The summer before second grade, I attended one of those Hebrew day camps. One of my favorite activities was, of course, singing. We sang various songs in English and in Hebrew, and the melodies have stayed with me forever. Not being fluent in Hebrew, my memories of the words have faded over time. There is this one particular melody I remember. We used to sing it, hundreds of kids, around a huge tree, led by the head rabbi and his wife who played guitar. (I had a crush on one of the rabbi’s daughters who was in the “grade” above me, naturally.)
I used to sing this song to myself for years and years, and every once in a while it pops back into my head. Well I was listening to some Matisyahu — a hasidic reggae/rap artist — and even though he doesn’t sing this particular song, my mind became flooded with all of those melodies from when I was much younger.
But I couldn’t remember the Hebrew words as we sang them around that huge tree. I decided, for the first time, to use the internet to find the words to that song. I simply searched Google, in English, for the transliteration of some of the sounds that best matched my memory. My query was hebrew song avodah ki hashem. Well, I had the “ki hashem” part right, but not “avodah.” While that’s a valid Hebrew word, it’s not in the song. Basically, my mind had transformed the consonants to different sounds, replacing spotty memory with recognizable Hebrew words, but amazingly the vowel sounds I contained in my memory remained largely intact 25 years later.
The first page of search results led me to this page, a blog entry naturally, containing the real words to the tune I remember. The internet never ceases to amaze me, and some times it just blows me away.