“HASHEM MELEACH, HASHEM MALACH!” Daniel was screaming. Daniel and I and the rest of the boys were in the midst of a moshpit right before Havdallah on Saturday night. You see, there was much anxiety about the Shabbaton and the reluctance of our Hungarian friends to join in the fun. But we were prepared for this. The American teens knew to take the initiative, understanding that the Hungarian teens may not be as participative as an average BT Shabbatoner. But this was not necessary.
It. Was. Lit.
Instantly, the singing and dancing began. Your nationality did not matter. You were singing alongside everyone else. Even if you didn’t know the words, you could get by humming along. The ruach was off the charts, the bonding was organic and unprompted. These random moments where one person would get up and start singing followed by a loud and rambunctious moshpit for the next five minutes were not uncommon. If you didn’t lose your voice by Saturday night, you were clearly not on this Shabbaton.
After the five-minutes-of-party concluded, I sat in a chair catching my breath as if I just finished a marathon. Daniel walks over and hands me a cup of water. We sit there for a moment and I ask him if has ever experienced anything remotely close to this Shabbaton. “Nope” he said adamantly. I clarified by saying I wasn’t just talking about the singing and dancing, but the whole shabang. “Never” was all he said. This may have been perhaps the most bitter sweet moment of the trip for me.
You see, at Beth Tfiloh, it can be pretty easy to take the community that we have for granted. Even compared to other American-Jewish communities, Beth Tfiloh has something really special: A school and synagogue community that inspires togetherness and meaning to the connections we make both in and out of school. The notion of a community like this in Budapest is merely hypothetical, if not unfathomable. While the Jewish population of Budapest may be 13th largest in the world, the community itself is still in shambles. With an entire generation of people who inherited the anxiety and PTSD of the Holocaust from their parents, all of whom were survivors, the thought of rebuilding a community that inspires Judaism seems dangerous. Therefore, this innate sense of community that has been hardwired into me since kindergarten, was completely absent. The reality hit me like a brick: This was the first time that these kids have ever had any form of Jewish community or togetherness in their lives.
But they loved it so much. They wanted to be together and present in the moment. The singing and dancing resumes and Daniel returns to the moshpit. I am still catching my breath from the last one. In the few moments that I was simply observing the bonding occurring before my eyes, I saw how happy every Hungarian teen was to be here. This was the moment I knew we succeeded. We instilled a newfound sense of Jewish pride in our Hungarian friends. You could see it in their eyes every time we got up to dance: They knew that a little piece of who they are, as a person and as a Jew, has been found.
