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!
Such a beautiful rendition of “To Life”; My husband and I I have tears in our eyes; we celebrate our 57th wedding anniversary tomorrow! You uplift my heart each week with your posts, Dan. A happy and healthy New Year to you and yours.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this joyous video. In the context of the play and movie, this song reflected the power of hope, tenacity and not surrendering to fear when everything in their world was so frightening. Let us move into the new year refusing to surrendrr to the fear we're being bombarded with and instead do the work we need to do to save our Democracy from a place of strength, determination and fearlessness. L'Chaim!