NEW YORK, NY September 26, 2003 — The modern theater has its roots in ancient religious rituals. And as anyone who's been to a Christmas or Easter pageant knows, modern religion sometimes draws generously from the stage. As Jews around the world head to synagogues for the High Holy Days, this weekend and next, some will find familiar services infused with new drama. WNYC's Fred Mogul has more.

Jews who attend the Actors Temple in Times Square for Rosh HaShana will hear familiar sounds -- the chanting of prayer, the blowing of the shofar, a ram's horn, and, of course the show-boating of Vaudeville?!? The Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur can be a pretty solemn affair in some circles. But for theater director Amichai Lau-Lavie the High Holy Days are an opportunity to try something else.

It's not every day that the High Priest of Israel initiates his young sons into holy serice in the tent. What a drama!...

Lau-Lavie: In the temple in Jerusalem, where the high priest did the whole shpiel, with the sacrifices and trumpets and incense - maybe it isn't theater, but it certainly is a spectacle for the audience. And then you think about the synagogue todayFor the last 1,000 or more years it's become dry performance.

Lau-Lavie considers weekly scriptural reading the world's oldest series of re-runs. His solution is Storah-telling - a blend of story-telling and readings from the Torah, or Jewish scripture. Last weekend, at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, about 50 people gathered to watch Scapegoat, an hour-long show performed by Lau-Lavie's troop about an ancient ritual, described in the Bible and recited on Yom Kippur. The Israelites' High Priest places the sins of the people onto a sacrificial goat, on the Day of Atonement. Lau-Lavie's character leads the goat into the desert, to push it over a cliff.

Lau-Lavie: Back in town right now, they're all atoning -- the height of the service! -- for all of the sins. The big thieves and the liars and the murderers and the gossipers. All on your head

Even among those who liberally take liberties with liturgy, inserting a dramatic interlude in the middle of the prayers is a novel step. Lau-Lavie, who has an impish intensity, calls it prayerformance.

Lau-Lavie: There is a hesitation on the part of many people to bring theater, with all of its trappings, into the synagogue, and I understand that hesitation, historically and currently, but I think it's an amazing opportunity to bridge the worlds that we live in.

Lau-Lavie wants to blur the line between synagogue and theater, performance and ritual. He believes this fusion can help give people what they're not getting out of synagogues. City College Sociologist Samuel Heilman has written about American Jewish practices. He says religious institutions are borrowing techniques from arts, culture and entertainment to overcome people's feelings of frustration.

Heilman: Probably the majority of American Jews are Jewishly illiterate, and yet they still want to become engaged by their religion and by their faith. So here's a way of taking something that was opaque, and it says, Well, you don't need that. We can zap you straight to the experience and bypass all of that. I think that's attractive.

Various places in New York and Washington hope StorahTelling will attract new people over the coming High Holy Days. Rabbi Josh Simon is confident the group will help him revive his synagogue near Times Square, called The Actors Temple. Founded in the 1920's, the temple was once home to Sophie Tucker, Red Buttons and, it's said, at least two of the Three Stooges. Recently, StorahTelling became the temple's theater company in residence. Simon believes theater, no less than rituals or prayers, can help people find wisdom and truth.

Simon: We haven't written a new blessing in a 1,000 years, so the script is closed. That leaves you very far from the street outside the shul, and the reality outside the shul. Let's bring more of the culture that's outside the synagogue, and the technology, the means of communication. How people consume ideas may have changed, they may want to dance to it first Mogul: Isn't the synagogue supposed to be apart? Aren't people supposed to experience something numinous? If your baseline for what you expect is numinosity, my friends, you have very, very high standards. Transcendence is wonderful, but transcendence grows from security and from wisdom, which comes from learning, which comes from being there enough to plant original ideas in minds that have been numbed by the blizzard of stimulation.

Author and professor Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary is open to the idea of introducing theater into the services, but he wants to know what's being given up in the process. He knows traditional prayers and rituals are difficult. That doesn't mean they have to be stale and boring.

Gillman: My job as a rabbi is to try to teach to expand, to open up the texts, to try to get at what is being said there, and why it's important, and why it might have people, even to people who are only amateurs or toe-dippers or who are only in the service for a short period of time and who don't come every week.

Come the Jewish New Year, synagogues swell with often reluctant pilgrims. Rabbi Simon hopes many of them will find something in StorahTelling that will interest them enough to come back during the rest of the year. And for those who are skeptical about the drama in the main sanctuary, there will be a special alternative -- the standard traditional service.



Storahtelling
The Actors Temple
High Holy Day Basics
www.virtualjerusalem.com