.

The captive who remembered the mountains

Chasidic tradition connects the melody with Imam Shamil, the nineteenth-century Muslim leader from Dagestan who led the resistance of the peoples of the North Caucasus. After years of struggle, Shamil surrendered and was taken far from his native mountains.

According to the story transmitted in Chabad tradition, he longed for the mountains and for the freedom he had lost. From that longing came a melody filled with sorrow, memory, and hope.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught “Nigun Shamil” to his Chasidim and revealed within Shamil’s story a profound metaphor for the Jewish soul.

The soul, Chasidic teaching explains, descends from closeness to God into this physical world. Here it enters a body and becomes surrounded by obligations, desires, fears, ambitions, disappointments, and distractions.

We become busy living.

And sometimes, amid all that noise, we forget where we came from.

But the soul does not forget.

Like a captive remembering distant mountains, something within us continues to remember another kind of freedom — a closeness to the Creator that cannot be completely erased.

That is what I hear in “Nigun Shamil.”

It is the sound of a soul remembering.

When the body becomes quiet

This is why hearing Rabbi Liberow sing it on Yom Kippur affected me so deeply.

On Yom Kippur, the ordinary rhythm of life comes to a halt. We refrain from eating and drinking and step away from physical comforts. For one day, the demands of the body become quieter.

But the fast is not meant to punish the body or declare it an enemy of the soul. The body is not rejected. Rather, it is invited to rise closer to the soul.

When physical desire no longer occupies the center of our attention, the whole person — body and soul together — can turn toward the Creator.

As the body becomes quieter, the soul becomes easier to hear.

And there, in Chabad Lubavitch of Flatbush, Rabbi Liberow’s voice carried “Nigun Shamil” through the Yom Kippur prayers.

The melody was not written for Yom Kippur. Yet at that moment it seemed to belong to Yom Kippur.

The longing of Shamil for his mountains became the longing of the soul for its Source.

Captivity became a metaphor for spiritual distance.

And the dream of freedom became teshuvah.

Teshuvah means return

Yom Kippur is often understood primarily as a day of judgment and repentance. But teshuvah means more than remorse. Its most literal meaning is “return.”

We return to God, but we also return to ourselves — to the truest part of who we are, which may have been hidden beneath our mistakes, anxieties, disappointments, and compromises.

We do not create a new soul on Yom Kippur. We uncover the soul that was always there.

That same movement can be heard in “Nigun Shamil.”

At first, the melody carries the loneliness of someone far from home. There is pain in it, but the pain does not become despair. The melody begins to rise. Longing becomes strength, and sorrow gives way to hope.

The captive may still be physically confined, but something within him has already become free.

He remembers who he is.

He remembers where he belongs.

From Flatbush to Heaven

Perhaps this is why Rabbi Liberow’s “Nigun Shamil” has remained with me.

There are prayers we remember because of their words. There are sermons we remember because of an idea. And then there are moments when a melody somehow carries both.

Yom Kippur leads us through confession, fasting, forgiveness and finally to Ne’ilah, when the gates appear to be closing.

Then comes the shofar.

Its cry tells us that the soul has not been lost.

However far we may have wandered, the road home remains open.

I would not call “Nigun Shamil” a traditional Yom Kippur melody. Historically, it is not. But perhaps a nigun does not have to have been written for Yom Kippur to reveal something about Yom Kippur.

That day in Flatbush, I heard in Rabbi Zalman Liberow’s singing the story of Shamil longing for his mountains, the Chasidic teaching of a soul longing for its Creator, and the message of Yom Kippur itself: return is always possible.

For a few moments, an old melody crossed mountains, nations, generations, and faiths.

It entered a Chabad synagogue in Brooklyn.

The Maggid of Flatbush sang.

The soul remembered home.

And, perhaps, Heaven was pleased.