Home Faith Get Up and Dance!

Get Up and Dance!

by Yehudis Golshevsky
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Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught…
Get into the habit of dancing. It will displace depression and dispel hardship.
(The Empty Chair, p. 104*)

What does this mean to me?
Everybody knows that dancing is good for you: it’s exercise, it puts you in a good mood, it gets you to sweat (for the wellness people, expelling toxins is a big deal), and you don’t even have to join a gym to do it.
You don’t need a partner, you don’t even need music. You just need to get up and dance.

Rebbe Nachman spoke a great deal about dancing (and even about the sweating, but that’s for another day), but the point that he emphasized the most was that dancing “sweetens judgments.” When we feel constrained and when we’re suffering, the deeper works say that we are living under dinim, or heavenly judgments. Dancing is a way that we come out of ourselves, so it “displaces depression,” and in the state of joy and reduced self-focus, we will find that it “dispels hardship”—because it helps to lighten the judgments upon us.

A prayer:
Dear G-d,
if only my heart would be
straight with You all the time,
I would be filled with joy.
And that joy would spread all the way
down to my feet,
and uplift them in dance.
Please, never let my feet falter,
release them from their heavy bonds,
and give me the strength
to dance, dance, dance..

(Likutei Tefillot I:10)

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Dear friends at Breslov,

We all know that HaShem is our physician and that the Torah is a perfect way of healing, if it is His will. I can only recommend the study of “Anatomy of the Soul” published by Breslov Research Institute. I sponsored a reprint in memory of my grandparents…because they always lived according to the pathway laid out in this book… Please study the “Anatomy of the Soul” and live up to it. It will be a great blessing given by Rebbe Nachman himself.
YW

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