My dream started to become a reality several years after my marriage, when I opened the Shoshi Broide Dance School. Our first location was in Har Nof, whose large Anglo population welcomed the classical ballet classes we offered. Later, we opened branches in Ramat Eshkol, Ramat Beit Shemesh, and Rehavia. As we expanded, we began offering dance classes for every age and every level, from the little kid who wanted to jump around and have a good time to the teenager who dreamed of becoming a real ballerina.

For some of my students, dance was a spiritual lifesaver. Girls who struggled academically or didn’t fit the Bais Yaakov mold found their place in my school, and many grateful parents told me that dance had saved their at-risk daughters. I wasn’t aiming to provide a therapeutic environment, though. I just wanted girls to dance.

One year, I had an eight-year-old student who was unusually talented. “Why don’t you put her into a high-level dance program?” I suggested to her mother.

In response, the mother withdrew her daughter from dance altogether.

“This isn’t what I have in mind for her,” she said sharply.

I thought she was hopelessly narrow-minded.

In every branch of art and music, once a school reaches a certain level of professionalism, it can’t expand further without outside funding, since the cost of serious training and performances far exceeds what can be collected in tuitions or even ticket fees from events. With all the branches of my dance school flourishing, I dreamed of staging not only a year-end performance for mothers and grandmothers, but also regular performances around the country by both my students and staff. For that, however, I needed money.

When I applied for government funding ten years ago for my dance school, I met with significant skepticism, as no chareidi institute had ever received government funding for dance. To qualify for funding, I had to add classes for gifted students and audition all applicants at the beginning of the year so that I could separate the born dancers from the kids with two left feet. I also had to provide better training for my staff, so I brought in nonreligious teachers in the morning to upgrade my teachers’ skills. I was happy to meet these requirements, since it meant taking my school up to the next level not only financially, but professionally as well.

It was deeply gratifying for me to watch my dance classes evolve from a fun after-school activity to a place where frum girls could develop themselves into serious dancers. My pride and joy was the school’s advanced students who spent 10 to12 hours a week on training and rehearsals and starred in performances all over the country. We weren’t just a school — we were a dance company.

For a true dancer, there’s no such thing as “good enough.” Your inner slave-driver is always urging you to lift your leg higher, to twirl en pointe longer, to extend your arms farther. I received government funding for five years, during which my school kept expanding and becoming more professional. Some of my students went on to teach their own dance classes in other neighborhoods, which gave me tremendous nachas.

Yet I still dreamed of making my school bigger and better.

Busy as I was with my school, I still had more time for my family than most working mothers I knew. I was home to get my kids out in the morning, I was available to pick up the little ones from gan in the afternoon, and I was there to greet the older ones when they returned from school. I also had time to bake cookies with the kids, take them to the park, and read them bedtime stories. On the outside, I was a normal kollel wife, a regular mother. Yet no matter what else I was doing, my mind and heart were always dancing. Dance was my life source, the wellspring that invigorated every other aspect of my life. I thought I had perfected the juggling act.

And then, four years ago, something unexpected happened: Another dance school opened in a chareidi neighborhood in Yerushalayim, offering a schedule similar to mine and targeting the same Bais Yaakov population. The big difference was that this school employed nonreligious teachers and accepted all kinds of girls, not only Bais Yaakov students.

I thought this new school was crossing a major red line. How could little Rivky and Chanala be taught to dance by Nurit and Tatiana and practice together with Daphna and Liat? Even I, who lived and breathed dance, wouldn’t have dreamed of sending my daughter to learn under a nonreligious teacher together with non-chareidi girls. I was certain this school would never succeed.

To my shock, however, the new school quickly attracted girls from top Bais Yaakovs in Yerushalayim — Bais Yaakovs whose administrators were suspicious even of me, with my all-chareidi staff and student body. While the administrators of these Bais Yaakovs certainly did not approve of the new school, the students and their parents didn’t seem to care much.

The success of the new school did not harm my business. In fact, it boosted my enrollment, since it helped promote dance as a culture, causing more girls from the community to be interested. But the success of this new competitor made me think. A lot. Over the next few months, I asked myself some uncomfortable questions.

Question number one was: Am I responsible for the success of this new school? I was the one who had demonstrated that there was no conflict between dancing and Yiddishkeit. I was the one who had trained a generation of chareidi girls in Eretz Yisrael to view dance as a culture, to busy themselves with bars and toe shoes and arabesques, to push their bodies to new limits. If not for my introducing dance to the community, would anyone have dreamed of sending their daughters to this new school, with its more relaxed standards?

The second question began to niggle at me when one of my students asked me if she could study in the new school, and wanted to know the difference between that school and mine.

“It’s a different world,” I replied. “The teachers there are not religious.”

“But it’s the same ballet they’re teaching,” she argued.

I didn’t have a good answer for her at the time, but when I gave it more thought, I was able to pinpoint the difference between my school and theirs: Over there, dance was a religion, while in my school, the religion was Yiddishkeit.

I wasn’t fully convinced of that myself, however. True, I was married to a ben Torah and sent my children to yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs, but didn’t my obsession with dance border on religion as well? Maybe there wasn’t such a big difference between my school and the new one. They were teaching ballet, and I was teaching ballet. They were living dance, and I was living dance. Was I so different from Tatiana? On the outside, yes. But on the inside?

A third question I asked myself was: Let’s say my 13-year-old daughter got serious about any other pursuit — art, for instance. Would I let her spend three afternoons a week in a professional studio and turn painting into the focus of her life? Of course not! I would want her to have a life: a 13-year-old life, with homework and friends and bad hair days and little tantrums because supper isn’t to her liking. Sure, I would encourage her to go for art lessons once a week and practice a bit in between, but I would insist that her art be second to her life, and not the other way around. Yet I had no problem encouraging my students, and my daughters as well, to make dance the focus of their life. Why?

These questions weren’t articulated clearly in my mind at first. They started off as an uneasy feeling, which gave way to a mental blur the likes of which I had never experienced. I tried to quiet this growing unease by telling myself that if Hashem created me with the ability to dance, obviously I was supposed to use dance to serve Him, and help others to develop their dancing talents to serve Him as well. But that argument seemed hollow and inadequate, somehow.

What will my tombstone say? I found myself wondering. Will it say, “She was a great dancer”? Is that all there is to me?

Seeing that I was struggling with these existential questions, my husband had a simple solution for me.

“When a Jew has questions, he asks daas Torah,” he said. “Why don’t you go speak to my rosh yeshivah?”

At first, I was adamantly opposed to this idea. I knew the rosh yeshivah was a man of tremendous insight who had successfully guided countless talmidim of all stripes, but what could he possibly understand about dance?

“He doesn’t have a clue what ballet is!” I told my husband. “Besides, this isn’t a halachic issue where he can tell me clearly what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s much more complex than that!”

My husband, the Bnei Brak boy, disagreed vehemently with this attitude. “People think the job of rabbanim is to pasken kosher or treif, muttar or assur. But that’s wrong! Gray areas are precisely what we need rabbanim for. You think this dilemma is about dance, but it’s really about chinuch. You can’t possibly sort these questions out yourself. You need daas Torah.”

I couldn’t imagine talking to a rav about dance, though. It was just too… weird. And besides, I wasn’t pressuring anyone to send their daughters to my school. I was just making dance lessons available to people who wanted them.

When I discussed my concerns with other people, their response was always to reassure me that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

“You’re giving girls a healthy outlet,” they said. “Dance is good for their physical and mental health, and it helps them to express themselves and bring beauty into their lives. Let the parents decide if their daughters should be dancing, and let them set the limits they deem appropriate.”

As the weeks and months went on, however, I felt less and less able to convince myself that I wasn’t the one responsible for putting a hechsher on dance for frum girls. Who was I fooling? The name Shoshi Broide was synonymous with dance.

At one point, I stopped sharing my questions and doubts with people. Nobody could understand my dilemma because nobody understood what dance meant to me. To everyone else, dance was a technical matter. To me, it was life.

For about two years, these questions percolated in my head, giving me no rest. Finally, I felt that I couldn’t take it any longer. I needed answers; I needed guidance. What daas Torah could possibly offer me, I didn’t know, but I did know I couldn’t continue living with this kind of mental turmoil.

I still couldn’t bring myself to speak to my husband’s rosh yeshivah, though. Instead, I sat down and wrote him a long, long letter articulating my questions and concerns.

“Is it good for girls to be appearing on stage regularly?” I asked. “Does the applause they receive build their personalities, or does it tie their self-image too closely to their ability to dance?”

While I was at it, I gave voice to additional dilemmas. “Should a frum dance school have mirrors in the rooms for the girls to watch themselves, or does this put too much focus on the body? Is it right for us to encourage the girls to perfect their ballet moves? Should we be offering degrees in dance for serious students?”

A few days after my husband delivered the letter, the rosh yeshivah himself called and asked me to come in for a meeting. By the time I arrived, I already knew, in my heart, that I would have to make some changes to my school. I sensed that the rav was going to tell me to tone things down and turn my dance school back into a place where girls could have fun learning to dance, instead of being part of a professional company that emphasized dance as a culture.

That’s not what he said, though.

“The way I see it,” he began, “you should close your school.”

I had two thoughts at that moment. One was, Thank goodness there’s a chair under me. The other was, When I was younger I used to wonder whether there’s anything inside me besides dance. Well, now I’m about to find out.

I did a quick check: I still had two arms, two legs, a head, a neck, a spine — and they all worked. But I was now officially handicapped.

The rosh yeshivah wasn’t finished, though. “You should close your school this week,” he continued.

“What?” I asked dumbly.

“Yes, this week,” he said. “And you should make noise. Don’t just close down quietly — you should publicize why you’re closing down. People shouldn’t be left to speculate. You have a lot of influence, and your name carries a lot of weight. Take this opportunity to get the message out there that you were getting carried away, that you took dance too far. People will listen to you more than they would listen to a rav saying the same thing.”

By the time I turned to the rav for guidance, I knew I was going to follow what he said. But in my wildest dreams I never thought he’d tell me to shut down my dance school. Since he did, though, I was going to listen, even if I didn’t understand. At all.

I had one more question for him. “What about me?” I asked meekly. “I have to dance. It’s my life. My oxygen. My essence. I can’t live without it.”

“Dance is Hashem’s gift to you,” he replied. “Use it.”

I have nothing nice to say about the three days that followed my conversation with the rav. I closed the school in one go, firing all my teachers and recruiting high school girls to call all my students and tell them there would be no more classes. I sent out letters to the parents of my students informing them that I had received a psak to close the school and notifying them when they could come get their money back. I closed the letter with the words, “And may Hashem help you and me come to terms with this.”

That was as far as closing the school went. As for making noise, I wrote letters to all the Bais Yaakov high schools in Yerushalayim explaining why I had closed my dance school. I wrote that I had presented certain questions of values and chinuch to a rav, who felt that I had led my dance students down the wrong path and therefore had to close my school immediately.

Doing all this was incredibly difficult. I felt as though I was killing dance, killing myself. Plus, I had to deal with deep misunderstandings from all directions: my students, their parents, my staff.

Worst of all was the confusion. I had approached the rav to gain clarity, but instead, I left his office in greater turmoil than before. In practically the same breath, he had told me to close my school and still go on dancing myself. How could those two directives coexist?

I closed the school, but I did not dance. I couldn’t.

For an entire year, I sat home praying for parnassah. By this time, my husband held a position as a mashgiach in a yeshivah, but we couldn’t live on his salary alone, and we soon found ourselves deeply in debt. On top of that, I was bored, miserable, and listless. I had no appetite, no interest in anything.

Every morning I awoke thinking, I have to destroy the rav and blow up every letter I sent out because of him.

I had followed his advice blindly, stupidly. There was no halachic issue with my dance school. I hadn’t done anything wrong. On the contrary, the school had done so much good for its students, not to mention supporting my family and enabling my husband to learn. What was I, crazy?

Had I been able to walk around holding my head high and proudly saying, “I followed daas Torah and did the right thing,” the aftermath of the decision would have been hard, but bearable. But I didn’t feel that I had done the right thing. I felt that I had done something rash and fanatic.

Without dance, I felt adrift, unmoored. Who was I?

This loss of identity was compounded by a thorny theological question: If I had done the right thing by bowing to daas Torah, then why was I so unhappy? Why didn’t I have clarity?

About a year after I closed my school, a woman arranging a chareidi sales event in Binyanei Haumah called to ask if I could tell my story at the event.

“I have no story to tell,” I replied. And I hate these dumb events, I thought.

I thought the matter was closed, but she kept calling. “Telling your story can be a kiddush Hashem, and I think you should ask your rav before you refuse.”

This attempt at manipulation infuriated me. “I’m the rav-asking woman of the year!” I practically shouted at her. “Don’t tell me to ask a rav!”

I was convinced that the organizers of this event had an agenda. “They want to put Shoshi Broide up on stage and see if she will or won’t dance,” I told my husband.

He wasn’t as indignant. “Maybe call the rosh yeshivah and ask him if you should speak,” he reflected.

“Fine, I’ll call him,” I said.

I was certain the rosh yeshivah would agree that I shouldn’t speak at the event. In fact, I had three great reasons to decline the invitation. “First of all,” I began, “why should I compromise my privacy by exposing such a personal aspect of my life? Second, all I would talk about is dance, and people aren’t interested in hearing about dance. Third, and most important, I have no clarity. I’m a confused woman who just lost her parnassah, her passion, her sanity. You don’t give a confused woman a microphone.”

He disagreed. “What you have to say is important enough to put your privacy aside,” he said. “It’s not about dance — it’s about chinuch. It’s about priorities. It’s about daas Torah. And everyone else talks about clarity. It would be good for someone to get up and speak about confusion.”

“But what I say is going to weaken people!” I protested.

“What you have to say is emes, and emes doesn’t weaken people,” he said. “Speak about lack of clarity. Speak about what happens between when the chassid obeys the rebbe and when he finally sees the yeshuah. It’s a story that needs to be told — but it’s a nasty story that no one wants to tell.”

After receiving these new marching orders, I cried the whole day. Then, I asked the rav to write my speech. He jotted some points on a paper, and I rehearsed those points in my own words. And then, reluctantly, I walked up to the podium in Binyanei Haumah and spoke for ten minutes, swallowing tears numerous times. I was not an experienced speaker, and I didn’t know how to tell a story. I felt like a bumbling fool. And, in a way, having to talk about closing my school was more painful than actually closing it.

When I returned home after the speech, I told my husband, “I will never do this again.”

But after that short speech, my phone didn’t stop ringing. Everyone wanted me to come tell my story. At first, I said no to everyone, but when the invitations persisted, I called the rosh yeshivah and asked him what to do. “Go and speak,” he said.

So I did. In the beginning, I spoke from a place of total confusion, fighting tears each time I stepped up to the microphone. I would begin each speech by saying, “My name is Shoshana Bracha bas Rus. Please pray for me, because I don’t know how to live in this world. I don’t have a self anymore.”

Close to two years after I closed my school, I heard a recorded shiur from the rosh yeshivah on the weekly parshah. It was parshas Vayeira, and he was speaking about Akeidas Yitzchak. Why, he asked, is the Akeidah credited to Avraham Avinu if Yitzchak was the one who was giving up his life?

He explained that when Yitzchak was lying on the mizbeiach, he was looking upward to Heaven, to the angels, meaning that he saw the purpose and benefit in what he was about to do. Avraham, on the other hand, was looking downward, into his son’s eyes. He saw no purpose, no logic, in what he was doing. Yet he was ready to do it anyway.

That lack of clarity, said the rosh yeshivah, is the definition of a nisayon. A nisayon doesn’t mean you have to do something hard — it means you have to do something that makes no sense to you, something that flies in the face of everything you stand for. “We daven every day that Hashem should not bring a nisayon upon us because a nisayon robs us of our daas,” the rosh yeshivah explained. “And that is the hardest thing of all.”

That was my “aha” moment. So I didn’t need to be happy about what I had done. So I didn’t need to have clarity. I was going through a nisayon, and the bleakness and darkness I was experiencing were part and parcel of that nisayon.

After that, my public speaking changed. Understanding why I didn’t have clarity actually helped me put the whole experience into perspective, which allowed me to start having fun when I spoke. From then on, each time I repeated my story publicly, I gained more insight into why I had done what I had done.

During every speech I gave, I made sure to stress that the step I had taken was extreme, not something that people should think of imitating. “I don’t advocate drastic steps like this,” I emphasized. “Most of the time, we’re meant to make small, incremental changes and improvements in our lives. It’s only because I went way too far with my dance school that I had to shut it down swiftly and completely.”

When invitations for speaking engagements first began to pour in, I attributed my popularity to the fact that I was still big news, the hot story of the day. I never dreamed that three and a half years after my dance school closed, I’d still be receiving regular invitations to share my story — not only in Eretz Yisrael, but all around the world. Nor did I ever dream that I would actually earn a respectable parnassah this way.

By now, I’ve told my story publicly hundreds of times, in both English and Hebrew, to women and girls across the frum spectrum. Each time I speak, I feel that I gain more clarity, as I attempt to convey how I went wrong with my approach to dance, how I finally came to terms with the decision to close my school, and how I subsequently managed to forge my identity anew.

In recent years, I’ve discovered I have talents other than dance: public speaking, for one thing, and writing, too. After I closed my school, my teenage daughter felt lonely — she missed dancing, she missed the social opportunity of dance classes, and she missed the special time we used to have together when I would drive her to and from dance lessons — so I decided to work on a book with her. We concocted a plot together, and I would write a chapter each day, in Hebrew, and read it to her at night. After a few months, I sent the book to a writer friend of mine, who loved it so much that she sent it to the editor of Yeladim, Mishpacha’s Hebrew magazine for children. Yeladim subsequently agreed to publish it in serial form. Since then, I’ve written numerous stories, serials, and poems that have been printed in Yeladim and other frum Hebrew publications.

About a year and a half ago, two years after I had last danced, I awoke one morning and felt like dancing again. In keeping with the rosh yeshivah’s second directive, I signed up for a ballet course. The person running the course, a former student of mine, refused to take money from me, but I insisted on paying.

“This is what I need to do right now,” I said.

For Shoshi Broide to suddenly show her face in a ballet class, two years after dropping out of the dance scene completely, was a humbling experience. But I quickly got back into the rhythm of dancing, as I remembered why I loved doing this.

Dancing, apparently, was still very much a part of me.

About a year ago, I was asked to choreograph dances for a performance in one of Yerushalayim’s leading frum high schools. I asked the rosh yeshivah if I should do it, and he said yes. After that, other Bais Yaakov schools invited me to help choreograph their performances, and I found myself yet again in demand as a dance instructor — this time, as part of the chareidi chinuch framework, instead of as an outsider creating her own dance movement. The same principals who had once regarded me with suspicion now trusted me as someone whose values were firmly aligned with Torah and Yiddishkeit.

Dance has once again become an important part of my life, on both the personal and professional levels. The difference is that now, it doesn’t define me. I view my dancing talent, as well as all my other creative abilities, merely as tools given to me by Hashem to enhance my life and the lives of others. But dance is no longer my life or my identity.

Who, then, is Shoshi Broide?

Today, at the age of 42, I can confidently say that I am an eved Hashem. As such, I walk around with a big umbrella over my head, an umbrella called daas Torah that shields me from the storm of my own creativity. The umbrella I carry is a lot bigger than me, but it has a handle attached to it that serves as my lifeline: Every time I’m unsure about whether or how to give my talents expression, I call the rav and defer to his Torah wisdom. I may not always understand that wisdom, but it’s a higher wisdom that I trust and feel secure in.

Under the daas Torah umbrella, I have discovered a life of happiness and clarity. Under this umbrella, I can make the unique contribution to the world that Hashem has in mind for me. Under this umbrella, I can dance.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 738)