Subtle Feelings – Yale Daily

jesse flores

As the former president of not one but two sideshow clubs, I am known on this campus for taking my entertainment very seriously. But in an age where algorithms take advantage of minute-long videos, the word “entertainment” sounds like an insult. Entertainment, consuming it leads to a sugar crash – entertainment, a distraction from real life or at least the life of the mind.

However, let’s not go back to the “simple times” of the Threepenny Operas, with their overly strained moral maxims. Even if you floss with an ice pick like a dentist, these can make your teeth rot.

In a world where color and light are always there try to catch us, our last measure of control is regulating what sounds enter our ears or what rhythms move our bodies. These more subtle sensations, measured in neat logarithms, require our attention the same way whispers drown out screams.

But, given that you’ve known me for three paragraphs, you should be able to guess that those sounds alone don’t earn my full approval.

look i love yodeling bluegrass professor When I walk down Prospect Street and bump unorthodox In the shower – dare I say I like it better than the others. I’m okay with the AirPod-wearing Yalies, they’re too inattentive of their surroundings to see my bike approaching their khaki-clad shins. Well, I think I have a problem with them.

After a while, though, this digital sound entertainment also turns into an intellectual regression, more due to habit than pleasure. I often find myself singing on the way back from theater rehearsals simply because I have nothing else in the attic.

But every week at Yale, the entertainment goes back hundreds of years. Almost every Friday night, something magical happens. You should trust my magic, because I’m a juggler.

It happened at the Jewish Life Center in Slifka after the overstimulation of the Shabbat dinner, when everything quieted down a bit and people had gone off to pursue the commandment of sleep.

Among the ruins, nearly empty of wine bottles, is a table that is a “bench” table, usually presented as a stack of slim, beautiful blue paperbacks called a “bench”. Prostration—literally, blessing—is saying grace after a meal. After a near-silent speed read, the song—called Zemirot—begins.

Someone suggests a song title, usually in Hebrew or Aramaic. Everyone flipped the stools frantically until someone found and called out the correct page number. People turn pages, turn pages to each other, and share advice in solidarity, inclusion, and community.

Almost before everyone gets their bearings, a voice and a note emerge, perhaps the beginning of a fast and quiet melody. Those around will nod if the note is right — and offer instructive slides if the note is too low or too high.

Finally, the summoners started. In the absence of a conductor, those familiar with the melody pour out their voices. The song fills and swells for several verses until everyone gets it and joins in, with or without words.

At some point, some chorus, magic happens. Everyone finds their place, volume and melody. Then, the coordinator enters. The theme has changed. Some belts, live out their moments like rock stars, as others collectively unwind and let them shine. Some experimented with harmonies, getting stranger and jazzier until the laughter kept coming back to the melody. Some, like me, insist on small embellishments here and there, mustering the courage to end one phrase rising while the rest descend.

Even if you can’t hear it, you can feel it. Hands slammed on the table, chest trembled, throat tensed to reach out to crawl, to join the union.

The energy is unmatched. The act of singing, the act of exhaling, fills the chest cavity as the lungs empty. Everyone is connected to everyone, and their voices run through the warp of the text. As Leyvik Halpern writes in his Yiddish poem “Subway Dawn,”

Me – and neighbors.

I – at the neighbor’s house.

I – I am a neighbor.

I first experienced this phenomenon as a sophomore under the large Sabbath tent on Lot 38. In the vast, empty night, our voices drifted skyward from the sloping vinyl, glowing in the star-studded darkness framed by Murray’s towers and Hillhouse Avenue.

As a way to pass the time, it is transcendent. A few days ago, it dawned on me that I was in front of a group of people who loved life. This can be seen in the fact that “progress” is forbidden on the Sabbath – no electronics, no writing, no jobs. Moments down the melody – because music can only be understood through the movement of time – creates a cavity throughout the week in which to slow down and form complex and beautiful eddies. Singers and listeners make music for its own sake, for the love and pain of time.

By 2023, we’ll be able to cue virtually any band in the world from our phones. But Shabbat takes us back to a time when we could only hear music like this if we had a group of people get together to sing to us or learn an entire orchestral arrangement. The fleeting few minutes of Friday night allowed us to be more creative, to feel the tension in the bonds of the human family.

So I invite you to add your voice to the sea of ​​songs this Friday night – and, as a bonus, Saturday afternoon. Turn away from “entertainment” as a distraction in life and devote yourself to enjoying life. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or not, if you think you’re good at singing, or if you’ve sung a hundred times or zero. Listen – feel! – what your siblings have to offer as we float through time together.