Reb Yonason Schwartz has been calling up mechutanim for the mitzvah tantz for the last twenty-three years, but he says that the minute it becomes routine, he’ll bow out of the business. “I get emotional at every single wedding. Each one is an entire universe,” says the world-class badchan with the silky voice whose popular CDs have become staple listening in Jewish homes.
Loosely translated as a “jester” a chassid knows that it’s anything but. At a chassidic wedding the badchan is the link between heaven and earth weaving his lyrical verse as he summons the honored relatives to the mitzvah tantz — a dance that according to tradition joins the souls of the generations together.
“A good badchan is really a family therapist” Reb Yonason says. “He has to be highly intuitive and chap the nuances of the family dynamics. He has the capacity to make shalom between relatives or fan the flames of controversy. I don’t even know most of the families I do weddings for but after doing this for more than two decades an hour of getting family details is enough for me to know what to say and what not to say.
“Sometimes one word can destroy a family” he continues. “Let’s say there are several brothers; one is a rosh yeshivah one is a rav one is a mesivta rebbi and one is a plumber. So if I call them up as the dayan the rosh yeshivah and the baal chesed I’ve slaughtered him. You have to be so careful not to trample people’s kavod.”
Also an Orphan
Reb Yonason Schwartz’s unusual gift of lyric (“the rhymes just come spontaneously when I hold the microphone”) together with his silky penetrating voice puts him in a class by himself. His popular series of recordings most of which are in Yiddish and whose titles begin with “A Gutte” (e.g. A Gutten Shabbos A Gutte Voch A Gutter Yid A Gutte Niggun A Gutte Neshamah A Gutte Besureh) contain chilling songs that can bring a person to tears and intense feelings of spiritual longing and others that extract a giggle at some of the foibles of modern society.
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