How to Build a Tribe in Ninety Minutes

A few months ago I stood in a Kansas City ballroom and sang a Pat Benatar song in three-part harmony with two friends and several hundred strangers. Honestly, I don’t think I’d even heard the song before. Now it fills me with joy.

Weeks, perhaps months, later I am sitting on a Tube in central London with the pressing urge to write about it. To finish this draft and tell you how, and why, we belong.

Because what happened in that ballroom was the thing our tradition has spent thousands of years trying to do, and a former music teacher from Brisbane pulled it off in ninety minutes with a quirky PowerPoint.

The concept is Pub Choir. Astrid Jorgensen started it in 2017 in a Brisbane pub, and I had encountered it exactly once, in the clip of her crowd singing Toto’s Africa. This rendition turned her and her hundreds of thousands of internet choristers into a phenomenon. Her show is a content creator’s dream, when you think about it: every show manufactures its own viral clip, hundreds of amateurs producing one broadcast-quality performance a night, city after city. I watched the Africa clip, liked it, followed the Instagram, signed up for the mailing list.

I have a pretty good command of the internet, and a horrific doom-scrolling habit, and yet I had still only ever seen the one clip. Yet, when the US tour email landed and Kansas City was on it, I bought a ticket within three minutes of the pre-sale going live, and then waited four months.

The format is simple enough that describing it makes it sound like nothing. Astrid teaches the room a popular song in three vocal parts over ninety minutes. There is music, a PowerPoint (or ‘deck’ for the young people), no rehearsal, no audition, and no requirement that you can sing, only that you are willing to. At the end, the room performs the song once, all the way through, it is filmed, the video goes online, and the next night she does it again in another city with another song and another room of strangers.

The audience, she likes to say, is the main character. Nobody comes to watch Pub Choir. There is nothing to watch. You are the show, or there is no show.

I have watched that clip more times than I will admit. We sounded good. Not good for amateurs. Good. I am still working out how that happened.

Part of it is Astrid, who is the kind of teacher you remember from the year you stopped hating school, with the stage presence of a touring comedian and a gift for holding a room without raising her voice. She is funny in a way that does not feel like a bit. She taught us that everyone can sing. Not everyone can sing well, but everyone can sing, and she says it like the most obvious fact in the world, and the relief that moves through the room when she does is its own kind of music. Perhaps that is what the song was about all along.

We all belong in that room.

Somewhere in the second chorus I caught myself wondering if this is what Miriam was like at the sea, timbrel in hand, pulling a nation of freed slaves into its first song, before anyone had taught them how.

The trick is not just Astrid, even though her charisma does a great deal of the hard work. The trick is that everyone in that room had decided, before they arrived, to do whatever she said. They had paid for the privilege of being told what to do. They had agreed in advance to the deal. Once a room agrees in advance to the deal, anything is possible. Community is not a feeling. Community is an agreement.

Jews have been running this experiment for thousands of years.

That night in Kansas City happened days before Shavuot, the festival marking the morning a generation of newly freed slaves stood at Sinai and accepted the Ten Commandments with two words: na’aseh v’nishma. We will do, and we will listen. In that order. Some commentators call it the great Jewish leap of faith, commitment before comprehension. I read it slightly differently.

I think na’aseh v’nishma describes the mechanics of every community that has ever worked. You agree to the practice before you fully understand it. You sing the part you have been handed before you know how it fits with the other two. Nobody in that ballroom understood how three parts would fit together. We sang the line we were given, and the understanding arrived mid-chorus.

Trust is what closes the gap.

I know I am probably finding Judaism where it was not meant to be but when several hundred strangers hit the chorus and the harmony locked in, I was a teenager again at a Shabbaton, and I was in a Jerusalem apartment on every Friday night, and I was every age at which a room of people ever sung with gusto that awoke the soul.

The institutions that used to hand people a tribe have been quietly struggling for a while: fewer synagogues, fewer churches, fewer unions, fewer clubs, fewer places where you show up on a Tuesday because you always show up on a Tuesday and the people there are your people whether you like them or not.

What replaced them is a feed. The feed is very good at telling you what you already believe, and completely incapable of putting you in a room. The thing the algorithm cannot give you, no matter how well it learns you, is a room.

Astrid gives people a room.

Priya Parker, whose book The Art of Gathering became required reading for anyone I employ or volunteer alongside, argues that gatherings transform when they have a clear purpose and a host unafraid to lead (her actual term is “generous authority,” but that’s another essay for another time).

Astrid runs the proof. A stated purpose. A benevolent dictator with a microphone. A room that consents to be led. Pub Choir is the art of gathering set to music, and people with no congregation, no clergy, and no club buy a ticket, stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sing, and leave slightly embarrassed about how much they cried.

The week after Shavuot, a week after our “we will do, and we will listen” moment, Jews read Parshat Naso, the weekly Torah portion, home of Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing. On holidays, a few people stand at the front of the room, raise their hands, and chant fifteen words in a melody older than any pub. The room receives it together. For the length of the chant, the room is one thing. Blessed.

Astrid does not need to have heard of Birkat Kohanim. She rebuilt what it does from scratch. For ninety minutes that night, I watched a woman with a microphone do what every clergyperson, camp director, and youth leader I have ever known is, in some sense, trying to do. Connect. That is all. Several hundred of us in Kansas City, stadiums of thousands elsewhere, same result. The size of the room is not the variable. The agreement is.

I did not go to that ballroom looking for meaning. I went because I spend too much time on YouTube and a clip made me feel something. We spend a lot of energy looking for meaning in the places meaning is supposed to live, and we are frequently disappointed. We conclude that meaning is getting harder to find, that social media is bad, that the future is bleak.

And then a song, that has been around as long as I have, came to me for the first time, and a room full of strangers taught it to me in an evening. Now I understand it is not a love song at all. It is an instruction.

We belong. Not you, not me. We.