By Sam Weiner
It was 11:30 on the night of my birthday and all I felt was exhausted. After going to classes at Hebrew University for the morning, we spent a solid three hours driving up to Tzfat, stopping only for dinner at a delicious humus place off the highway, and then immediately ran over to Rav Noah’s house to continue working on making our Tefillin for another couple hours. While the day had been very fun and eventful, I was only really thinking about getting some shut-eye. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do so quite yet because we had a late night private concert from the two-person band, “Simply Tzfat.” We were seated around our performers in a couple rows in the dining room of the Noah’s home. The band itself consisted of one Hasidic man on guitar and another on violin, I really had no idea what to expect for our first night in Tzfat and whether I would get anything out of it. Yet once they started playing I knew that this would be a night that I wouldn’t forget.
The band opened up by playing some familiar nigunim that many of us typically sing during Kabbalat Shabbat services. They were clearly very talented from a musical perspective but what I really admired was their vibrant energy they had in their performance. Their joy in playing was palpable and also contagious as many of us began to either sing along or even play along with the band with some tambourines and other small drums handed out to us during the concert. The songs they played seemed to flow seamlessly into one another, only interrupted by some story-telling from the band or applause from the audience.
After a particularly impressive violin solo from the band, we couldn’t sit in our seats any longer. The girls ran to a different room while the boys stayed and we both simultaneously began singing and dancing in circles. Suddenly, I was caught off-guard when people lifted me up in a chair bar mitzvah style. It was incredible how I began the night ready to go to bed but now I felt like I could continue to sing and dance all through the night. Simply Tzfat served as a catalyst to not only bring our group closer together but also to get us anticipating Shabbat happening the following night. The concert as served as a primer to think about as Jews what types of rituals we engage in within our communities and how they compare to ones in other places. Nonetheless, this night was an expected joy for many of us and served as an excellent introduction to simple yet vibrant city of Tzfat.
