In the last couple of years, folk music has enjoyed a massive boom in American culture. This uptick in popularity was not lost on the Heschel student body. Artists like the Lumineers and Noah Kahan have taken the school by storm.
Junior Hannah Wurzburger listens to The Lumineers religiously. “They really just make my day,” she said. “I don’t know where I’d be without them.”
Junior Hannah Goldman’s (near-)daily social media updates of Noah Kahan quotes are testament enough to her complete infatuation with the man.
Although both artists are loved by the Heschel community, some of their lyrics pose directly contradictory views to one another. In his song “Growing Sideways,” Noah Kahan claims that “It’s better to die numb than feel it all.” Alternatively, Lumineers lead singer Wesley Schultz asserts that “It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all” in “Stubborn Love.” So who’s right?
Last week, I approached dozens of Heschel students across all four grades with the question: “Is it better to die numb, or feel pain?” Regardless of their familiarity with either artist, 100% of people surveyed gave the same response: Every single student believed that it was better to live with pain than to die numb.
This mentality is indicative of what it means to be a Heschel student, and a follower of Rabbi Heschel himself. When life gets tough, we should strive to persevere, or even to thrive. In his book “Who is Man?” Rabbi Heschel describes a situation where a person is trapped in a pit of snakes. Instead of moping and giving up, or even fighting the snakes directly, Heschel claims that the best thing for the person to do is to seek to find a way out of the pit. And that is exactly what Heschel students do. Even when our Schoology pages feel more like a Sisyphean rock with a constant stream of formidable tests, essays, and daily homeworks, we still take extra time to connect with our community through activities like student government and school athletics, or even just chatting with friends at a lunch table. The way Heschel students are able to persevere through their stress-ridden lives and still help our community thrive is a testament to how special a place our school truly is.
