[This piece is exclusive to Yated and does not appear
in Varda's new book, I Remembered in the Night Your
Name which is reviewed this week.]
At the Splitting of the Sea, Miriam led the Jewish women
in song and dance to celebrate the great miracle. Dance -- a
form of exuberant spiritual expression.
All night we have been dancing with the bride, and now we sit
with our drinks and pieces of cake. We are too tired to talk
the talk we spoke to one another over the table at the
wedding feast. From the dancing, we have been raised beyond
our sleepiness and are ready to witness and appreciate the
dance that is called in Yiddish, Mitzva Tantz.
*
I remember it from my own wedding. The Rebbe didn't explain
what was happening when he handed me one end of the
gartel, and there was no time to ask him. Just to
dance with my brother holding the other end of the
gartel, then the brother-in-law, then the Rebbe. And
then my husband.
In front of everyone? Something seemed amiss. Why, all of a
sudden, was I allowed to `dance' in front of men? What kind
of mitzva could I get at the expense of doing
something that is usually forbidden? I didn't understand, but
I trusted the Rebbe.
The reason is that it is not a dance like any other dance.
The bride hardly moves. She just holds the gartel
while the other end is held by the one designated to dance
with her. Her face is usually veiled. She stands in her veil
and wedding gown. She knows that this is a good time for
prayer, like the time of neila on Yom Kippur, and her
lips move behind the veil as she asks for a happy marriage,
for children, a good life, and all the deepest prayers that
are hidden in her heart.
The order of the dancers is significant: the uncles and
brothers, the father-in-law, the father, and then, last of
all, the groom. A pathway to her new life is carefully laid
as she dances with her father-in-law which gives way to the
dance with the father who gives ultimate precedence to the
groom who is the other half of her soul.
*
Here is the father dancing with her without the gartel
between them. They are permitted. This is, after all, his
daughter. This is, after all, her father. The other dancers
were close relations, but her father is much more. One's own
child, one's own daughter. How to express what they feel for
each other now at the time when the nature of love is
expanded?
Do it in a dance where the dance is a gentle swaying of hands
in hands and the tapping of feet in a modest expression of
something so tremendous. A complete understatement. She has
grown up and is leaving her father's house to make her own
home. Her father is saying goodbye to his child. He already
beholds before him a young woman and a wife.
The father's love is expressed in this intense, almost
motionless dance of one soul whispering to another. If he is
the good father that he is, he knows that now he must give
over his sweetest, most lovely daughter to her soulmate. And
so, the hands release her hands and the next dance begins.
Now begins the ultimate dance of one soul retrieving itself
from the exile of having wandered without its whole being and
now made whole.
*
Out in the middle of America, in Denver, Colorado, where the
men wear cowboy hats in shul, there was our
chassidishe Rebbe, a grandson of the Bobover Rebbe, R'
Ben Zion, and a ninth generation grandson of the Baal Shem
Tov. There was Rabbi Shloime Twersky handing me the end of
his gartel and gently explaining that the mitzva
tantz is a speial Chassidishe custom. Most of the wedding
guests had never beheld a mitzva tantz at their own
simchas but some of them had seen it at the weddings
of the Rebbe's children.
My own relatives had certainly never seen or even heard of a
mitzva dance. But the whole wedding had been one
surprise after the other, and they had taken each thing in
stride. My brother had been swept up by the dancing and had
clearly enjoyed the experience. His tie was loose and he
looked happy and relaxed.
My brother stood in the middle of the circle that had been
cleared for us and gingerly took hold of his end of the
gartel. As a lawyer, he has plenty of experience
taking center stage.
At first, our Rebbe stood smiling by the sidelines. More than
anyone, he was appreciating the anomaly of the scene and the
primary players. It was a great cosmic joke, putting on a
mitzva tantz in the middle of Denver, Colorado. But
then the Rebbe's face turned serious as he watched my brother
glide from side to side. The Rebbe closed his eyes the way he
had closed them during his long beautiful solo dances earlier
during the wedding feast when everyone had stood watching
him. He might have been praying for my brother and for all
the souls still trapped in the exiles of New Jersey and
Boston, San Diego and Great Neck.
It didn't matter if the mitzva tantz was taking place
in Denver in the last quarter of the twentieth century or
between two grandchildren of Rebbes in the teeming
chassidishe center of Bobov, Ger or Belz in Poland
before the Second World War. Our Rebbe saw the opportunity
and the opening. He was calling on the power of the mitzva
tantz to transform and heal, to return our hearts to Our
Maker. The Mitzva Dance as a Dance Above All Dances could
break through the borders between cultures, countries and
centuries.
When the Rebbe took the gartel to dance with me, I
couldn't raise my eyes. I felt the strength of his prayer
like a strong gentle wave washing over me. He had blessed me
like a father before the chuppa and now he was
blessing me again. The Rebbe had only known me for one month,
but I felt his care and concern for me and the love he had
for my husband who had virtually lived in his house and was
like a son to him. My father, who was already in the Next
World, would not take his turn in this dance, but the Rebbe
was ready to stand in for him as he danced with one end of
the gartel before handing it over to my husband.
What is dance? What is prayer? What is connection? The
mitzva tantz was an answer that spoke without words.
It moved without hardly moving. It soared with the gentle
tapping of feet. It spoke of the flight of souls, the bird
soaring and then flying low, twixt the earth and the Heavens.
It was a dance of one, not of two.
It was a dance of One.
