S.6 #7 | With God's Help

Every time I volunteer at my synagogue, I learn a ton. This time was not exception. I helped the summer camp put on a kids play, which turned out to be a highly educational and gratifying experience for me.

Mentions:

Baruch Hashem - B''H

Frozen - Disney movie

Transcript

Being a dancer and a teacher, I try to use my talents to help and volunteer at our synagogue whenever I can. Last winter, for instance, I taught the preschoolers various dances for the Hanukkah celebration. This summer, I helped out at the summer camp to organize a theater performance. I had never staged a theater production before but with the help of others I thought I’d give it a go. Every time I step foot in our synagogue, I end up learning a ton about Judaism, and being involved in this project proved to be an incredible learning opportunity for me! Just in the first meeting with our Rabbi’s daughter Mushkie who runs summer camp, I acquired some of the most essential Jewish knowledge that otherwise might have taken me years to learn. What I realized soon after immersing myself in Judaism is that it takes a lifetime to learn the ways of the Torah, and oftentimes one lifetime is not even enough, so our soul comes back for more learning in new bodies. Especially for regular people like me who don’t dedicate their whole life to Torah study. Of course had I attended Hebrew school and graduated from a Jewish high school, I would know a lot more, but that’s not the case. 

In our meeting about the camp performance, the first thing I noticed Mushkie do as soon as she took out a pen and paper to jot down our ideas was her writing in the top right corner the Hebrew letters bet-hey. I had seen these letters many times on the newsletters we receive from Chabad and the Hebrew school communication but I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant. I asked, and she explained that this acronym for Baruch Hashem- Blessed is God- is often written in the top right corner of a document to signify that this project is being carried out "with God's help". She said that everything she does in life, she makes sure to include G-d. The letters serve as a reminder that all her endeavors, projects, whatever it may be, are undertaken with divine assistance. She says that she is so used to writing or typing these letters on papers that she didn’t even notice she’d done it until I asked her about it, it’s like second nature to her. I absolutely loved this! 

You see, we grow up in a society where we are conditioned to believe in ourselves as the creators and managers of everything in our life. Sure it sounds empowering, but a human being, is only capable of so much, limited in what he can achieve on his own. With G-d’s help, it’s a different story. When you have G-d’s help, first of all, you don’t stress as much and you don’t feel such a heavy burden of work on your shoulders because you are dividing that work or responsibilities with G-d. If you let G-d help you, He does! It’s amazing, it’s wonderful and it’s something people need to know- that they don’t have to do it alone! And when a plan of yours doesn’t work out the way you wished it, you trust that G-d knows better, and a different, better plan will be presented to you at the right time and place. Oh how much easier life becomes! Like I said, less stress, less disappointment, more miracles!

Working together with Mushkie, we quickly came up with a stellar idea for the play, which was going to be a take on Frozen. The plot” Ana and Elsa come to summer camp, in our synagogue it’s called Camp Gan Izzy. It’s their first time and the campers are excited to show their new friends around. At the end of the first week, it’s time to prepare for Shabbat. Elsa tries braiding challah but finds it difficult with her gloves on, so Ana suggests she take her gloves off just for a moment. The minute Elsa takes her gloves off, she freezes camp. Summer camp is now full of snow and the campers love it because it’s never happened before. They play in the snow and have fun, but when it’s time to go swimming at the pool, they realize it’s frozen and get angry at Elsa. Elsa feels bad for ruining summer camp and flees to her castle. The campers realize they were mean to Elsa and want to bring her back in time for shabbat. With love, kindness and forgiveness they manage to melt the snow and bring Elsa back for candle lighting. 

Now that we had the clear idea for the play, it was time to write the script. She showed me the numerous scripts from previous plays and mentioned that they have a script and song writer - a couple actually, the girl has a theater background and her husband is a musician, so in the past they’d written the plays along with the songs. But this time Mushkie wanted to try something new and she proved to be way more tech savvy than me. She asked AI to write the script, providing it with the prompts we came up with. AI came out with a tremendous script complete with songs. I was in awe. 

We started discussing the songs and here is when I learned something completely new to me. It turns out that in orthodox tradition, a woman or girl above a certain age, cannot sing in front of men. So we couldn’t, for example, give Elsa a singing part, well at least not a solo. Furthermore, orthodox men cannot even listen to a recording of a woman singing, which is why in the past they had always asked this musician guy to record the songs for kids to sing along to or learn from. I asked Mushkie why that is and she explained that it has to do with modesty. That the singing voice of a woman is considered sensual and possibly stimulating to men. It is therefore forbidden for a man to hear a woman, other than his immediate family, sing. This was such a shock to me! Obviously, in today's world, this seems quite severe, but hear me out! When it comes to married men, the Torah puts such enormous value on the bond between a husband and wife that it does not allow for any potential damage to a man's undivided and unequivocal devotion and attraction to his one and only partner in life. Imagine how beautiful that is! And if the man is not married, it makes sense too that he is not distracted by a female singer, that he does not become attracted to a female solely based on her physical beauty - something that secular Westerners have been accustomed to for ages now. Right? Most people I know have gotten married or dated those they felt attracted to because of looks, talents, money…very few have actually found their soulmate the Jewish way - seriously considering the spiritual aspect and purpose of a relationship, shared values, and opinions of family members.

By the way, and this is the hardest one for me, being a dancer, the same rule of men being restricted from enjoying a woman’s physical qualities goes for dancing. Men are not permitted to gaze at a woman, which is the complete opposite of what I’ve lived with for over 30 years. My whole life consisted of dancing with and for men, so to speak. I spent my twenties and most of my thirties performing for all types of crowds that always included men. Now that I look back I understand the reasons for my resentment towards my significant others in past relationships. Before marrying my husband, I always dated dancers, which naturally generated a lot of jealousy from both sides because watching your significant other in a close embrace with someone else is not very enjoyable. It all makes so much sense now. I remember those days when my life consisted of going out salsa dancing. I thought the only way for a man to become and stay interested in me was for me to dress as revealingly as possible and to dance as sensually as possible. Boy was I wrong! I speak about this extensively in my episode on modesty, so I won’t repeat myself here. But in short, I now know that the less women reveal themselves to the opposite sex, the better! That is of course if the woman is seeking a long-lasting, respectful relationship.

The problem for me as a ballroom dance teacher, though is very real. If I continue teaching dance, it’s impossible for me to adhere to this Jewish rule because I teach boys and men to dance, and I am their partner in the dance, which means they look at me, they are in physical contact with me constantly. I would need to quit ballroom dancing altogether, which I don’t think I’m ready to do in this life. Because of this, there is often now this internal conflict in me. I have students that have been with me for years, and I have new young students that are so excited about dance, I can see how much happiness it brings them and I love being part of that. Being a teacher has always been gratifying because I can see the progress students make, how their confidence grows, how their posture improves and even how I become a sort of confidant for them. Also, when I perform, it brings people joy. They come up to me after the show and they thank me for my art. If I have a G-d-given talent, should I quit it? I do want to become more observant and follow the ways of the Torah, but how can I give up that which is such a big part of me? This has been on my mind for some time now and I plan to speak to my rabbi about it to see what he thinks. 

OK, I need to get back to the summer camp, because I went on a complete tangent here. We wanted to include some Jewish songs in our play, so we were able to find on Spotify various songs sang by men, such as Shalom Aleichem - a song sang on Shabbat to welcome the ministering angels into the home. Other songs that AI came up with we had the male musician record for us and the kids sang along to the recording - groups of kids singing aloud on stage. I helped choreograph some simple dance moves for the kids to go along with the songs, so we were all set in that respect. But then came the fun job of try outs and assigning roles. This was my first time running auditions, which was a fun experience. However, as rehearsals were underway, some actors dropped out, others got sick and others couldn’t make it for whatever reason. We had only had 2 weeks to put this production together and I started to get worried if we could even pull this off. That’s when I realized that I was once again not fully trusting G-d. I would speak to Mushkie about all the last-minute changes with the actors and the script, and she remained completely calm - I mean completely! Not a worry in her mind because she knew that G-d would help us, and whatever the outcome had to be, that's what it would be, all we could do was try our best. And that is what we did. We rehearsed with the kids as much as time allowed, we came up with ways to make the script more simple, to assign more roles to those kids that could take on more - such as backstage help, etc. 

The day of the performance, the room was full! So many families and friends came to see their kids perform in Jewish play, it was amazing. In the show, we had upward of a hundred kids participate; the little ones by dancing and singing and the older ones with actual speaking parts. The show ran so smoothly that I still, a month later as I am talking about this, cannot believe how we pulled it off. I mean I know how - it was with G-d’s help of course, I just can’t believe it! Everyone that attended the show was blown away by the amazing job of the actors, the beautifully set up stage, the props, the music, the dancing, but above all - the meaning of the play: that love and forgiveness work wonders. 

It was truly an amazing experience for me and as you can see I learned a ton! Starting in October this year I will be once again volunteering to teach pre-schoolers a Hanukkah Dance. My youngest is no longer in pre-school, she started Kindergarten, but it will be nice to teach the little ones and be part of the Hanukkah celebration at our schul. 

I suppose there are several takeaways in this episode - first of all: remember that G-d is always there for you and to help you, so invite Him into all your projects and endeavors, include Him in your thought process, in your plans, in your ambitions. Trust that whatever you take on will be so much easier with His help. Second of all, if you have an opportunity to volunteer or help out, do it! Every time I do something new, step out of my comfort zone or just do a mitzvah from the heart, it ends up benefiting me just as much if not more! So give give give! 

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I will leave you today with a very, very short saying that my Rabbi, Zushe Greenberg, learned from his father. His father had an incredible life story. He survived the Holocaust, the Siberian prison camp in Russia, the 6-day war in Israel and many more difficulties. Each time he didn’t think he was going to survive, and because he thought he had nothing to lose, he continued practicing Judaism- observing mitzvahs in secret and in whatever way possible. He never stopped believing in G-d, and G-d saved him each time. He lived to have many children, our rabbi is the 6th of them, born in Russia, right before their immigration to Israel. After surviving so many hardships and receiving so many blessings, he would teach his children to always rely on G-d and let G-d take care of the difficulties. He would simply tell them, “Don’t worry, let G-d worry!”.