Parashat Yitro: RIP Carol Channing

    Shabbat Shalom. Last week, Broadway icon Carol Channing died. My first Broadway show was Hello, Dolly! when I was about 7 years old. Channing already seemed ancient to me then, but she went on to play Dolly Levi for several more years. I remember how the red upholstery in the theatre matched that of the Harmonia Gardens scene and how elegant everything felt. I remember Channing stuffing dinner rolls in her face at impressive speeds at the end of the Harmonia Gardens scene when everyone has discovered each other and her plottings. I guess mostly I just remember the Harmonia Gardens scene. My memories of the rest of the show are obscured by time and many, many viewings of the Barbra Streisand movie version.

    If you don’t know the show, Hello, Dolly! is based on a Thornton Wilder play called The Matchmaker, which itself was based on other plays with similar themes, including an earlier and shorter version also by Wilder called The Merchant of Yonkers. Dolly Levi, widow of Ephraim Levi, works as a matchmaker, though it is a bit unclear if she was doing that while Ephraim was alive. She is about middle-age, an age which is a bit of a moving target for a story that is nearing 200 years old. I assume what was considered “middle age” when the original one-act farce was written in 1835 is a different age than now, and at each iteration of the story since then the authors and casting directors probably had a different age or look in mind for the part of Dolly. But whatever the number, she is at a point in her life where she feels it is time to remarry. She is a fiercely independent woman, but even the updated versions of Hello, Dolly! seem to take place in Wilder’s era of the early 20th century. The movie, made in the mid-1960’s, depicts horse and buggies and only a few early Ford vehicles on the road. So, independent soul though she is, she is still living in an era where some dependence on men was necessary for women to move safely through the world. I’m sure Tzipporah can relate, in this week’s Torah portion, as her father and husband discuss the fate of hundreds of thousands of people without her input, including such details as where she resides during the tumultuous transition out of Egypt.

    Anyway, Dolly is hired to find a wife for wealthy widower Horace Vandergelder, and she decides he should marry her. But she can’t come right out and say that, because she’s been hired to find him someone else, and also she doesn’t quite fit his absurd list of requirements. Today’s Millionaire Matchmaker, Patty Stanger, would tell him to stop being a Man-Baby and shift his expectations, but Dolly knows she has to be softer in her approach, and let him come to his own realization about his hopes for the ideal woman. So she sets up a series of events, which of course unfold in musical hilarity, to set herself up with Horace, ensure Horace’s niece gets to marry her love whom Horace disapproves of, and set up Horace’s two employees to also find love and a fun night out in an era before labor laws.

    None of the versions of the story, to my knowledge, explicitly name Dolly as a Jewish woman. My sibling and I once argued about this, and whether I just think of her as Jewish because Babs played her in the movie. But, let’s look at the evidence. Her last name is Levi. Her husband’s name was Ephraim, one of the tribes of Israel. She is a matchmaker, a yente. She is a strong woman who knows how to play nice alongside patriarchy and still get her way in the end. If that doesn’t describe half the women in the Talmud, I don’t know what does! Granted, there aren’t many women in the Talmud. The show is mostly a silly story of mishaps and coincidences leading to perfect love-matches, without a lot of deeper substance or commentary on morality. But I do see Dolly as a character that can be a role model. She’s so easy-going yet assertive. Clever, but knows when to hold back her thoughts. Intensely loving even after loss, and looking to share love and wealth. Knows the importance of Tzedakah and equality (“Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow.”). She could teach all of us a thing or two about embodying the values of our Torah and tradition.

Perhaps talking about Broadway musicals would have been more appropriate last week, in the immediate aftermath of her death and in conjunction with Shabbat Shira, when our Torah and Haftarah portions are almost entirely about specified songs. But sometimes ideas need time to simmer. And, as I’ve said before in various contexts, there is much more music to be gleaned from our sacred texts than just where we are told something is explicitly a song. This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Yitro, tells us that as the Israelites prepared to accept the Ten Commandments, there was a loud blast of a horn and “All the people saw the voices” (20:15). Rashi explains further, “They saw what is ordinarily heard, and they heard what is ordinarily seen.” That sounds to me like the kind of deeply spiritual experience caused by moving music, like an empowering musical. I thought of this line in the parasha when I saw this picture with the caption "When it’s cold you can see the song":

shared on Facebook this week. If your heart is open, you can see the song. When the music moves you, when you are experiencing some kind of Divine revelation, you can see the song. When Dolly Levi sings “Before the Parade Passes By” and lets the audience in on her inner thoughts behind all her clever manipulations, and your heart swells with empathy, and you think to yourself, YES, I have a goal and a drive and can feel my heart coming alive, you can see the song. Or at least, I can. I hope you at least have a comparable analogy for what makes your heart swell and give you synesthetic joy and connection to the Divine if musical theater and imagining the revelation of the 10 Commandments as the climax song in a play isn’t quite your thing.

May the memory of Carol Channing be for a blessing. May her own playful spirit remain with us on Earth. May we find the music the moves our soul, that motivates us to commit our lives to something bigger than ourselves. May we do and hear all that we are commanded to, and bring about a better world in song. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.