“I’mma take off my shirt!”

“Great!”

“My pants, too!”

“No, leave those on…”

It’s 6:40 a.m. and we’re rocking out to Fatboy Slim circa 1998. Our two-year-old is running in circles in his pajamas (now sans-shirt) shouting “funk soul, bruva!” and our 11-year-old is groggily rubbing his eyes trying to make sense of the scene in the living room. The baby, who’s been up for two hours now, is flapping her arms like she’s going to fly away.

This is what we have become.

For Hanukkah 2025, my husband, face split in a grin, gave us a family gift.

“It’s super fun!” he said. “It’ll break the tension!” he said.

“It” is a giant yellow button emblazoned with the words “THIRTY SECOND DANCE PARTY,” and “the tension” is the clipped exhaustion that is the natural consequence of having three children.

I admit that I was not enthused. The 30-Second Dance Parties appear on lists titled “10 Ways to Become a Fun Mom,” along with themed movie nights and breakfast scavenger hunts. The 30-Second Dance Party renders images of a trim mother with fabulous hair singing into a wooden spoon while making fresh tomato sauce. Her children drop their pencils mid-math-problem to do the Macarena. 30-Second Dance Parties seem too perfect and Instagrammable. I also think that if you need a dance party to “break the tension,” then nobody is in the mood for a dance party.

How. Wrong. I. Was.

The first thing you need to know is that the Macarena is not on the playlist. When someone hits the big yellow button, it dispatches a German-accented voice that sounds almost world-weary announcing — you guessed it — “THIRTY SECOND DANCE PARTY.” That’s when the club beats start.

You immediately feel there should be a strobe light and adults wearing shirts made of mesh and pants made of leather. Instead, you’re in your kitchen with a half-dressed toddler, a gurgling baby and a tween side-stepping his chores.

The second thing you need to know is that 30 seconds is way longer than you think. It’s too long to laugh it off, hoping the music ends before you’re done laughing. Really, there’s nothing for it… but to dance.

There are only two rules. First: pants stay on. Second: everyone dances. No exceptions to either rule are permitted. I am a convert. There is no faster way to turn a house around than to have a ridiculous, all-out, 30-second dance party.

It’s not hard to see how we went from hitting a button to hitting play on the mixes that bring my husband and I right back to college house parties and the gritty Lawrence, Kansas, clubs of yore. That’s how it is that our toddler now requests, as stated above, “funk soul, bruva.”

To dance at a wedding is easy. People are happy, the lights are low and everyone has a little liquid courage to hand. Like Miriam on the shores of the sea, we dance to cut loose from the bonds that held us, to proclaim our joy and gratitude, and because our bodies won’t let us do anything else.

It’s a very different thing to dance when you feel heavy, when the weight of the world – from geopolitics right down to the daily commute – seems an endless and thankless struggle. Dancing is not so easy when it feels like the world has actually and literally lost its mind. Maybe no one is sleeping well, work is piling up and you can’t remember the last time you had a chance just to work out. Dancing is a whole lot harder then. And probably a whole lot more important.

It was Rebbe Nachman who said that it is through dancing and clapping that harsh judgements are sweetened. That which seems impossible to bear can be made light through movement. Move the body and the mind and soul will follow.

A 30-Second Dance Party breaks tension, just like my husband promised. To raise the spirits and charge the soul, we keep the party going.

“Right about now… funk soul, bruva. Check it out now…”

We just keep dancing until the chemicals in our body and the joy in our souls can’t be contained, and everything — from geopolitics down to the daily commute — seems sweet.