JustASC

A friend turned to me last night and joked, “I guess we can stop worrying about Jewish continuity for five minutes.”

We were in the audience at Cong. Rodeph Sholom in NYC for the 17th Annual Gala for HaZamir, the international Jewish high school choir. 200 kids from 17 HaZamir chapters in North America and Israel performed a diverse Hebrew repertoire, from Renaissance composer Solomono Rossi to Leonard Bernstein. It was a good, old-fashioned, non-ideological, multi-denominational, Zionist pep rally, and the weekend of rehearsals that preceded it (if my daughter is a reliable witness) were in the time-honored tradition of all Jewish youth group get-aways  — that is, lots of eating, hugging, and flirting (and don’t worry, moms and dads, praying and learning).

I’m a sucker for choral music and uncomplicated Jewish enthusiasm (as supposed to the complicated variety I write about week in and week out), so I ate this up. A warm, glowing end to a weekend that was in turns scary, unsettling, and, in my neighborhood, tragic.