Lecha Dodi לכה דודי

"Lecha Dodi likrat kalah" — "Come, my beloved, to meet the bride" — was written by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz in Safed about 1540. Nine stanzas; the opening letters of the first eight spell the author's name, Shlomo ha-Levi. The ninth, "Boi ve-shalom," stands outside the acrostic — at it the congregation turns toward the doors.

The song entered Kabbalat Shabbat, the service of greeting the Sabbath composed by the Safed circle: six psalms for the six weekdays, Lecha Dodi, and Psalm 92, "a song for the Sabbath day." Before Safed there was no such service at all: the Sabbath began with the evening prayer.

The hymn's fortune is unusual. Verses written in the sixteenth century entered the fixed liturgy of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Italians and Chasidim — almost everywhere; among the major rites only the Yemenite Baladi did not take it at first, and there it came later. Hardly any later text in the Jewish liturgy spread so widely.

In halakhah it is at the final stanza that the congregation accepts the sanctity of the Sabbath. Its melodies number in the hundreds: each community has its own, and many have different ones for different seasons of the year.