By Jazzie Morgan
“There is nothing funny about the Holocaust, there is everything funny in surviving it.”
This quote easily embodies everything that Molly Livingstone hopes to teach people through her work. Coming to Israel, Molly never expected to be surrounded by light hearted and happy Israelis making jokes about terror attacks that had happened just days before. To her, that was crazy, the civil war had happened hundreds of years ago and yet it was still too soon to make joke about it. But in Israel, when a war is going on, they’re already joking about it two minutes after it starts. And that is just Israel.
We can all learn a little from this mentality. If we spend our lives resenting the bad things that have happened to us, we will never be able to find the joy in our days. If we take everything bad that happens with a grain of salt and figure out what is funny about it, then we will all be much happier. Wherever we are in life, whether it is camp, school, or our home we use humor as a way to cope. This relates very well to the life Nachshon members know all too well, those moments at camp where you just want to scream. We all get overwhelmed and annoyed, but if we find the humor is those little things that our campers do everyday and even in how bad the meal might be, we will find ourselves much less stressed and much more at ease.
Beyond just our daily mood, we also bring a sense of humor back to camp in how we lead programs. When it comes to engaging hundreds of young kids on matters that may not be all that funny, it is vitally important that we can find moments to lighten the mood. The ultimate sign of a great leader in camp and even outside of camp is the ability to make light of any situation and never let it turn too dark. In camp we learn that there is a lot of power to the ability to create laughter in a group.
They say laughter is the best medicine, and Molly Livingstone proves it. Through her multiple social media platforms and shows, she teaches us to learn to laugh at life and ourselves.This trait of finding humor is something we should all take with us wherever we go because it allows us to never take life too seriously and truly appreciate what we have rather than get bogged down by the negatives in our worlds.
