Debbie Friedman: Qol Isha for Kol Isha
- Ilse Eskelsen
- May 24
- 11 min read
by Acadia Schechter
Consultation with David Alperin for Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judaics expertise
“It was קוֹל אִשָּׁה qol isha – the voice of women – for כָּל אִשָּׁה kol isha – every woman – that inspired me to write inclusive music… Ultimately, the voices of women, their sense of empowerment, can be borne from song, which can form the core of political, spiritual, and economic transformation… Then every woman will be heard, and every voice will be heard: qol isha for kol isha.”
Debbie Friedman (z”l), in the documentary “A Journey of Spirit,” 2006 1.
Debbie Friedman, an American Jewish singer and songwriter, is known within the Jewish community for creating a new genre of Jewish music: modern, feminist, Jewish folk music inspired by traditional prayers, the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), and the folk music of the 1960s. She was born in 1951 in Utica, New York, and grew up listening to folk music by groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, from which she taught herself guitar.2. From her first album release in 1972 to her death in 2011, she released over 20 albums of Jewish folk music,3. which she wrote, performed, and taught in schools, summer camps, and synagogues.4. Later in life, she even performed at Carnegie Hall with Peter Yarrow, of the aforementioned Peter, Paul and Mary.5. Yarrow said later that she “has carved a very powerful legacy in the Jewish world.” He was right.
According to Friedman herself, her mission was to give Reform Jews ways to engage with God and liturgy in ways that would “nourish” their “spiritual… hung[er].”6. Her sister Cheryl said of her that “[h]er goal in life was to perpetuate Judaism l’dor v’dor [from one generation to the next]. That is what she lived for.”7. Friedman was posthumously identified as a lesbian, and her work was deeply rooted in the queer community, though she kept her personal life private.8. Jonathan Mark of New York Jewish Week wrote of her after her death, saying, “Debbie Friedman almost single-handedly introduced intimate God-talk into modern Reform Judaism.”9. Friedman’s work was informed by feminism, the queer community, and the decline of traditional engagement with Jewish liturgy among liberal Jews; we see these inspirations in three of her most famous songs: Not By Might, Miriam’s Song, and the Mi Shebeirach prayer.
Not By Might (Video)
Not by might, and not by power,
But by spirit alone (ruach!a)
Shall we all live in peace.
The children sing, the children dream,
And their tears will fall, but we’ll hear them call,
And another song will rise, another song will rise,
Another song will rise!
Not by might, not by power, shalom!10.
aThe word ruach רוּחַ literally means “wind,” but is also used as “spirit,” or, in Biblical Hebrew, “breath” (See Gen. 1:2).11.
Not By Might comes from the Book of Zechariah, one of the prophets of Israel after the Babylonian Exile (586-539 BCE).12. The book recounts visions related to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and explanations of them. Not By Might is based on Zechariah 4:6b:
זֶה דְּבַר־ה׳ אֶל־זְרֻבָּבֶל לֵאמֹר לֹא בְחַיִל וְלֹא בְכֹחַ כִּי אִם־בְּרוּחִי אָמַר ה׳ צְבָאוֹת׃
This is the word of GOD to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit—said GOD of Hosts.
This is a fairly straightforward song, but one of its lyrics has an interesting background. The line “Shall we all live in peace” was originally “Shall all men live in peace,” until one night when Friedman “was doing a sound check… singing Not By Might, Not by Power, … and some woman… gave a geshrei [Yiddish געשרײַ, ‘shout, cry’] from the back of the room and said ‘It’s ‘all people! You can’t sing ‘all men’ anymore because we’re men and women, and we’re all people. You have to sing ‘people’!’” Friedman said about the incident that she “realized at that point that [the woman] was right.” She changed the line that night to “Shall we all live in peace,” and said that “it caught on, and we did it… From that point on, I changed all of my language.”13.
Miriam’s Song (Video)
[Chorus]
And the women dancing with their timbrels
Followed Miriam as she sang her song.
“Sing a song to the One whom we've exalted,”
Miriam and the women danced and danced the whole night long.
[Verse 1]
And Miriam was a weaver of unique variety
The tapestry she wove was one which sang our history.
With every strand and every thread she crafted her delight
A woman touched with spirit, she dances toward the light.
[Verse 2]
When Miriam stood upon the shores and gazed across the sea
The wonder of this miracle she soon came to believe.
Whoever thought the sea would part with an outstretched hand
And we would pass to freedom and march to the promised land.
[Verse 3]
And Miriam the prophet took her timbrel in her hand
And all the women followed her just as she had planned.
And Miriam raised her voice in song, She sang with praise and might,
“We've just lived through a miracle! We're going to dance tonight!”14.
If Not By Might is the origin of Friedman’s feminist music, Miriam’s Song may well be the apex. The song is based on the crossing of the Red Sea during the Exodus, after which “Moses and the Israelites” (Exodus 15:1) famously sang to God,
מִֽי־כָמֹכָה בָּֽאֵלִם ה׳
מִי כָּמֹכָה נֶאְדָּר בַּקֹּדֶשׁ
נוֹרָא תְהִלֹּת עֹשֵׂה פֶלֶא׃
Who is like you, Hashem, among the gods?
Who is like you, glorious in holiness,
Awesome in praises, doing wonders?
(Adapted from the Koren Jerusalem Bible Translation, Exodus 15:11)
This passage and the poem it appears in are still said by Jews in daily prayers today. The long (and very, very old) poem it comes from is the Song of the Sea in Chapter 15 of Exodus, verses 1-18. This is a song of praise to the god of the Israelites, in His aspect as a war god, and its language is, accordingly, grammatically masculine. Then, in two short verses at the end of this passage, the women get to speak, and for the first time in the chapter, the grammatical feminine is used:
וַתִּקַּח מִרְיָם הַנְּבִיאָה אֲחוֹת אַהֲרֹן אֶת־הַתֹּף בְּיָדָהּ וַתֵּצֶאןָ כׇל־הַנָּשִׁים אַחֲרֶיהָ בְּתֻפִּים וּבִמְחֹלֹת׃ וַתַּעַן לָהֶם מִרְיָם שִׁירוּ לַה׳ כִּי־גָאֹה גָּאָה סוּס וְרֹכְבוֹ רָמָה בַיָּם׃
Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, picked up a hand-drum, and all the women went out after her in dance with hand-drums. And Miriam chanted to them: Sing to ה׳, for He has triumphed gloriously; Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea. (Exodus 15:20-21, adapted from JPS 2006)
Friedman forgoes the standard prayer in favor of these lines, and wrote a song about them in which the women have agency and are able to draw their own conclusions about life, not just to parrot the conclusions of the men (“The wonder of this miracle she soon came to believe.”) Miriam in the Torah is an afterthought to an ancient piece of art, copying Moses’ first exclamation (Exodus 15:1). Miriam in Friedman’s song gets to sing her own song: “We've just lived through a miracle! We're going to dance tonight!”
Although having one’s own voice in Tanakh is usually reserved for men, Miriam is allowed to remain a woman and gain her own voice – qol isha for kol isha – in Friedman’s song. Miriam is called a “weaver”; she is identified with the task of telling the Israelites’ story – “sing[ing] our history.” By the time Friedman was writing, weaving and storytelling had been cemented as feminine activities for centuries, and ascribing them to Miriam allows her to engage in this very non-feminine story while still retaining her femininity.
Singing this song gives Miriam and the Israelite women more than a voice: it gives them time and space to be – to exist. In the Torah, the women get two verses to the men’s eighteen, and are immediately shunted aside within the story, as Moses reclaims the spotlight in the very next verse. In Miriam’s Song, the women are explicitly given time within and outside of the narrative. From a structural perspective, it’s three verses and a chorus, and the men aren’t mentioned at all. From a narrative perspective, it’s right there in the chorus: “Miriam and the women danced and danced the whole night long.”
Debbie Friedman and Rabbi Drorah Setel’s Mi Shebeiracha (Video)
Mi shebeirach avoteinu (The one who blessed our fathers)
M'kor hab'racha l'imoteinu (The source of blessing for our mothers)
May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us,
Help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing, and let us say, Amen.
Mi shebeirach imoteinu (The one who blessed our mothers)
M'kor habrachah l'avoteinu (The source of blessing for our fathers)
Bless those in need of healing with r'fuah sh'leimah (complete healing),
The renewal of body, the renewal of spirit, and let us say, Amen.15.
A Standard Mi Shebeirach, adapted from the Koren Siddur Ashkenaz
מִי שֶׁבֵּרַךְ אֲבוֹתֵֽינוּ, אַבְרָהָם יִצְחָק וְיַעֲקֹב, משֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן, דָּוִד וּשְׁלֹמֹה, הוּא יְבָרֵךְ וִירַפֵּא אֶת הַחוֹלֶה ___ בָּעֲבוּר שֶׁ___ נוֹדֵר צְדָקָה בַּעֲבוּרוֹ. בִּשְׂכַר זֶה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא יִמָּלֵא רַחֲמִים עָלָיו לְהַחֲלִימוֹ וּלְרַפֹּאתוֹ, לְהַחֲזִיקוֹ וּלְהַחֲיוֹתוֹ, וְיִשְׁלַח לוֹ מְהֵרָה רְפוּאָה שְׁלֵמָה מִן הַשָּׁמַיִם לִרְמַ״ח אֵבָרָיו וּשְׁסָ״ה גִּידָיו בְּתוֹךְ שְׁאָר חוֹלֵי ישְׂרָאֵל, רְפוּאַת הַנֶּֽפֶשׁ וּרְפוּאַת הַגּוּף. הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב, וְנֹאמַר אָמֵן.
May the one who blessed our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacobb, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon; the one who blesses and heals the sick [person] ___ on the merit of ___, who has done tzedakah [charity, lit. ‘justice’] in their name. With this, the Holy One, blessed be He, will have mercy on him, in his convalescence and in his healing, in his strengthening and his living, and will swiftly send him complete healing from the heavens for all of his organs and tendons, in the company of the sick [ones of the people of] Israel, healing of the soul and healing of the body. Now, speedily, in near times, and we say, amen. (Translation by David Alperin)
aA Mi Shebeirach is a prayer in Jewish services that starts with the words Mi Shebeirach (“The One Who Blessed…”). The two examined here are for ḥolim, people who are ill, but there are many Mi Shebeirach prayers for other occasions, like being called up to the Torah during services.
bIn many Conservative and Reform prayerbooks, “Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon” is replaced with “שָׂרָה רִבְקָה רָחֵל וְלֵאָה” – “Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah” – the four women most commonly considered the matriarchs of the Jewish people. (See the Sim Shalom and Lev Shalem prayerbooks for examples from the Conservative movement, and the Mishkan T’filah prayerbook for an example from the Reform movement.)
Debbie Friedman wrote this with her partner, Drorah Setel, in 1987, when HIV/AIDS was decimating queer communities across the country.16. In many ways, this Mi Shebeirach is a direct response to that suffering, but it has transcended that era with a force that is truly stunning. In the few decades since it was written, it has become one of the most popular Mi Shebeirach prayers ever, and is sung in nearly all Reform congregations and many Conservative ones during services.
Gregg Drinkwater, a professor of Jewish Studies, says that in 1987, the Mi Shebeirach “was rarely used in Reform communities. These two women [Friedman and Setel], both then immersed in the AIDS crisis and the gay and lesbian Jewish community, re-wrote the traditional Mi Shebeirach as an egalitarian, empowering, and spiritually contemplative song for use in communal settings.”17. Along with other progressive rabbis in the gay and lesbian communities, he says, Friedman and Setel’s Mi Shebeirach “transform[ed] not only the nature of personal prayer, but also the very visibility of illness, spiritual healing, and the body in liberal Jewish communities.”
Why was this song so effective for liberal Jewish communities? One answer is the simple, repetitive Hebrew and inclusion of English, which makes the prayer accessible to Jews who didn’t grow up reading or speaking Hebrew. Another is the inclusion of the word imoteinu, “our mothers,” in reference to the Matriarchs. Liberal Jews in the 1980s, especially liberal Jewish women, likely felt alienated by traditional Mi Shebeirach prayers that didn’t include them.18. At the same time, the 1960s and ‘70s saw a push in liberal Judaism for the Matriarchs to be included in the Avoteinu (“our ancestors,” literally “our fathers”) one of the central prayers in every Jewish service. Not only does Friedman and Setel’s Mi Shebeirach include the Matriarchs, it uses parallelism between the first and second verse to keep the Matriarchs and Patriarchs on exactly equal footing by reversing their positions within the lines. Finally, the first two English lines are a prayer much more palatable for non-religious Jews than the traditional request of God for healing, although that request is still included. Those first lines, “May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing,” are a prayer for people who don’t expect to be cured, who are instead seeking community and connection to their people.
In 1987, when Friedman wrote her Mi Shebeirach, the AIDS crisis was ravaging the gay community, and AZT – azidothymidine, the most widely known drug used to treat HIV – had only been approved that year. Even with a treatment finally approved, patients continued to die, due to the lack of widespread availability, side effects of the drug, and a rising level of immunity to it.19. Friedman, being involved in the LGBTQ+ community, was well aware that no person with AIDS in 1987 expected to be healed. She had to grapple with the question, how does one write a prayer for healing that feels authentic when many of the people you are writing for have no hope of recovery? The phrase “make our lives a blessing” draws on the commonly used phrase זִיכְרוֹנוֹ לִבְרָכָה – “May his memory be a blessing”20.– often abbreviated in writing after the name of a deceased person as ז”ל or z”l. This allusion serves to acknowledge that praying for healing does not have to be reserved for people who expect it – that death is not the antithesis of healing. Especially for queer Jews, especially during the AIDS crisis, the idea that healing and death are not mutually exclusive was an important one, and one they weren’t getting elsewhere.
“And let us say, amen.” The Hebrew word amen carries a slightly different meaning than the corresponding English word. It is used to respond to another person’s prayer; one person says the prayer, another person (or the whole congregation) says amen, to say “I heard you.” And because everyone can sing this song, it goes from “I appreciate that you sang that” to “I appreciate that we sang that.”
Friedman died in 2011, at age 59. In addition to her long music career, she was appointed to the faculty of the School of Sacred Music, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s cantorial school, where she taught Reform cantors for several years. After her death, the school was renamed the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music.21.
Her music has become so ubiquitous in the Jewish world that congregants don’t always know that a “traditional” melody is hers; for example, she wrote the melody of the Havdalah prayer for the end of Shabbat, and despite singing it since childhood, I only found out that it was hers last year!
Although her music is incredibly famous now, that ubiquity does not and should not negate the radical nature of her work. Debbie Friedman wasn’t just creating a genre of music; she was creating a community of people who would continue her work of feminism, queer inclusion, and love for the liturgy and God in liberal Judaism, with the compassion, respect, and joy – even in times of crisis – that the work and the people it’s for deserve.
Footnotes
“Debbie Friedman,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed March 6, 2025, https://jwa.org/feminism/friedman-debbie.
Elaine Woo, “Debbie Friedman, self-taught Jewish folk singer, dies at 59,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2011, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-debbie-friedman-20110111-story.html.
Woo, "Debbie Friedman."
“Forward 50, 2010,” The Jewish Daily Forward, October 26, 2010, https://forward.com/news/132454/forward-50-2010/#dfriedman.
Woo, "Debbie Friedman."
Jonathan Mark, “Debbie Friedman Talks About Being Gay,” New York Jewish Week, January 13, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20150103231839/http://www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/route_17/debbie_friedman_talks_about_being_gay.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “The Recognition Debbie Friedman Desired,” The Jewish Daily Forward, March 29, 2022, https://forward.com/life/147729/the-recognition-debbie-friedman-desired/.
Mark, "Debbie Friedman."
Mark, "Debbie Friedman."
“Debbie Friedman’s Not By Might, Not By Power,” Milken Archive of Jewish Music, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.milkenarchive.org/music/volumes/view/cycle-of-life-in-synagogue-and-home/work/not-by-might-not-by-power/#lyrics.
“Genesis 1:2,” Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1.2?lang=bi&aliyot=0.
"Debbie Friedman's," Milken Archive of Jewish Music.
“Debbie Friedman,” Jewish Women’s Archive. Watch interview here: https://jwa.org/feminism/friedman-debbie.
"Miriam’s Song" Music & Lyrics by Debbie Friedman, accessed March 7, 2025, https://images.shulcloud.com/7903/uploads/ShabbatServices/PrayersforSep16service.pdf.
“Mi Sheberach, by Debbie Friedman,” Haggadot, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.haggadot.com/clip/mi-sheberach-debbie-friedman.
Gregg Drinkwater, “Queer Healing: AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Origins of the Jewish Healing Movement,” American Jewish History 104, no. 4 (2020): 605-629, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2020.0053.
Drinkwater, "Queer Healing."
Sara Smith, “The Imahot in the Amidah: A History,” Contemporary Jewry 32, no. 3 (2012): 309–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43549746.
“The First AIDS Drugs,” National Cancer Institute | Center for Cancer Research,” National Institutes of Health, accessed January 11, 2026, https://ccr.cancer.gov/news/landmarks/article/first-aids-drugs.
“This is the masculine singular form; the feminine singular is זִיכְרוֹנָה לִבְרָכָה (zikhroná liv'rakhá), the masculine plural is זִיכְרוֹנָם לִבְרָכָה (zikhronám liv'rakhá), and the feminine plural is זִיכְרוֹנָן לִבְרָכָה (zikhronán liv'rakhá).” via Wiktionary, “זיכרונו לברכה,” Accessed March 6, 2025, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/זיכרונו_לברכה.
“Debbie Friedman,” in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed January 24, 2026, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/friedman-debbie.
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