Yehoshua Limoni: Choosing Faith Over Fame in Israel’s Music Industry

Not long ago, singer and musician Yehoshua Limoni received a tempting offer: to take part in a nostalgia feature that would air on Friday Night Studio (Ulpan Shishi) on Channel 12. The piece was scheduled to be broadcast on Friday night, and Limoni was promised that the screen would display the caption, “Filmed on a weekday.” After consulting a rabbi, Limoni decided to turn the offer down. “It’s not an easy test,” he says in an interview with Hidabroot. “This is an opportunity for serious exposure, and today artists pay thousands — and even tens of thousands of shekels, to promote themselves. Here, you get it all for free.”

“Being an artist is a struggle”

Limoni began his musical career as a secular high-school student. Together with friends his age, he formed the band “Temporary Sanity” (Shfiyut Zmanit), and the first song they recorded — “The Last Summer”, became a hit that broke listening records on leading radio stations.

After completing his army service, Limoni flew to Hollywood, where he trained professionally in music and drums. While abroad, he came across the book Orchot Tzaddikim and was deeply impressed. His path into Torah observance was swift — but so was his path out. A decade later, Limoni encountered the world of Torah and mitzvot again. This time, his return was more gradual and cautious.

Today, he is a Chabad Chasid, lives in Herzliya, is married and a father of two — “a miracle story in its own right,” after marrying at a not-young age — and he marks more than two decades in a life of Torah and mitzvot.

Your songs reached respectable spots on radio playlists. Which success moved you the most?

“I don’t know how to answer that — it's a hard question for me. I don’t feel like I ever experienced ‘success.’ Maybe we need to define what success is. Being an artist making music in Israel is, first and foremost, a struggle,” he explains after thinking. “Certainly if you’re not the kind of musician who’s filling Caesarea right now.”

A struggle financially?

“Financially too, and also the struggle of making room for it in your life. You have to really want and love what you do, and it’s important that you have something real you want to send out into the world for it to happen. That’s why, by the way, it takes me a very long time to release a song.” He says that his current album, took him almost eight years of work.

“I was blessed with a studio, and thank God I now have all the tools — I acquired them over the years. That allows me to do the whole production process, A to Z, almost independently, and that’s a huge advantage. That ability helped me release the new album.

“As for success — for me it’s a form of coping. I believe there’s some kind of little demon inside me that’s very afraid of its own success, and I’ve been in dialogue with it over the years. I think today we’re in a much better place than we were a few years ago, and I’m willing to succeed. But it’s still not easy, and for me success comes with a lot of baggage.”

How do you keep humility during good times?

“It’s a constant challenge. What helps me a lot is a word I learned from the Lubavitcher Rebbe that changed my life: mission (shlichut).

“There’s a famous story about a man who was a successful teacher, and masses of people came to his classes. One day he came to the Rebbe and said he felt himself filling with pride and therefore wanted to stop teaching. The Rebbe answered: Why should people suffer because you have pride? Keep teaching — and deal with your pride.

“That’s a trait I work on all the time, to this day, and I’ll probably work on it my whole life. Thank God, over the years I’ve learned to take things a little less seriously, to take myself less seriously, and to look at everything with a certain flow.”

Alongside this inner work, Limoni emphasizes that he believes an artist has an obligation to bring the mission he was given into the world. “A Jew has to be moving, in motion, not stuck in one place. And in general, creativity seeks an audience.

“I’ve met many people — through writing workshops I taught and other situations. Quite a few say, ‘I write, but I write for the drawer,’ or ‘I don’t feel a need to do anything with it.’ In my eyes, those sentences are never really true. Every creation wants to be revealed. The question is whether you can overcome the fear, how important it is to you for the creation to come out into the light, and whether you’re willing to pay the prices involved.”

Are there clashes between strict halacha observance and your profession?

“I think it’s one of the professions with the most clashes. For example, many times women approached me asking to work with them on their songs, and I had to refuse because of kol isha (women’s singing). For a similar reason, I rejected ideas to incorporate women’s vocals into my own music, even though musically it could fit. There are also expressions I avoid putting into my songs for halachic reasons.”

He says the most challenging times for him are the mourning periods when listening to music is avoided: the Omer and the Three Weeks. “To shut yourself down for two months a year — that’s a test. At the beginning of my return to observance, I stopped everything, literally. Honestly? There was something amazing about it. The break brought back my longing for music. Today I know the halacha better, and I know there are certain things I can do, like sitting in the studio and editing music.

“What gives me strength to face the tests in this profession is faith,” he shares. “In the end you understand that doing God’s will is the best thing.” He adds with a smile that something sweet came out of the bitter regarding the nostalgia feature he gave up because it was set for Shabbat: “Suddenly, articles appeared on various sites that ‘Yehoshua Limoni refused to participate in Ulpan Shishi.’ If you truly walk with God’s will, I believe everything will be okay.”

“This is what prayer will look like in the future”

Alongside his main work as a musician, Limoni runs the Open Beit Midrash in Herzliya. “The beit midrash is located inside a Chabad House, and anyone who wants can come and learn. There’s a minyan, a learning schedule, and light refreshments. Of course, the main goal is specifically to bring those who haven’t yet touched Torah study.

“People come from all types — young people, retirees, students, even people who seem, on the surface, totally far. Some are people you meet along the way and invite, and some come to pray and stay. Thank God, there are quite a few learners here every day. The beit midrash is a project that makes me very happy.”

Another project Limoni is currently working on is connecting people to prayer. “Prayer is my greatest passion. It occupied me for many years, and in the last two years I began writing a book and giving classes and workshops on the topic.”

Borrowing from the world of music he lives and breathes, the method is called the “Buttons Method.” “Many people have a very hard time with prayer, and it shows in sentences like ‘I don’t connect,’ ‘I can’t concentrate,’ or ‘I don’t see results from prayer.’

“In this method, we learn how every word in the siddur is a button for a point in the soul — and then we understand that prayer is personal. The words of the siddur aren’t just letters sitting there for thousands of years that you come and read. They are letters that come to write, together with you, a song connected to your soul.

“We go through these buttons in prayer, word by word, and understand what each word represents — what it opens up in the soul. This learning gives people a completely different perspective, like a redemptive kind of prayer. I think this is what prayer will look like in the future. You can probably hear my passion in the way I’m speaking — I can talk about prayer for hours without stopping.”

Limoni says there was a moment that pushed him forward in this area: as is customary among Chabad Chassidim, he wrote to the Lubavitcher Rebbe asking for encouragement in his mission around prayer. Two days later, he received a phone call from a producer of a large, well-known music project. The producer asked to invite Limoni to perform for a significant audience, and the title of the event was Prayer. “I heard him and froze. I didn’t understand where he suddenly came from. By the way, the event is indeed going to happen in about a month.”

At the end of the interview, they speak about the album Limoni released recently. “There’s an English song I really loved, and the chorus words are: say it loud, say it clear, it’s too late when we die. Meaning: say it clearly and out loud, because it’s too late to say it after we’re gone.

“If there’s someone you want to tell something good to — someone you love and haven’t yet said it, then say it. For me that’s something that’s hard to do. I’m usually a person who doesn’t say it, so I wrote a song about it.”

“My brother, know that I love you
Even if you don’t
Inside, you hurt too
You want to grow too”

Who is the brother in the song? Who did you mean?

“Maybe we’ll leave that question open,” Limoni hesitates. “You know what — let’s answer it in two ways: the brother is the brother outside, who thinks differently than me, who looks at the world differently and annoys me. Our texts tell us that all Israel is one complete structure, and all Israel needs each other, and all Israel is responsible for each other — each for the other. In the end, deep down, I can’t live without him. He is my second hand, and I love him.

“A second possibility is that I’m speaking to myself, to the parts within me. Inside us are parts that conflict with each other. There’s no person without inner conflict. In the song I’m asking that we succeed in living together — the animal soul and the Divine soul, and create inner peace within every one of us.”