My father places his hands on my head to bless me upon the moment of my bat mitzvah. Girls are not yet allowed to be part of Shabbat morning; we are relegated to Friday night. It’s 1966, and my hair is carefully plastered to tame the frizz; my glasses keep sliding down my nose; my pink wool dress is matched with dyed shoes. And all I can think is, Dad, don’t crush my hair!
Yet his hands tremble, and that tremble shakes my body in a way that I would not understand until years later. It is his trembling hands that I remember from that moment: not the Haftarah, not the speech written by the rabbi. The tremble. The physicality of it. It calls to me still. The dance of “Jewing.”
Our younger son was born in 1990. At this time, we were nominally involved in Jewish practice, and I had not yet re-entered the stream of Judaism. That year, my husband discovered improvisational dance; a year later, I joined him. It was our date night: babysitter, dance, then Chinese food. Through dance, I discovered play, a realm that I did not inhabit effortlessly. I was not a playful child; I was even less so a playful adult. And yet, dance, specifically improvisational, where there are no “steps” or specific ways to move, but rather a physical response to rhythm, opened something in me: a channel for the flow of passion. The tremble in a new form.
What was it about improvisational dance? The rational mind shuts down; instead of the mind directing a movement (move your right foot now, then your left), the movement directs the mind. Or leaves the mind behind, altogether. And in this state of movement-informed mindlessness, new insights and images emerge in an unbidden creative flow. This is how I would return to Judaism.
Two scenes. One: I’m at a retreat with Reb Zalman, way back in the late nineties; we are being asked to improvise the sephirot (10 mystical attributes of God) by traveling along the floor with focused abandon. I recall especially the sefirah of hod, gratitude. I entered into the freedom of moving without purpose other than the prompt of gratitude. I am greeted at the other side of the room by Reb Zalman, who hugs me in a deep embrace. Icing on my cake, sealing the deal: If I can dance Judaism, I’m in!
Two: I am at a dance retreat at Elat Chyyim with Joanne Tucker, who pioneered Dance Midrash. Joanne has asked us to fall off each other in as many ways as we can. With so much laughter, we fall and fall. Then Joanne shares with us the Torah: Rebecca sees Isaac across the field, and she falls off her camel (Genesis 24:64). And now we fall again with the biblical images flooding our senses. Torah explodes open in me; after all that falling, I am inside the story as never before. If I can dance Torah, I can dance Judaism. I’m in!
For many of us, the Jewish tradition was shut off from us, the vibrancy of the past squashed both by WWII and American suburban banality. The Judaism in which I was raised was dry, dead to emotion, curiosity, or passion. That Judaism had been stunned into a profound PTSD by the Holocaust, and no one yet knew how to wake it back up. It could only be a multifaceted, multisensory experience that brought me back into Judaism.
Then along came Rock and Roll.
In an article, Hear That Long, Black Snake Moan, by Michael Ventura, he talks about the transition that took place between the WWII’s dance of the foxtrot, where only the legs moved, and, expressly, not those sexy hips. But the revolution of rock and roll, with its origin story in the sensual Blues, cracked a generation open. There we were, out on the dance floor, mindlessly (and I use this word purposefully) gyrating, our whole bodies writhing, an experience from which we emerged sweaty, healed, and cleansed. It was a spiritual experience, to dance with abandon, no choreography except what came from each heart, each body, unique and expressive, improvisational at its core.
Once I found my portal back in through dance, the whole of the tradition became available. On the other side of that portal was rabbinic ordination through ALEPH and the Jewish Renewal movement. Dance, feminism, ecology, and the joy of the Chassidic tradition as midwifed by Reb Zalman were cemented to the core of my being, and I was birthed into my life’s new paradigm.
So what was it about dance that set me free? Reb Zalman taught that Judaism was over-verbalized and under-experienced. Dance is pure experience; it embodies (literally) a level of engagement that feeds understanding in a way that invites me into being fully present. Driver’s ed classes are full of information, but nothing teaches us so thoroughly about driving as that moment when we get behind the wheel.
Dance allows us to grok Torah and, by extension, Judaism. I use this word intentionally. Coined by the sci-fi master Robert A. Heinlein in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land (and yes, the biblical reference is explicit in the story), to grok means “To understand something deeply, intuitively, or completely. It goes beyond basic intellectual comprehension to imply total mental and spiritual empathy, making the concept second nature.” (etymonline)
This is why the marriage of improvisational dance and Torah was a lightning bolt for me. Once it struck, I was flooded with the passion and mindlessness of movement; now I could entertain a curiosity about Judaism. In fact, the Jewish Renewal movement was born out of this curiosity: How can we bring back into our davenning (embodied praying), our study, our lives, the juiciness of joy?
I was recently at a three-day retreat, studying Kabbalistic text, and as was our minhag (custom), someone would begin a niggun (a wordless melody sung to induce a deep inner shift) that moved us into or out of our study. I realized with a bit of a shock that my voice ceased to be a singular, discernible one but literally was joined in a profound, undulating vibration with the folks around me. I could not hear a distinction between my voice and theirs; the vibrato, the sonic landscape, the sounding and vibrating as one voice. Heavenly harmony, really.
And that, too, is dance: the dissolution of or at least a softening of cell walls, when I am the archetype, as opposed to being of the archetype. Dance brought me into the circle of movement, sound, melody, and a visceral experience of the mythic as well as the liturgical. Once those channels were opened, lubricated through the effort of a regular, weekly dance practice, I became a powerful shlichat tzibbur (leader of prayer). I couldn’t keep my body still as I led the service, conveying the passion with which I davened, inviting all who were there to join me in the dance.
That we Jews have a tradition of shuckling, swaying in prayer, is so delicious. We move during our open heart time; we sway and dip. We shuckle side to side, as if we are rocking a baby on our hip, or we bend at the waist, rocking the bowing and bending while our voices are joined in song or in the depths of our hearts that are plumbed during the silent Amidah prayer. What’s important here is that we move our prayers. As Gabrielle Roth taught, we dance our prayers, we sweat our prayers; we become our prayers.
Rabbi Shefa Gold taught, “It is not sufficient to talk about Torah. We must live it.”
Improvisational dance is how I began to live Torah. Twenty years later, I’m still at it.