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March 9, 2012

Kindness is contagious

Students accomplish a lot during RAC week.
MICHELLE DODEK

King David High School (KDHS) finished the second annual Random Acts of Chesed (RAC) week with the first showing of the school’s lip dub to a crowd of students, alumni, staff and parents in the school’s auditorium on Feb. 24.

After a weeklong, multiple- school campaign to raise awareness about the contagious nature of kindness, those in attendance at the final assembly seemed excited to see how their activities would be summed up in video format. Although students at KDHS, Vancouver Talmud Torah (VTT) and Vancouver Hebrew Academy (VHA) had spent the week doing things like baking cookies for staff at B.C. Children’s Hospital and collecting food for the foodbank, the lip dub they had filmed almost two weeks earlier was the embodiment of their ideas of spreading chesed.

For a lip dub, an individual or a group of people are filmed lip-synching and otherwise performing (singing, acting, dancing, etc.) while listening to a song or other audio recording, with the camera traveling through the crowd, a landscape, building or other space. With the original audio of the song as the soundtrack, all of the elements are combined, sometimes with computerized graphics or other aspects added/deleted in the editing process. The video is intended to “go viral,” i.e. gain many viewers over the Internet.

A group of Grade 12 students at KDHS was inspired by the success of last year’s University of British Columbia lip dub, which has had more than 1.5 million views since it was posted on YouTube. One of the main players in making that UBC video, Michael Gunion, volunteered to lend his time and expertise to the students of KDHS so that they could produce a lip dub themselves. Students Sol Zetler, Maya Rosenkrantz and David Rosengarten worked with Gunion.

“It was a lot of prep but Michael helped make our ideas a reality,” said Rosenkrantz. “We did it to promote RAC week, to expand the ideas of chesed out of the school.”

Zetler added, “We needed to make it as good as we could make it. We know that it can be reused and shown for at least a few years.”

The content of the six-minute-and-33-second movie is not only intended to illustrate the acts of chesed that students performed during RAC week, but also to convey an anti-bullying message. Feb. 29 was Pink T-shirt day in British Columbia, part of a national initiative to raise awareness about bullying in schools and workplaces, and Zetler and Rosenkrantz are hoping that KDHS’s lip dub will contribute to this initiative by garnering the attention of the media and thereby a broader audience. Their objective is to spread the message of how students can make a difference in the world by caring more for one another, as well as the community and world around them.

RAC was inspired last year by the brief but exceptional life of Gabby Isserow, an alumna of both VTT and KDHS. The idea behind a week focused on performing acts of chesed was to reflect Isserow’s ability to spread kindness to those around her.

KDHS students built on last year’s effort and, in collaboration with VTT and VHA, planned a week that involved a different area of chesed each day. The first day was about taking care of one’s self, the second was about caring for friends and family and the third looked outward to the community at large. The last theme day was broader in scope, advocating environmental stewardship.

Shoshana Burton, a Judaics teacher at KDHS, spearheaded RAC week and the idea of collaborating with other schools. “It’s such a beautiful thing to have the students working together and feel like they are a part of something even bigger than their own school,” she said, adding that she hopes RJDS will also participate next year.

A large banner at KDHS during RAC week read, “Kindness is contagious.” In keeping with the metaphor, KDHS students are hoping that their new lip dub will go viral, infecting the minds of students Internet-wide with ways to make the world a better place.

To view the KDHS lip dub, visit vimeo.com/37616108.

Michelle Dodek is a freelance writer who likes to do random acts of chesed too.

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