To Life

Smile for a New Year's Eve

So how do we try to ring in a new year with a smile?

We recently wrote about the importance of health and how we tend to wish each other good health this time of year.

Well… this naturally led to thoughts of clinking champagne glasses and accompanying toasts, fixtures of New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Many toasts consist of some form of a powerful sentiment - our hopes for a good life, of health and happiness. These are not the yearnings of any one culture or tradition. They are expressed around the globe because they speak to the most basic desires we have for ourselves and those we hold dear.

One well-known expression for just such thoughts comes from Hebrew - L'chaim! It literally translates as “to life,” but it is a deceptively simple phrase that implies so much more. L’chaim was famously made into a hit Broadway song in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The scene is around a wedding, one of the more hopeful and life-affirming of our human traditions.

As our thought process followed this trail, we remembered a particularly inspired performance of the song. It comes courtesy of the phenomenally talented Lin-Manuel Miranda on the occasion of his own wedding back in 2010. Manuel was already a rising musical star but hadn’t hit the stratosphere of fame that would come years later with his musical Hamilton. For this lover of musical theater, there seemed to be no better song to sing to his bride Vanessa than one inspired by a culture and a time far different from his own. Such is the universality of hope, and music. The joy on the faces of everyone involved is impossible to contain.

We hope this “wedding song” helps you ring in the New Year with a smile. See you all in 2022.

L’chaim! Here’s to a healthy and happy New Year!