Shuckling on the Dancefloor
There is this story my friend told me at a festival that I just can’t get out of my head. His knees were bouncing to the beat as he did, and I was feeling about as good as I can ever remember feeling as he spoke.
He spoke of a friend of his, also a traumatized ex- yeshiva bochur (rabbinical student) tripping on the dance floor of a festival much like the one we were at. Tears streamed from his eyes, but they were tears of joy- you could tell from the smile on his face. He was shuckling (swaying) fervently, back and forth, tripping major holy balls. My own ducts emptied just thinking about it- broken Yeshivah Bochurim, finding their bliss in nature, losing themselves to syncopated beats, loaded out of their minds, just shuckling it out.
They beat us, they told us holiness and pleasure were something to be earned, not a birthright, a salary, for a job we couldn’t quit on pain of eternal suffering. So we gave them the finger and went into the desert. We set up our own Holy Ark- one hundred speakers tall, stacked one atop the other, a tower of Babel pointed at ourselves. And we blast this music, simultaneously both newer and more ancient than the songs we were raised with. We take the drugs they told us would fry our brains and we let the music massage the knots out of our psyches. We dance and we show our bodies and shit in the woods like humans have been doing for millennia before they decided there was a proper way of doing things.
In the rhythmic motions and beats, we find a bliss Yahweh never made us feel. We dance, really dance, in a way that comes naturally to us- instead of holding hands and walking in sweaty circles, I can’t believe we let them get away with calling that shit dancing. No, we dance- we spasm and shake and jump and swing our arms and the music fills us with movement like those fuckin’ wacky inflatable arm guys at car dealerships- no will, just the movement for the sake of movement.
Instead of dancing like our fathers, getting drunk and walking in circles, we look to our ancestors for party advice- not our recent ones, but our real ancestors- everyone’s ancestors, hunter-gatherers who have been tripping and listening to syncopated beats for as long as humans were humans, and likely even before that. So we trip and we dance for hours and days longer than we did when it was the pious thing to do. We strip away not just our clothes but our life stories, our egos, our minds, and we dance, and we shuckle, and we cry. Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh (holy, holy, holy).