Molly-Ann Leikin never had any serious health problems until 2015, when, out of nowhere, her right foot inexplicably exploded with pain. She glanced down and saw a red, throbbing mess staring back at her. It was agony. She tried ice, stretches, exercise, Advil; she saw dozens of doctors, underwent X-rays and MRI scans. Nothing worked. Nobody knew what was wrong.
And it didn’t go away. She quickly became bedridden, unable to walk, work or drive. As Leikin puts it: “If I wanted a banana on a Friday, I had to wait till Wednesday for a caretaker.”
Leikin, an Ottawa native, is a professional songwriter who now lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. Her clients include Cher and Anne Murray. She bought a gorgeous California dream home with French doors and three fireplaces. But once her health problems began, she couldn’t focus. “In that kind of pain,” she says, “you don’t write love songs.” She ploughed through her savings and lost her house. The whole ordeal, she estimates, cost her US$4 million (CAD $5.23 million).
After a year and a half, a local cantor, Mark Childs, visited her bedside. He offered some advice: keep praying, visualize yourself healthy again, keep a positive attitude and believe in God. For lack of better options, Leikin took his advice, praying to God every day. She took a vow: if she got healthy again, she would do whatever she could to help her Jewish community.
A phone call changed everything. It was a friend of Leikin’s from Hebrew school back in Ottawa, wishing her a happy birthday. Leikin immediately started crying, divulging her miserable story. Her friend asked if she’d been to Cedars-Sinai, a non-profit hospital in Los Angeles. Leikin hadn’t, but a trip there validated the suggestion. A surgeon ran some tests and, weeks later, called to reveal the mystery ailment: Leikin had been suffering from tarsal tunnel syndrome, which is like carpal tunnel, but in the ankle. A breezy 45-minute surgery should fix it, he told her.
Within a month, she was healed.
“Every day, I’m grateful,” she says. “Every day, I thank God. Every day, I thank the universe.”
READ: DIAMOND: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JEWISH?
Now it was her turn. She needed to keep up her end of the bargain she made with God. Her strength was songwriting, so she started there, recalling a tune she’d heard on a classical radio station when she was ill that she recognized from her childhood. It was Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem.
“I sang it maybe 5,000 times when I was a kid,” she says, “but I really didn’t know what I was singing.”
Over the past 70 years, numerous writers have translated the Israeli anthem, but none have written words to match the music. Her mission crystallized: she would write brand new English lyrics to Hatikvah and spread it worldwide.
“I always, as a songwriter, tried to find a hole in the marketplace, so I could write something that didn’t already exist,” she says. The anthem was an opportunity not just to fill a void, but also to create something more meaningful than the pop tracks on which she built a career.
Leikin calls her version an “official English translation,” but nobody’s made it official. Instead, she’s taken it upon herself to spread it worldwide, until it gains traction as a mainstream translation.
Childs oversaw the first recording of it, which was performed by a children’s choir. When the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra came to town, Leikin networked her way backstage and slipped a copy of the recording with her contact info into the coat of the symphony’s director. Six months later, the director called her up with thanks, promising to play it when the philharmonic tours.
She’s personally pitched it to cantors throughout North America and has so far convinced around a dozen to use her version, including David Benlolo of Montreal’s Shaare Zedek Congregation.
When Benlolo first saw her email, he was sceptical. “Quite frankly, I didn’t really pay much attention,” he says. “If you want to tweak something, why tweak Hatikvah, a national anthem?”
But looking closer at it, he was impressed by its flow and the poetic interpretation. He hasn’t sang it publicly yet – “If I change the wording for a song or a national anthem, that would be a little bit too much for some people to accept,” he says of his congregants – but he teaches it during private classes, where it catches people’s attention and helps them understand the song’s meaning.
“Every synagogue around the world is trying new things,” he says. “I think sometimes you have to shake the apple tree to get people to think.”
The rendition is still one of Leikin’s least famous songs. But it’s also been the most rewarding.
“When I hear it, I get misty-eyed, thinking, ‘I did something worthwhile with my life,’ ” she says. “I think to myself, ‘I did that. God and I did that.’ ”
