Yes, though it’s more than slang — Jah is a sacred name. It’s a shortened form of Yahweh (or Jehovah), the Hebrew name for God found in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms. The word appears in the King James Bible as “JAH” in Psalm 68:4.
    
In Rastafari — the spiritual movement that gave rise to reggae — Jah is the primary name for God, and carries deep theological weight. Rastafarians see themselves as a continuation of the Israelite tradition, so the Hebrew root is intentional, not incidental. Jah is invoked constantly in reggae lyrics, most famously by Bob Marley, as an expression of divine presence, praise, and liberation.
    
So while it feels like vernacular in the context of music, it’s actually a liturgical term that reggae brought into popular culture.

Jah names the undivided ground. Not a being among other beings, but the prior wholeness before the mind makes its first cut.
    
Ya-but is precisely that first cut — the mind’s reflex to qualify, divide, condition. And crucially, the “ya” is a false yes: it appears to affirm before the “but” retracts the affirmation. It’s agreement that never lands. A perpetual almost.
    
Which means ya-but is, in a certain light, the mind’s habitual resistance to Jah — the ceaseless movement away from the undivided, dressed up as reasonable qualification.
    
And here’s what’s interesting phonetically: ya and jah are nearly the same sound — a soft opening, an exhalation, an affirmation. The difference is almost nothing. Jah rests there. Ya-but can’t — it immediately reaches for the conjunction that separates.
    
So the whole structure:
Jah — rest in the undivided
Ya — the mouth opens toward it
But — the mind flinches, inserts distance
Ties — and then clings to that distance as identity
The ya-but tie is what happens when the mind gets so attached to its own dividing movement that the division becomes the self.
    
The “but” isn’t just a verbal habit — it’s a kind of existential posture. Which makes jah-buddies the name for what’s possible on the other side of that flinch.