Vail: A new spin on sacred stories

By Jessica Tenner
The Vail Daily, Thursday, August 20th, 2009

David Zinn holds the Torah he donated to the B'Nai Vail Congregation —
its second — during a Shabbat service on the wedding deck on top of Vail Mountain
Special to the Vail Daily
VAIL, Colorado — What do you do with the world's best selling book and longest running re-run now that it appears to have lost its luster and is certainly losing audience share?

This seems to be the question that the Israeli-born maverick educator, Amichai Lau-Lavie, was trying to address when he founded “Storahtelling” with a group of musicians and artists in 1999.

A portion of the Torah, which is comprised of the five books of Moses and is commonly referred to as The Old Testament, is read by Jews every Saturday. It is the world's oldest continuous ritual of sacred storytelling.

Lau-Lavie realized that in increasing numbers, the People of the Book didn't really know what was in “The Book.” And so, with an innovative combination of scholarship, storytelling, and performing arts, Storahtelling aims to bring the Torah stories to life and inject interest and relevance back into the sedate Saturday Service.

Phil Brodsky, Claudine Brandt, and Rabbi Debra Rappaport examine a special
section of the torah while rewinding it at a service for the Simchat Torah holiday
at the Vail Interfaith Chapel
Special to the Vail Daily
Reviving the maven
On Saturday, at a service being held creekside behind the Vail Interfaith Chapel, B'nai Vail Congregation is hosting a group of mavens with a story to tell. A maven is generally defined as an expert, but translated from the Yiddish (meyvn) and Hebrew (mebhin) it literally means “to understand.”

In a tradition beginning 2,500 years ago, the mavens played a very important role in religious life. They served as interpretive storytellers, translating the Hebrew of the Torah into Aramaic, Greek or whatever the predominant vernacular of their audience happened to be.

They also adapted the meaning of the narrative to the viewpoint of the congregation, creating a context for understanding the ancient text. Sadly, the practice was abandoned in the early Middle Ages, but is today enjoying a resurgence.

Four members of the Denver-based Storahtelling pilot program, “Mile High Mavens in the Making” will be participating and leading portions of B'nai Vail's service.

“It isn't just for Jewish people, everyone's invited to attend and participate,” says Caryn Aviv, a member of the visiting troupe and a University of Denver professor. “The goal is to create relevance and a resonance with the past, to find a fun and engaging way to connect with a very old story.”

As the founder Lau-Lavie has said of his enterprise, “Without being hokey, I want to offer people the opportunity of gathering around the sacred, to give people a taste of the mythic, of the eternal that will speak to the mundane challenges of their lives.”

B'nai Vail's Torah story
The guest of honor at the Saturday service will be B'nai Vail's original Torah. As long time members of Vail's interfaith community, B'nai Vail Congregation proudly owns two sacred scrolls.

The Torah that will be read this weekend was acquired in the very early days of B'nai Vail's existence, over 35 years ago. An early Vail resident, Al Amaral, was a local carpenter who had been raised as an Episcopalian, but always had an affinity for Judaism and the Jewish people.

He had accepted an invitation to a Passover Seder with the Asts and the Kleimers, two of B'nai Vail's founding families, where they were discussing the desire for a Torah. With just $189 in the fund at the time, Amaral offered to purchase the Torah if one could be found, in honor of Manny Kless, a man who had been very important to him in his early life. Kless had built two synagogues in San Francisco and a home for the blind and deaf in Acapulco, Mexico.

Through mutual friends David and Diane Pratt, then owners of The Tannery in the Talisman building, Amaral was introduced to Herb and Sharon Glaser, visitors of Vail since 1967, who became part-time residents in 1970. The torch was passed to the Glasers, and with a very limited budget, Sharon began the quest.

Scouring first the states, and then calling to London, she was directed finally to Israel. The Glasers made the trip to Maya She'arim, an Orthodox community in Jerusalem.

“I was shown Torah after Torah, that we simply couldn't afford,” Sharon Glaser said. “Picture if you will, me walking down the street being trailed by seven Orthodox rabbis in search of an appropriate Torah.”

They at long last came upon a scroll with a very unique history that would become B'nai Vail's Torah. The scroll is actually comprised of two prior scrolls, fixed together in the middle. The first half had formerly resided in Hungary, surviving the Holocaust greatly damaged. The latter half had survived a fire.

They had been joined together; much like the community of Jewish people in Vail, with different backgrounds and observances just beginning to coalesce in this burgeoning mountain community.

After being examined by Rabbi Menachem Gottesman, from the Glasers Synagogue in California, Gottesman carried the scroll on his lap, wrapped in a prayer shawl, for the long flight back to the states. Upon its arrival, Al Amaral created the wooden handles upon which the scroll was affixed.

The community is invited to view this sacred artifact and hear a lively and provocative re-telling of one of its stories this Saturday beside Gore Creek behind the Vail Interfaith Chapel. Service begins at 9:30 a.m. and will be followed by refreshments and conversation.

If weather is bad, the service will be moved into the Chapel. For further inquires, please call the B'nai Vail office at 970-477-2992.

A Model Partnership
by Jacob Berkman

August 20, 2009

There have been some loud splashes in the philanthropy world over the past couple of weeks, from the start of Madoff book mania to more public concern over day schools to the closing of the Professional Leaders Project.

But it's a relative ripple in the nonprofit world that might have the most to teach organizations this week.

The 14th Street Y in Manhattan's East Village and Storahtelling, the avante-garde theater troupe that takes biblical stories and translates them into modern theatrical pieces, announced this week that they had formed a strategic alliance.

Under the agreement, Storahtelling will move into the newly renovated Y, which is owned by the UJA-Federation of New York, saving the troupe tens of thousands of dollars a year on infrastructure overhead. In return, Storahtelling will become something of an artist in residence and will provide monthly performances and holiday programming.

The executive directors of both groups are calling it a win-win.

Storahtelling's Amichai Lau-Lavie told me that going forward the organization was going to focus on transmitting to others around the country its expertise in teaching Jewish messages in a more modern way. But the group badly wanted to have a home base in which its troupe could showcase itself and its work, particularly in New York, where those performances would be easily accessible to potential donors; their new space in the Y will allow them to do so in a way the group couldn't previously.

"We wanted to be very local," he said. "We have a headquarters. But it wasn't a place we could invite people in. A lot of what we have been doing has been going out and seeding change. That is becoming our focus. It was recommended to us and urged to have a local center to showcase our change, especially to New York funders and supporters."

From the Y's perspective, it has a new space and has been trying to figure out programming that would attract members of the East Village's diverse and eccentric Jewish community.

The collaboration is a great example of how the older, more established Jewish organizational world can help foster the growth of new, innovative Jewish projects out there -- a source of great concern over the past 12 months as funding for those organizations is very much in doubt.

The project was very much born out of the establishment. Both Lau-Lavie and Stephen Arnoff, the Y's executive director, are recent alumni of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows program, a one-year residence in Israel that helps foster professional leaders of Jewish organizations. Though they have known each other for years, the two both credit their involvement with the Mandel program as a catalyst for their collaboration.

Arnoff, though, said that the Y is trying to set an example for an establishment that is obligated to take under its wing the new wave of innovative Jewish organizations.

"It is criminal that larger agencies are not taking on more responsibility to sustain at least a decade of Jewish work," he said. "Some of it is in real danger because of the recession. We have so much infrastructure in the community. We have many, many, many buildings that are not performing to best of their missions, underperforming or not performing at all. This is a way to combine the old and the new in a way that is a win-win for both parties."

Fundermentalist's Take: I hope the rest of the organized world studies the example of Arnoff and Lau-Lavie, and sees if there is something to be learned. Instead of fighting over the philanthropic pie, it might be time to figure out how we can better share it.

jta.org

RE:VERB FORTY-FOUR / SHOFTIM / FORGIVE
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

FORGIVE

Graffiti, Rome 2009
(photo by Amichai)
Wearing a tailored blue suit, a single strand of pearls and clutching the last of her fur coats, Ruth Madoff stood facing her angry accuser – Sondra, her sister in law. Sondra, who lost everything because of her brother Bernie, demanded an apology from Ruth, and full retribution, and if possible - revenge. Ruth was sad, but defiant, refusing to take responsibility for her husband’s actions or take any of the blame. “I, too, am a victim” she said, “The man who committed these crimes – who had this affair with some Hadassah lady– was not the same man I married. My life is, also, ruined. I should have paid more attention to what was going on. Please forgive me”.

But Sondra didn’t want to – and neither did we, who were watching. Must one always forgive?

Sitting there, on a lawn in a pretty park in Denver, this past Saturday afternoon and watching this scene, we were torn between compassion and fury. Can we forgive her and let her get on with her life? Or do we side with Sondra who demands further punishment for the woman who represents, by proxy, her terrible losses? Or both? At some point I got real angry at Ruth Madoff. “Yes” I said to her, my teeth clenched, “pay attention to what’s around you – but first – pay up!” She looked at me sadly and said nothing. My anger had nowhere to go. Frustration beat forgiveness, and it didn’t feel good.

These weren’t the real Madoffs up there on the lawn – these were two talented women who are members of the Mile High Mavens – the Storahtelling Colorado Cohort, about to complete a year long training program. As part of their training to be Storah-Mavens who translate Torah into modern ritual theater, these two ‘actors’ – Caryn and Birdie (who in real life are a cantor and a university professor), chose to interpret the weekly Torah portion of Shoftim in ultra contemporary garb. The Torah text, dealing mostly with matters of capital punishment and other judicial matters as savory as stoning, provided a perfect pretext for a public conversation about crime and punishment, and about the limits of forgiveness. 70 people gathered on the lawn in Denver’s Crestmoor Park– adults, children – mostly but not entirely Jewish audience members, and among them 7 rabbis – of every single denomination – including 2 of Denver’s leading Orthodox rabbis along with their families. The Mile High Mavens put on a great Storahtelling program, and the very diverse audience, interacted and offered a variety of responses. “Everybody deserves a second chance” – a nine year old girl spoke up. “Why is she walking away with 2.5 million??” somebody else shouted.

Perhaps we all deserve second (and more) chances to perfect ourselves, but are there limits to our ability to forgive others for inflicting harm on society? Are there times when forgiveness is just not OK?

Later that night I got this email from L.: “I've been thinking a lot about the Torah portion and the way you presented it because my cousin was just diagnosed with Hep C, infected by the drug addict who stole syringes at Rose Medical Center and replaced them with used saline syringes, infecting 21 innocent patients, including my cousin. She's been wrestling with the sense of violation and anger and sadness, not to mention agonizing over which horrible treatment option she will choose (one-year of chemo). I wonder if I could forgive, or if one is even supposed to. But your presentation laid all these issues bare.”

In Shoftim (literally ‘judges’) there is the description of a unique ritual that begs for forgiveness. Chapter 21 in D’varim outlines the theoretical situation in which a human corpse is discovered in a no-man’s-land –between two cities. The corpse is that of a murdered person, but there is no evidence as to who the killer was – this is way pre CSI. The elders measure the distance from the corpse to every one of the nearby cities – and the closest one is presumed the guilty source of trouble, the place from which the murderer emerged. The leaders of that city are then instructed to behead a young cow at a nearby river and to publicly exclaim: 'our hands did not spill this blood.' And then they turn to God and appeal for forgiveness for yet another terrible human act:

‘Forgive, O God, Your people Israel, whom You have redeemed, and suffer not innocent blood to remain in the midst of your people Israel. And the blood shall be forgiven them.’ (D'varim 21:8)

This bizarre ritual is based on the notion of responsibility – and the possibility of forgiveness. As Sondra said this last Saturday – ‘somebody has to pay, somehow’.

The word ‘forgive’ in this context is the Hebew ‘Kaper’ – translated elsewhere at ‘atone’ or ‘absolve’. Kaper is the root of the word Kippurim – atonement – as in the Day of Atonement – exactly 40 days from today.

Today is the first day of the last month of the Jewish year – Elul. It’s the kickoff for the High Holidays, a reminder to get one’s affairs settled, to clean up whatever messes this year has seen emerge, all bad blood. Anybody I need to ask forgiveness from? Anybody I need to forgive? What’s my unfinished business in terms of human affairs, commitments made and neglected, hurts intentionally or unintentionally committed? How do I prepare myself to lead the life I really want to live – with more integrity, responsibility, compassion, accountability? And, also, what do I do with the rage, and the pain, and the knowledge that there are people in my life who I’m mad at (Madoff somewhere on the bottom of the list) and it’s just hard to forgive them? Do I send them a “Happy Jew Year” and smile when I see them next? Do I confront them? Is it just hard to forgive some people – or actually impossible?

Perhaps it’s a case by case scenario. Perhaps, like the elders and judges of yore, we are each to measure the distance from the corpses and wounds of our lives to the nearest people and memories, and there, choose how to take responsibility or demand answers – for whatever bad blood remains – as long as the hurt is not ignored. And then – minus the headless cow ceremony – appeal to the universal compassion that some name ‘God’ and hope, and pray, and appeal – for the ability to forgive – not forget – and be granted a second chance at being the best possible human being around – for everybody’s benefit.

At the end of the Storahtelling program in the park, people were called up to the Torah, for the honor of an Aliyah – an ascent onto the tale. Bruce, the lead Maven, invited those who seek justice and want to make the world a better place, to come up. Ruth Madoff rose, once again, and stood by the Torah scroll, and said the blessing. Sondra joined her. These were just actors, I know, but this was also real. For one minute, in front of a temporary community, all was forgiven, and hopes, and the possibility of redemption, were all that mattered. They chanted the blessing, and we answered ‘Amen’.

RE:VERB FORTY-THREE / RE'EH / DEMOLISH
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

DEMOLISH

I moved back into my lovely East Village apartment this week, after almost a year away. The apartment was clean and in great shape but the little garden in the back – a rare luxury (thank you Steven!) – was a messy mini jungle overgrown with weeds and plants. It’s pretty in a way – but I wanted to plant some herbs and flowers. Enter: demolition.

For over an hour, armed with a pair of garden scissors and a small machete-like knife that I got at the hardware store next door, I played gardener, demolishing most of the 8 foot tall hydrangea bushes and some of their unfortunate neighbors. Remorse followed. I guess one can call this ‘pruning,’ but as I was filling large garbage bags with clipped green branches I still couldn’t escape the sense of violence – and the eerie satisfaction I got from it. It felt good to physically tear up the garden, to clear out room for small plants, to clean up the place. But it also felt like I was violating this quiet, messy eco-system, this sample of nature-as-is in favor of some vision of what a garden ‘needs to look like.’ Who am I to mess with Mother Nature’s horticultural choices?

M. rolls her eyes and laughs at me when she comes to visit that afternoon and hears my pangs of remorse. She is an experienced gardener and environmental activist, with a big mouth, and calls me a moron and goes on a tirade about how we need to let go of some things in our lives in order to make room for the new, even when what we let go may be precious, or beautiful, like blue hydrangeas. Even if it feels violent. Harsh times require harsh measures. Pruning is prudent, etc...

Fine. Old houses get demolished to make room for taller ones, parks are replaced by faster highways and files get deleted on hard drives to accommodate new data – I get it. Progress. But when and where do these acts of destruction/clearing/shedding get incorporated into the greedy tireless race for ‘new and improved’? When and how do the desires for improvement get implemented as acts of violence or terror? Where’s the fine line?

I know. BIG leap from an afternoon in the garden to a discourse on cosmic evil and the reasons for violence in our world of so little tolerance for mini jungles of all types; a world torn by conflicting desires and visions of order, too often interrupted by weapons far more dangerous than garden scissors. But it’s not that great a leap. As I sit in the garden later that day, after M. leaves, I flip through the pages of the Bible that has traveled back with me from Jerusalem and I open to this week’s portion, Re’eh, and there, sadly, discover the mutilation of fresh trees in the service of religion. It is a disturbing paragraph that chronicles yet another dry memo in the horrific historical battle between nature and culture, and between different forms of religions and value systems.

The context is still the last speech of Moses, complete with instructions and warnings to the People of Israel on their route to the Promised Land. The big fear is that the people will be seduced by the local pagan religions and turn away from worshipping YHWA. This is not only a theological concern – it is also financial. Later in these chapters the law is laid down plainly – worship is only allowed in Central Headquarters – Jerusalem (as it will be later named) and all gifts, sacrifices and tithes are to go there and only there: one God, in one location. As local worship gets banned in favor of a centralized system, all local deities, altars and sacred spots are to be demolished. Here’s how:

"You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshiped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree. Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site." (Dvarim 12:2-3)

Ouch. Makes me think about the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas, the American Colonists melting down George III’s statues into bullets, and Neo Nazis desecrating Jewish cemeteries all over Europe. There are many other examples, equally disturbing in their relation to this Biblical ruling. It is uncomfortable to read and to acknowledge as yet another part of our history – remote and yet so contemporary. (how far the distance from burning books and defacing monuments to the actual shooting of ‘other’ people?)

I can only deal with this text using M’s gardening logic, applying a metaphoric, psychological reading to this painful historical fragment, most likely chronicling actual events. Moses wants his people to be focused, united, diligent in their collective building of community and nation. The local altars, often erected under sacred trees, giant living deities, represented the past, the indigenous memory that had to be repressed in order for the new narrative to form. The altars and trees were taken as diversions, preventing the people from being present in the here and now of their new identity. In the battle between gods, values, options, isms – the winner demanded exclusivity.

Demolish the desires, destroy the distractions – focus on what really matters to your wellbeing – is, in some ultra humanistic midrashic way – what Moses may be saying here. Less leads to more.

I know it’s a stretch. No point in justifying this or other Biblical text when we read laws that once reflected violent human values, interpreted verbatim, and still are by so many today. But, as I sit in my little garden now, noting that the mint is doing fine, and the Jasmine bush (I had to plant one with Jerusalem in mind) is blossoming already, and that new flowers are coming out in the much smaller Hydrangea bush – I think about demolition in the service of higher causes and hope that my violent interruption to this garden, under this luxuriant tree, is blessed by Mother Nature herself.

(Next demolition projects: files on my virtual desktop and 8 extra pounds.)

RE:VERB FORTY-TWO / EKEV / THANK
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

THANK

It took 63 years, but my uncle finally got to thank, publicly, the family of the man who helped him survive the Holocaust. In the middle of what was already an intense and emotional week in Israel, esp. with the aftermath of the shooting in Tel Aviv -and for me personally as I prepared to leave Israel after a year, not to mention the August heat - I joined my uncle, father, family members and guests at the synagogue of Yad Vashem for a long but moving ceremony honoring the courage and kindness of my uncle’s long lost and now deceased protector, Fyodor Mikhailichenko, the 164th Russian citizen recognized by the State of Israel as "Righteous among the Nations."

My uncle, Rabbi Israel Lau, is an incredible orator, and to hear him retell his own story of childhood in the camps was as always, a haunting experience – but it was even more inspiring this time, and even more moving. When the ceremony was over I walked to get the car, crossing the vast sculpture garden of Yad Vashem, (complete with horrors of all kinds) walking quietly for a few minutes, overlooking the vast Jerusalem forest, grateful for the opportunity to express gratitude - for the kindness of strangers, for the possibilities of humanity overcoming its destructive patterns - even in the midst of, especially in the midst of, days of great hate and unspeakable sorrow and simple stress. I pause to take a deep breath of thank you, recalling the tune to the prayer that little A. loves to sing: Modeh Ani.

Expressing gratitude should really not be something one waits 63 years to do, although in this case, there was no other way. My uncle’s full story is HERE, but here’s the gist and my takeaway and link to the Torah tale of this super dramatic week:

Fyodor, a Russian prisoner of war, possibly a soldier, was 18, and my uncle Lulek, a Jew, was only 7, when fate brought them together inside Block #8 in Germany’s Buchenwald Concentration Camp, during the winter of 1945. There’s a steel sign, in German, still hanging at the entrance to the camp: “Each to his Own Fate.” Perhaps it was fate, combined with stealth and determination that helped them meet and survive: Lulek was smuggled into the camp and into the safer block by his older brother, my father, Naphtali who was 19 at the time – and known as Tulek. My father knew that the boy would be safer with the Russian Prisoners of War than with the Jewish inmates, and so he got somebody to extract a diamond that was hidden, years earlier, in one of his teeth and with this blooded gem bribed one of the kapos and got the kid into the better block. Fyodor apparently took pity on the boy, gave him extra potatoes, made him ear muffs from a dead man’s sweater, threw him down to the ground when there was shooting everywhere. On April 10th, burning with fever and presumed dying, my father went to find his little brother and give him a final message: "if you survive this hell – and they ask you where you want to go – say Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel. And repeat after me – so that you won’t forget: Eretz Yisrael – it is the one place where they don’t kill Jews." And then they said goodbye, and my father collapsed and Lulek was whisked back to Block 8 by Fyodor and the next day, April 11th, Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans and they were free.

Fyodor wanted to adopt Lulek and take him to Russia and Lulek agreed. But Tulek, barely conscious but alive, got his pals to guard the boy and make sure he stays with them. Lulek and Fyodor said goodbye a few days later and never knew each other’s last names, and apparently kept looking for each other for all those years.

Fyodor died in 1993. Two years ago, through a complicated twist of events and archival discoveries, his identity was finally revealed and my uncle got to meet Fyodor’s two remaining daughters. There they were, in short sleeved summer suits, standing at Yad Vashem representing their father, receiving a medal and a certificate from the little boy they had always heard their father talk about, the boy he loved. My uncle, now the chairman of Yad VaShem, got to say “thank you” and help them unveil the plaque honoring the memory of a kind man who took pity on another.

With Oscar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg as celebrity icons, the roster of gentiles who are honored for saving the lives of Jews during WW2, includes some 23,000 men and women of all nationalities. A government minister, in his opening remarks at the ceremony, explained that this is Israel’s highest honor for Non-Jews. The Russian Ambassador, in response, expressed a wish that more than 164 of these countrymen would be remembered and honored in the future. There were clearly some political subtexts going on in this media-heavy event, but for me, the real story here was the triumph of kindness, and the reminder to take stock of that which is worthy of honor and gratitude. It isn’t every day that an entire room full of people rises to such an occasion, rising to honor human honor. To say thank you.

Gratitude is not just good manners – it’s among the highest of human laws. But it’s so easy to forget.

Open this week’s Torah tale, Ekev, and there, too, is the reminder for gratitude. It’s tucked in the midst of the reminder, much like my father’s presumed-last-words to his brother – that there’s no place like home. Moses, in his last speech (for real) to his people, praises the land of milk and honey that he has never seen, and reminds them to appreciate it – to always remember to acknowledge the bounty and thank the Creator for such favorable feed.

"When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to your God for the good land which God has given you." (D’varim 8:10)

Eat, Fill, Thank. This biblical verse is the formula that predates ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and serves as the original inspiration for the Jewish custom to say Grace After Meals (and possibly, I assume, for the Christian tradition of saying grace before food is served).

This text is a reminder not to take life for granted. And, also, a reminder that we are fed in many ways, and it’s not always delicious and not always kind, but always worthy of appreciation.

What does one do when all the food one gets is a slice of a rotten potato stolen by a fellow prisoner? And how does one thank life when one suffers or shared the suffering of loved ones? Or how does one still say thank you to the world after turning on the radio to hear of a terrible murder of innocent lives?

Not even a week has passed since a mysterious gunman opened fire in Tel Aviv and rewired the narrative of the Gay-Lesbian Israeli experience. The aftermath is tragic loss of life, grief of family and friends, the fear of so many young GLBT youth to come out and express themselves, the worry that violence is so rampant in Israel – all this is real. But, also – and maybe something worth thanking for here – is the sense of community that has reemerged, the coming-together-because-of-great-crisis that is another bonding element for the GLBT community – in Israel and worldwide.

Maybe sometimes it does take time to see beyond the speechless rage and pain, to glimpse a sliver of a silver lining that can penetrate pain and be something that is worth thanking for?

Earlier in Ekev, Moses reminds us: “Remember everything, the entire path” – there are no good times without the bad.

All this as I finish packing, and say goodbye, and take a long stroll around the park that is near my parents house, and thank the paths, and the playground, and the trees, and the ravens, and the benches – for sheltering me this whole long year in Jerusalem. I’ve taken long walks here with my father this past year, recalling his horrible Holocaust memories, talking about God and faith. I played with my daughter on these swings. I watch now as the moon, full, rises over Jerusalem’s summer, and I say thank you to a year full like a full meal, with so many surprising appetizers and side dishes and drinks and desserts and companions and conversations.

‘Bring texts!’ is one my brother’s favorite hilarious expressions, reserved for the end of meals when the Grace After Meals is called for and the little booklets with the liturgy are brought to the table (it’s funny in Hebrew). Later during the same day as the Yad Vashem ceremony, up in the Galilee, in my brother’s beautiful garden, our entire family gathers to eat and to celebrate little E’s first birthday and bid me farewell. I am there with my parents, and siblings and their children and grandchildren, and my children, and their mothers, and an even fuller moon rises above us and a very full heart swells inside me, and the words, familiar, that need no printed reminder and are addressed to the moon, and the sky, and the fates, and my parents, and family, friends, and if I had an agent – my agent – and whatever God is: Thank You Very Much.

For everything.

Raising the Bar in LONDON!

by Joel Stanley

David

I heard about Storahtelling a number of years ago when I attended courses at Elat Chayyim Jewish Renewal entre in upstate New York. As a Jewish storyteller/teacher who had trained in drama myself, I was intrigued but never had any time to investigate it further, being embroiled with a young family and working hard in the area of Special Educational Needs. Then I crossed paths with it again many years later as Joel Stanley, my son Jonathan’s Barmitzvah teacher (and drama practitioner), told me how he was training as a ‘mobile maven’. Then our Masorti (Conservative) synagogue chazzan told me how she had heard about Storahtelling. Knowing Jonathan and myself were drama enthusiasts, she suggested we incorporate it somehow into his Barmitzvah.

This creative carrot that was dangled in front of me was too delicious to resist and Jonathan and I took the plunge. We asked Joel if Jonathan could compose and direct a Storahtelling Maven as a central aspect of the Torah service element of his Barmitzvah. Joel responded with alacrity and the wonderful journey of discovery, devising and directing began. However, more than anything this journey was a spiritual one as we delved deeply into the text of Parshat Chukkat to create a dramatic staging of the public trial of Aaron, the first High Priest.

For the first time in 17 years I was involved in the collective writing of a script, a script moreover that both had to match line by line the words in a Torah Sedra and bring the words off the scroll to become a powerful vehicle for drama and engagement. Also for the first time in 17 years I had to play a public role, for which I needed to learn lines, a very different task to the improvisational job of the storyteller. Scary, but powerful. And how much more so knowing that my director, my son Jonathan, was depending on this to go right, as along with directing he would be leyning interactively with the action, verse by verse. Over to him!!!

Jonathan

Long before even starting to prepare for my Barmitzvah my mum had told me about Storahtelling and how Jacky, our chazzan, had told her about it. It sounded really weird and I didn’t really think about it again until, having discussed it with my parents, my teacher Joel suggested we try it out. We started exploring the history of Storahtelling through Joel’s big file, the Storahtelling ‘bible’ he had been his training in America.

I realised that this was how the Torah service was meant to be and got really excited about the method of translating and interpreting. I couldn’t wait to get started.

After almost nine months of intensive study of my three Torah portions (our family belongs to two communities and my Barmitzvah was a double-parshah) I made the decision to go with the section dealing with the hitting of the rock in the Parsha Chukkat. We then explored possible characters for the Maven, considering Miriam, the rock and Aaron. After I decided to go with Aaron my dad came in for all our discussions, lessons and rehearsals. We soon got on with writing the script – a combination of planning in the lessons, writing privately and sending it back and forth with Joel. After 5 or 6 drafts we were almost there. We started rehearsing each week and sorting out the finer details.

Eventually everything was ready and we were doing the dress rehearsal - which was a bit of a disaster! But on the day it all came together and was incredible. Everyone thought it was fantastic: my leyning, which I had been learning separately, worked really amazingly with the script, alongside my Joel’s and my dad’s acting as the judge and Aaron.

Joel

By the time it came round to Jonathan’s Barmitzvah, I had been his teacher for some three years. So most of all the Maven and Jonathan’s own ‘performance’ was the wonderful culmination of a very special process and journey.

The service was held in an enormous marquee in the garden of one of Jonathan’s family members. There were 180 people there and I think every one of them enjoyed the Maven.

Stepping forwards as Aaron’s judge, banging my gavel on the edge of the bimah and calling for “order, order” the scene was set and we had the whole room’s attention.

Somehow courtroom dramas capture the imagination. We’ve seen it so many times before in countless TV shows and movies. So it was one of this Maven’s real strengths that it brought the sedra to life in a way that people could understand and relate to. ‘Oh, OK,’ they must have thought, ‘I get what’s going on here.’

A highlight for me was the ‘Second Aliyah Stretch’, when we turned to the congregation – the “ladies and gentlemen of the heavenly jury” – and asked them to decide just how guilty Aaron was and of what. When they broke from their discussions and order was regained, there were so many people who wanted to participate and give their opinions that we just couldn’t hear from everybody. Everyone was so enthusiastic it was hard to believe that this was reserved old England.

This was the first Raising the Bar Maven to take place in the UK, the first time anyone here had incorporated a Maven into their Barmitzvah, and it was an undoubted success. Never did it feel out of place or strange, and the comments we received were overwhelmingly positive.

Jonathan now wants to work on another Maven to take place in his synagogue next year, only this time he wants it to be a challenging legal section. He doesn’t do things by halves, this boy!

RE:VERB FORTY-ONE / VA'ETCHANAN / WRITE
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

WRITE

Most of the apartment is packed, boxes and suitcases gradually filling up with accumulated books and pieces of Armenian pottery and random papers. Moving out becomes an opportunity for selection, for reflection: a year’s worth of history and future priorities sorted out, shelf by shelf. I’ll miss living in Jerusalem, and I’ll miss this little apartment that quickly became a real home. My last day of packing is today – Tisha B’av – the annual fast day in memorial of Jerusalem’s ancient destruction and the (perpetual?) Jewish exile. Perfect. It’s a bit of challenge to be packing up while fasting but it’s no big deal and actually quite a visceral experience, an echo of the question asked by so many of my ancestors as they packed emptying rooms, for mundane or tragic reasons: how do I create memories of a home? What do I choose to remember? Do I really need all this history? (And how do I avoid being charged for overweight luggage?)

I’ll remember, and miss most, the little balcony–quiet at all times, lush with greenery, with the round plastic table my mother got me for my birthday. “You’ll see”, she said, “come spring – it will be an extra – and the nicest – room.” She’s a wise Jerusalemite. I’ve sat here, as I do right now, lots of times- with friends in the cool evenings drinking Arak with fresh mint, but most often alone, throughout the days, fingers on keyboard, coffee fuel, focused on writing. The balcony became my writing space, a bubble of inspiration and effort and frustration and satisfied periods at the end of this or that essay, or chapter, or blog. I’ve ‘written’ in various forms for most of my life - but somehow, sometime this past year, rather early on in the fall, the focus on ‘writing’ has changed. I began observing more of how I write – and why I write – and how I can perfect this craft, this art, further. By spring, I had read some great books on writing, including Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ and Michal Chabon’s 'Maps and Legends.’ And also, by spring I had started sitting daily on the balcony, at regular early morning hours, just showing up and doing my damn best to write something and get into the swing of regularity. We all know this, and all writers write about it – the difficult art of just sitting there and committing to the articulation of thoughts in the rigid and fabulous confines of letters, words, punctuation marks. It helped that I had deadlines to meet, and ideas that I wanted to share, and the time (carefully, painfully, carved out) to sit and try – and it helped that I had this peaceful space, this balcony, to help make writing happen.

So of course I want to pack the balcony and take it with me anywhere I go – if only the balcony was as mobile as my laptop! Can I keep up the pace and tempo of writing that I’ve cultivated in Jerusalem and write the same way at my desk back in Manhattan??

Yeah, I know it’s not about the physical balcony. It’s like the story about the Jewish kids who come back from summer camp and refuse to perform Sabbath rituals unless those are conducted by a lake. But the balcony became a symbol – a private – now public – icon of the personal mental place in which I reside as a writer: right there between the innermost private musings and the general public – on the balcony, so to speak, of my life. I want to figure out how to keep ‘sitting on the balcony’ – entering this state of mind, regularly carving out the time and voicing my thoughts in words that enter the public domain, generate conversation. (Why do I need to do that? Well, why do you now read these words? There’s something here about conversation, about dialogue and learning and sharing concepts and symbols and questions that help me make sense of my life and, mysteriously, magically, touch the mind and heart of one, say, you – reading, listening, reacting - moved (hopefully!) in some way to be more present, or attentive, or alive.)

Writing is taken for granted, like walking, like air. But it’s humbling to think of its sacredness, its once-upon-a-time rarity. Texting, like writing, gets the message across, but writing, like slow food, benefits from time and patience. In this week’s Torah tale, Va’etchanan, as Moses reflects on the Sinai years, he delivers several poetic paragraphs that will eventually dominate Jewish liturgy: the S’hma prayer. Within the S’hma is the following instruction to write things down, an instruction aimed at preserving literacy, and ensuring that our multiply exiled people will always have a way to stay grounded:

"And you shall write the words upon the door-posts of your house, and your gates." (Dvarim 6:9)

The ‘words’ mentioned here are these precise words – this very verse. Jewish households to this day are marked on their doorposts with these exact words, written in Hebrew on tiny parchments: in essence, we are nailing the instruction manual of how to be Jewish to our thresholds. (It’s not a bad idea for what to do with instruction manuals. While packing I must have thrown out at least a dozen different manuals, little fold outs of how to assemble and maintain a printer, a water filter, a camera, a phone.)

What strikes me is the insistence on regularity. Say these words daily, see them before you as you enter and exit your home – mark your life with these reminders for better living.

The laptop will be the last to be packed. In a few days I will close it and take a last look around, and kiss the mezuzah on this door, and cross this threshold and say thank you and goodbye little house. But for now, I’m still here, on the balcony, afternoon breeze, still fasting in memory of exiles gone, writing about writing, reminding myself to remember what this has all been about. I’ll pack the words, spoken here, and written, and I’ll inscribe them on the doorpost that leads out to this balcony, and I’ll pack the door handles and the sunsets, and the breeze.

RE:VERB FORTY / D'VARIM / BELIEVE
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

BELIEVE

Henry dies around 2am Jerusalem time. I put the book down, sobbing. It wasn’t unexpected but his loss, nevertheless, is shocking. I go online and look on gchat for A. who is in India, god know what time, and I type ‘Henry just died.’ She immediately replies ‘o honey I’m so sorry. I know how you feel.’ And so on. We chat for about 10 consoling minutes, she in the middle of the monsoon and me in the hot Jerusalem night, grieving an imaginary dead man in Chicago.

It’s weird, we both acknowledge that – but still, we grieve, captivated within the ‘make believe’ drama that good fiction writing can provide. We chat a little longer, candid, open about our own longings and loves and losses. The book ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ – A. gave it to me to read – is fiction – but our reactions and feelings are real – and then what’s reality anyway? Here I am in Jerusalem, a city spun from the pages of sacred books, spinning into violent realities that far exceed all fictions.

In Jerusalem, it seems, all the myths and truths and fictions and faiths clash constantly.

The latest: ultra orthodox riots, hurled rocks and dirty diapers, burnt garbage cans, dozens of arrests. The cause is the recent arrest of a woman who belongs to one of the Ultra Orthodox Anti Zionist sects – she is accused of extreme neglect – starvation - of her three year old son and was recently taken into state custody, while the child was rushed to the hospital. As a result, and as security measures - all welfare stations have been closed to that specific Ultra Orthodox sector. ‘If only the yeshiva boys had air-conditioning in their rooms, they wouldn’t get so angry,’ one of the rabbis said to the press last week, half joking. ‘We don’t believe the police, the government or the media,’ responds another spokesperson for the protestors – ‘we believe that we should take care of our own people and only with God’s guidance.’ It’s a media circus of course with fierce opponents choosing to believe this or that version of this civic brawl, sadly at the expense of a family that is clearly in need of help.

Once again, in the middle of the summer heat, the clash of values and the high cost of beliefs is at the root of trouble that’s been rocking this ancient, tired city of faith for so many generations under an enduring blazing sun. What one does or doesn’t believe here spills to the streets – becomes public policy or burnt plastic. Believing, in Jerusalem, is, somehow, part of the territory – inescapable, volatile. Everybody believes something here, fiercely. Even those who don’t believe – in God, or in Zionism, in a Two State Solution, or in basic human hope – have to have an opinion here – have to believe something. It’s not easy to live by your conviction and belief, taking sides, side by side with everybody else’s side…It’s never been easy, and it isn’t getting any easier. These recent clashes are but a reflection of the widening gap between different sectors in Israeli society, a gap that is redefining, slowly, what Israel is – and what values and beliefs will determine its future. One thing is clear – we’ve never been a people known for consensus, especially when it comes to matters of faith.

A quick check on this week’s Torah tale reveals this reminder, tucked into a brilliant bitter speech - Moses reminds his flock, on the eve of entrance to the Promised Land of how little faith they had in him, and in his vision for their future. The speech is in the first chapter of the fifth and final of the Five Books of Moses. The book, like this week’s portion is called ‘D'varim’ – “Words” or also “Things”, and it consists of the last will, summary, last song, and lots of other things Moses says before he dies. In this speech he reminds his people of the time when they heard the frightening report of the spies – how dangerous and overpopulated Canaan was – and refused to enter the Promised Land. Moses, Ultra Early Zionist, is angry – ‘God carried you through the desert as a father carries his son’- and you refuse to enter the land? He blames it on their faith, or lack thereof: “Yet in this thing you do not believe God’ (D’varim 1:32) He hurls at them – the ‘thing’ meaning – their refusal to enter the land, to believe his vision.

Who were they, all those Hebrews who checked out the spy reports and said – no, thank you – we’re not into taking over a populated region. Or – how about Egypt? They may not have had the faith in the complex Promised Land vision of Moses and Joshua – but what did they believe in? how valid their point of view – even though it is clearly portrayed in this book – and in our history –as the ‘bad’ view. Translated into today’s terms – the Children of Israel that Moses blames for not believing in the Promised Land are not that much different than most world Jews today for whom Israel is maybe a visit but are definitely not moving in any time soon. Or maybe they are even like the Ultra Orthodox Anti Zionist Jerusalem Jews who live here but refuse to recognize the State of Israel as the legitimate sovereign of the Holy Land. They, like those ancient Hebrews, simply stick to a different set of beliefs and values that bleed into our messy reality.

This business of belief gets complicated. That’s why we return to good books, not just the Good Book.

A few months ago A. recommended that I read ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’. She is a dear trusted friend and a smart teacher and writer, so I obeyed, except that I somehow got it wrong and walked out of the airport bookstore with ‘the Memory Keeper’s Daughter’ – which I liked - but made A. laugh real hard when I told her about it and asked her why she wanted me to read it. Just before going back to India, she went and bought me the book she wanted me to read in the first place. I’d been reading it for several weeks, slowly savoring the end - ‘in the last two weeks,’ A. writes, 'I gave myself one page a day.' And now it’s done: Another book on the shelf – a souvenir of a stirring journey, an intellectually and emotionally stimulating metaphor – and really, heartbreaking in a very beautiful way. What made it so powerful? A. and I wonder about, one chat line at a time. ‘it reminded me to believe that love is possible – it gave strength and validity to the belief in love and in the terrible beauty of longing.’

A. & I finish chatting and I slog out and sit on the quiet balcony and think: isn’t the Torah also a book that invites the reader to time travel back and forth between then and now? Isn’t it also a book about yearning, and love and about the courage to – or not to – believe?

I guess that’s what makes a good book great. It’s a lot like life.

MAVEN IN JERUSALEM
CROSSING OVER

Storahtelling Maven Event in Jerusalem
July 25,2009 6pm
Free!

Amichai Lau-Lavie and the Israel Storahtelling team present a special Storahtelling for Shabbat Hazon.

Join us as we follow Moses up to the mountain top on his campaign to enter the Promised Land – at all costs. Is it worth the struggle?

This Storahtelling Maven Event will be conducted in Hebrew and followed by a musical Havdala

Mercaz Tarbut Amim
Emek Refaim Jerusalem

click the image to enlarge

RE:VERB THIRTY-NINE / MATOT MAASEI / TRAVEL
A weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

A year-long Jerusalem Journey, action by action, verb by verb. Each week I pluck a verb from the Torah portion and set it reverberating both with its context and with my own. Let's make this a conversation, and talk our walk.

TRAVEL

It’s the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, on another flight to the Middle East. The cabin lights are off, the individual video screens flicker here and there, most passengers are sleeping, but I’m wide awake, and am quietly crying, not sure why.

I call it ‘travel tax’ – the method of pay is physical and emotional.

I’m usually among the sleepers on these overnight voyages, sleeping pill and a scotch as my faithful helpers, but not this time, which is also the first leg of the last round-trip for this year of excessive travel. I’m trying to do the math – is this the eighth or ninth flight back and forth between NY and Israel this year?? Maybe I’m crying because of this constant sense of ‘in between’ – overdue ‘travel tax’. Or maybe and also, I’m crying because of the moving movie I just finished watching: “motorcycle diaries” – the early, defining years of Che Guevara’s life. His reaction to human suffering and injustice, his young, beautiful passion – this is the stuff that makes me cry on planes. (Full disclosure here: I also watched the last 30 minutes of ‘confessions of a shopaholic’ and that too made me weepy – just the true and tried Hollywood recipe for the triumph of the will and the victory of happily ever after… the American-Modern Orthodox gaggle of girls sitting across the aisle noted my selection and reaction with unrestrained giggles.)

And maybe I’m crying because A.’s little feet, in red converse sneakers, are resting on my thighs, while the rest of her little body stretches across the middle seat, with her head tucked into the lap of her mom, snug against the window, both of them now sound asleep. This is the first time this year that I haven’t flown solo – A., S. and I take up a whole row, family style, and we’re traveling together, and somehow, this is enough of a significant change in my travel life to make me pause, and reflect, and reach for a tissue. Traveling together with others – esp. with children - is a very different form of journey.

I turn off the video screen in front of me (even though there are 500 more movie selections) and flip open ye Good Book. This week’s Torah tale marks the end of Ba’midbar - the fourth book of Moses – the book of wilderness – the book of traveling.

It’s a double Torah-portion entitled ‘Matot Maasei’ but it’s read as a cohesive text, mostly comprised of collections of lists, attempting to sum up, add up and finalize all that Israel went through in 40 years of wandering thorough the Sinai desert on their journey home.

48: And they traveled from the mountains of Abarim, and pitched in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.

They camp out at the plains of Moab, by the banks of the Jordan River, overlooking Israel, is their one-before-last stop. One of the lists describes the number of times Israel packed up camp and took off again, picking up where they left off on a seemingly endless travel schedule. They do this no less than 43 times in 40 years. That means that at least once a year they had to pack and go. Talk about 'travel tax.' No wonder our ancestors were so stiff necked and generally grumpy and rebellious, and weepy. Can you imagine growing up and moving homes at least once a year? How did that experience impact the collective identity of our people? How did this early, defining sense of constant travel and moving about influence and mold the Jewish sense of belonging – or not - to any specific geographical location in any significant manner? How has this altered our notion of ‘home’ or even our notion of ‘homeland?’ I know that so much of Jewish history is about persecution and forced travel – but how much of it is actually built in to our collective DNA? Is it possible that our basic operational status is to be the wandering people – all over the place? That we actually thrive on travel – on constant motion and dispersion - in order to exist? That we are simply a people who are very bad at sitting still in one place for more than a year or a couple of centuries at best??

On the way to the airport, I saw a yellow cab with a sign on its roof ‘PLEASE GO AWAY’ – an advertisement for a travel agency. Smart. But it made me sigh. Enough going away.

After a year of Sinai like traveling, I, like my ancestors, have mastered the art of travel, but there’s a part of me, as was perhaps to them – that really wants to call one place only – home. And not go away quite that often. And I know that home is where the heart is, and still…

The children of Israel leave Egypt and then travel and camp, travel and camp, pitch their tents when the pillar of fire stops, and take off again when that light changes, 43 times. Reading this dry travel itinerary in chapter 33 in the middle of this flight to Israel becomes, suddenly, a very moving experience. The same expression repeats verse after verse, like a hypnotic chant, like the wheels of a train: travel, travel, travel… journey, journey, journey… home, home, home….

And maybe what makes the difference between travel as a tiresome duty and travel as a mission of will is the sense of collective – traveling together, as the Hebrews did then, as I’m doing tonight. Maybe that’s part of why the weeping – the sense of how vast the world is – and how vast the real sense of what home can mean, and with whom, and when.

A. wakes up with less than one hour to go before landing in Tel Aviv, and Dora the Explorer is off on adventures that keep us all occupied till we get there...here. All smiles, night time weeping over, we look outside the window at the sunny morning, and the captain announces: shalom and welcome home.

Til next time.