My brother was finishing his army service and I went to visit him and Israel for the 1st time. I remember feeling like the guy in the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. Something happened when my brother took me skinny dipping in Yum Hamelech. Im not sure if it was the salt that got in my eyes, or the feeling of floating in thousands of years of tears, but after that day I started to shrink. Nothing fit anymore and the whole began to look different. When I returned I began working on the album Kedusha. Here are the earliest recordings from that time of transition.

I met a Jamaican bass player and a singer called Sister Levi at club Soweto in Tel Aviv. They took me to a small studio where we recorded Bring Them Home and All Ye Lambs. When I returned to Toronto Neil added a live drum track to my Israel clip. This was the first recording for the Kedusha album.

I was beginning to get into Torah study and tried turning some Hebrew prayers into Reggae and African sounds. Ain Kemalkano I recorded with my friend Hersh Gutwilling. Vayechi was done with my friend Alan Merovitz. He was an actor and I told him just daven into the mike. Afterwards I built the Reggae band around his voice.

They used to introduce me in Canada as The King of Jewish Reggae. How did the 'Jewish' enter the Reggae? Well another good story. Around the time of my Israel trip I had been dating a Beautiful Black woman named Veronica. We fell in love by mistake. I say 'mistake' because everything was wrong yet everything was right. She was tall; I was short, she was black; I was white, she was into Black power and I was into Jewish power, she liked Malcom x and I liked the Jewish Malcom x - Meir Kahane. We never went out. She would tell black men that they should date black women, and I would tell Jewish girls they should date Jewish men. Yet dispite our ideologies we loved each other. She knew her Christian bible and would ask me questions and I would answer we don't believe in that and she would ask me why. I wasn't sure and so I began to read more and research my own heritage (I haven't finished yet, still reading).

According to the theories she read about in her Balck cultural books, the Black people were the original Jews and the European Jews stole it from them. Now I thought that was silly but I started to think about it. Why are so many Jews attracted to Reggae music, and what made the Jamaican people start singing about Zion? The Black people seem more tribal than the Jewish people, and they rap freely like the prophets. I asked a Rabbi once about this and he practically threw me out of the office thinking I was too far gone. In the end I discovered the answer. Before I tell you the answer though, here is a story from the wise men of Chelm that may explain it better.

Once a couple had an argument and went to the wise rabbi of Chelm to advise them what to do. She complained that she wanted to name their new baby boy Chaim after her father who was a Torah scholar. Her husband also wanted to name the boy Chaim after his father who was a horse thief. She insisted she wanted to name the boy Chaim after her father. The rabbi interjected. I have a solution. Name the boy Chaim. If he grows up to be a horse thief, then you will know he had been named after your husbands father. If he grows up to be a Torah scholar then you will know that he was named after your father.

This story from Chelm also answered my question. My proof of who the real Jews are is very simple; the local newspaper. The Jews are one half of one percent of the world's population. Yet, in every newspaper from Bejing to Madrid there is news about this tiny country called Israel almost every day. If we are paying the price for being Jews, then that means we are the real thing. Of course within Israel we have every color and race you can imagine. We fight together as brothers in the same army, speaking the same Hebrew language. Black men from Ethiopia and from Chicago, white men from Russia and Texas, people from India and Asia and North Africa and Yemen. It's not about where you come from, but where you are going to, and who you stand with.

Having said this, there is still something mystical about the Jamaican connection and topic for an essay that I will write soon (b'h) tracing the 'roots' of 'roots' music back to Biblical origins.