Although not quite at Fiddler on the Roof levels of ubiquity, The Dybbuk, or, Between Two Worlds, written at the turn of the century by ethnographer and playright S.Ansky, is one of the most widely known works of Yiddish theatre.  The tale of thwarted lovers and demon possession continues to inspire re-stagings and re-imaginings. The latest is Looking Through Glass, a new modern-day adaptation by observant Jewish troupe 24/6 Theater, written by Ken Kaissar and directed by Yoni Oppenheim.

In the original play, Leah is the only daughter of a wealthy widower. Khanan is a poor Talmud scholar whose father died before his birth. They meet over a Shabbat meal the very night Khanan arrives in town to study at the beit midrash, and feel an instant connection—a connection that, unbeknowst to them, is the result of their fathers’ youthful promise that their unborn children would marry each other.

But motions are already in place to betroth Leah to another, much to the displeasure of her and Khanan. Khanan, already a Kabbalist, turns to increasingly fringe rituals to try and magically halt the engagement negotiations and acquire enough money to present himself as a suitable candidate. Eventually in desperation he calls on the Devil— and dies.

In Looking Through Glass, it is Leah’s mother is rather than father who is widowed, and Leah (Judy Ammar) has new dimension as an ER doctor. Leah and her beloved still meet on his first night in town—he is hanging out on her stoop in Brooklyn, reading a book of Kabbalah, as one presumably does in Brooklyn—but he is no Talmud student.

This Khanan— now named Jacob (David Hilfstein)— proudly tells Leah, her boyfriend, and her mother that he is a yeshiva drop-out who prefers to study now on his own. What’s more, he is a full-time “professional protestor” (not his term) from DC, passionate about protecting the rights of immigrants.

Leah’s mother and her boyfriend quickly out themselves as conservatives, asking Jacob why he wants to be an unemployed “agitator” protecting terrorists. (A line made a bit more nuanced by the fact that Vidal Loew, who plays the boyfriend, delivers it in a strong French accent.)

The boyfriend, Shmueli, is far more fleshed out in 24/6’s adaption than the nameless bridegroom in the original. Shmueli and Leah have known each other for years and have been dating for months by the time Jacob shows up. They are comfortable together, but no match for the chemistry the strangers have with one another.

In this version it is Leah, rather than a parent, who invites the stranger into their home for Shabbat dinner. And in this version, they don’t just stare at each other over the candle flames—after mom goes to bed, Jacob quizzes Leah about her level of attraction to him vs. Shmueli, then pulls her close and nuzzles her cheek.

In a talkback after the show, playwright Ken Kaisar said he wanted his adaption to empower Leah—“make her the driving force of the play, bring her to the fore.” But this is the first of several uncomfortable moments in which the script doesn’t seem to fully recognize the unbalanced power dynamic between her and Jacob.

In the modern era, it is not her father’s decision that forces Leah into a marriage, but societal pressures. She picks the stable Shmueli over the unknown passion represented by the stranger. (A choice that to me made a lot of sense, given Jacob’s grating enthusiasm for group meditation exercises—he’s #thatguy at your Shabbos table.)

But more damning is his reaction when running into Leah shortly after she has accepted Shmueli’s proposal. He yells at the woman he’s known for all of one weekend: “How could you expect me to be happy for you?” and then precedes to berate her for breaking his heart and removing all meaning from his life—a line that caused my female friend and I to turn to each other with eyebrows raised high in alarm.

If Leah was really a “driving force,” as Kaissar said, perhaps she would have pushed back a little more on this, but their fated attraction has its pull. She urges Jacob to find meaning in his life and forget her, and they tearfully part.

Like Khanan, Jacob now proceeds to die before his time, by suicide rather than the devil. And like Khanan, Jacob returns on Leah’s wedding night to possess his fated bride.

In The Dybbuk, this possession is invited by Leah—a powerful moment where, for the first time in the narrative she takes control of her own life.  In Looking Through Glass it comes across as far less consensual (though Ammar gives a stunning performance, switching back and forth between her voice and that of the vengeful dybbuk).

In both iterations of this story, the exorcism efforts of the community fail, because ultimately Leah does not want to be saved.

The end of 24/6’s show reveals that, like in the original play, the fathers’ had made a pact of betrothal for their children. So how does the fact that Leah’s attraction to Jacob may not have been her own, but the machinations of a dead father? It’s never explored.

The show’s premise has a lot of promise, and brilliant, compelling performances from the two leads and from Avi Soroka (who plays the ghost of Sholem Ansky, as well as of Leah’s father, and is hard to take your eyes off of while he speaks). The staging at Jewel Box Theater in Manhattan was gorgeous, and it will be exciting to see what the cast brings to the next performance of the play, this Sunday at Ansche Chesed synagogue in Manhattan.

But it seems strange that a retelling that aims to delve into Leah’s inner life has so many moments that don’t fully explore her reactions—perhaps she doesn’t call out Jacob’s manipulations because of her Orthodox background, or because of her lack of a father figure, but we can only guess. If she’s still okay with the fact that she dies on her wedding day because of another man’s pact, then we need to know why.

It seems Leah has resisted capture once again.

24/6 will perform a reading of the play at Ansche Chesed in their chapel at 4pm this Sunday January 7th. Free and open to the public.

Photos by Paul Terrie

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Halfway through the “Death Café” my leg started shaking—tremors so slight I couldn’t see them, but strong enough that when I put my hand on my thigh I could feel that I was shivering, as if in fear. Which was weird, because I was actually having a lot of fun.

I had not begun the day planning to spend one of the final evenings before the Day of Atonement sitting in an anarchist feminist bookstore and talking about death with a circle with strangers, but the chance seemed too seasonally appropriate to pass up.

“Death Cafe is a place to wonder together about the mystery and meaning of life and to discuss death comfortably and openly,” according to the Bluestockings’ website. (Bluestocking has repeatedly hosted one of the city’s multiple unaffiliated Death Cafés, but was not involved in organizing this particular event.)  Originating in London in 2011, these gatherings respond to what planners and participants see as an unhealthy silence around the subject of mortality in daily life. We all know we are going to die someday, so why not admit to that awareness, and talk about our feelings on the matter?

Organizers describe the result as a “free-wheeling, self-facilitated conversation around death and dying, inevitably touching upon life and living.”

The Jewish calendar, too, knows living and dying are inextricably linked. On Rosh Hashana we celebrate the New Year by eating round foods and looking forward with friends and family to the year to come… and by reciting all the possible ways we might die before it is complete. “Who by water, who by fire?” the chazan chants as we look furtively round the sanctuary.

And then just ten days later we are back, pleading to be be written in the book of life—but also declaring our acceptance of whatever fate the year holds.

That kind of acceptance—of our bodies’ mortality, of a certain lack of control over our own continuation—is something I struggle to achieve. Even as I say the words, my mind can’t quite believe that I could really (ever!) die.

And so the Death Café sounded like a good chance to practice putting myself in the mindset of acceptance.

The format of the café is simple. We were broken up into small groups, and asked to share our names and what had brought us there. My group included a woman who’d spent time at a Zen monastery and was interested in hospice work, a young hospital doctor looking to engage more fully with the deaths of patients, and a teenager in ripped jeans who described how losing a family member to suicide at a young age had changed her worldview.

In plastic chairs surrounded by books about urban planning and DIY radicalism, we asked each other increasingly personal questions.  Whether we really believed in a self, what kinds of burials we wanted for our bodies. Which, we imagined, might upset us more at the moment of death—the sorrow of leaving loved ones, or the fear of the unknown?

In the calm, cookie-and-tea fueled atmosphere, words poured forth from all of us. Throughout the evening, snippets of other circles’ conversations, equally compelling, were audible. There was so much to talk about, and, as we repeatedly acknowledged, who knew how much time we had to talk about it? Yet somehow the quality of the conversation remained unrushed.

One death café veteran in our group described the feeling of “having your head opened” that these conversations give her, and I could understand what she meant. Admitting that we are going to die one day—really thinking about it—is taboo, is downright scary.

But it is also necessary and important. On Yom Kippur, our petitions to be written in the Book of Life act as an additional wake-up call, a push to do teshuvah and change our ways for the better. And while many justifiably find the “sin=death” correlation this implies troubling, the reminder that we are mortal is indeed a powerful impetus for living well.

The organizers of the particular Death Café I attended say their inspiration to hold it came out of a conversation between friends about what a “good death” might mean—and that although they were still looking for the answer, they were sure that part of it was a living a life in which you treat others well. By thinking forward to the end, we can perhaps pull back a little, look at the larger patterns in our behavior, do better.

Every year in my parent’s synagogue, we read a text that describes Yom Kippur as just that kind of practice.

“One year. Give me one more year. I’m not finished. Not yet. We’re afraid. We don’t want to die. But Yom Kippur is about dying. We enact the drama of our dying. We put on our kittels. We stop eating. It’s over. How do I let go of this life? How I forgive everything, everyone, myself, and let my life fall… Give up your little story. Give up your small self.”

At my parents’ synagogue, since I was a child, we’ve read that text just before the Aleinu. I kept thinking of it as I sat in my circle of strangers, nibbling on a cookie. When I got home, I looked it up. The author, Bruce Fertman, describes the full prostration as another kind practice death, a surrender.

But it doesn’t stop there:

“Bowing is not just about about giving up and going down. It’s about giving up and going down in order to get back up. All the way up. Up, more easily and further than you have ever been. Up, with fresh energy, power, openness. Up, with renewed purpose…From where does our strength come? Our strength comes from God. But sometimes we’ve got to go down to get it. We rise with strength renewed.”

Wishing you a good practice death, and a good renewal and rebirth. Gmar chatima tova.

The post Tea and Cookies and Death appeared first on Jewcy.

This past Sunday in a rented storefront in Crown Heights, Vaybertaytsh, a podcast which producer Sandy Fox bills as “the first—as far as we know— Yiddish speaking, feminist radio program” celebrated the release of its second season.

Before it was a podcast, “Vaybertaytsh” – literally “translations for women” in Yiddish—was a term once used for commentaries on Torah written by Hebrew-literate Ashkenazi men for their Yiddish-speaking women wives (and other women) who were unlikely to learn the “Loshnkoydesh” (“holy tongue”) themselves. “Vaybertaytsh” also came at times to refer to the language of Yiddish itself, one of many names the “jargon” (another slang term for Yiddish) went by.

This podcast is a project of reclamation of the word.  Women themselves become the teachers, “flipping the concept of ‘vaybertaytsh’ on its head,” says Fox, “explaining and commenting on our own terms.” Interviews in the first season included a midwife serving the Hasidic community, a female cantor  for the renewal movement in Germany, and several international attendees of the Women’s March last January.

These interviews and conversations take place entirely in Yiddish, and the podcast draws guests mainly from the international community of Yiddishists, a group which speaks Yiddish in order to preserve the language. The Yiddishist movement began at the turn of the 20th century as activists and scholars sought to “legitimize” what was at the time seen as a “low” tongue, spoken by unsophisticated people—and women. “Those scholars were primarily men whose mission was to de-feminize Yiddish, to distance the language from its association with women as a ‘mameloshn,’ [or ‘mom’s tongue’],” Fox told me.

Sandy Fox, who also goes by the Yiddish name Sosye, describes Vaybertaytsh both as a continuation and a refutation of that philosophy. Just as these men sought to produce mainstream literature and journalism in Yiddish, Fox creates episodes of Vaybertaytsh available for download on any podcast app.

But unlike this earlier wave of Yiddishists, Fox does not shy from association with women or the home. The pilot opens with a tribute to the Riot Grrrl music movement , and another episode in the first season is devoted to a conversation between women who have lost their mothers on their memories of those women.

Nor does Fox insist on a rigid grammatical purity, as the first wave of many turn-of-the-century Yiddishists did. “I don’t really believe there is such a thing as ‘authentic’ Yiddish,” she says, “and it can be uncomfortable to speak perfect clinical Yiddish.” Vaybertaytsh’s opening episode contains a kind of non-apology for any grammatical “mistakes” the podcast may make: “Let’s simply feel free to speak” says Fox in the first episode (in of course, Yiddish). Creating something new is “too important to wait for a perfect Yiddish.”

As a Yiddish learner who speaks with less than perfect grammar, this stance excites me. More than once I have lost my train of thought while speaking due to interruptions correcting my grammar. While such interruptions are kindly meant and an important part of the language-learning process, they can make communication a little exhausting. “Often it’s been men serving as the gatekeepers,” Fox notes.  That gate-keeping can turn people away from actually speaking the language, something the relatively small community of Yiddishists arguably cannot afford.

At the second season’s release party, Fox welcomed non-Yiddish-fluent guests to “Yiddishland” before continuing entirely in Yiddish, while translations in English appeared onscreen behind her. “Maybe it seems weird, considering the fact that we all speak English. But such is the way of the Yiddishists,” the screen read, “Welcome to our world.”

The default language of the night was Yiddish, with a “learner’s couch” equipped with a dictionary. Party attendees schmoozed over the food, the drinks,  and the choice of women’s social justice groups to which to donate the nights proceeds (the winner was Days for Girls), all in Yiddish of varying fluency. Emboldened by the podcast’s premise, I took my time forming clunky sentences for concepts that I might have communicated much faster in English. By the time the event ended, I was only rarely asking my conversational partners to repeat themselves.

One man asked me near the evening’s end how I had first encountered Vaybertaytsh. I told him I’d heard of it online, I’d been unsure if my language comprehension would be strong enough to follow along, but I eventually checked it out and was using it to train my ear. “And here I am!” I finished exuberantly. My conversational partner nodded. “Okay. But I didn’t mean the podcast—I meant the language.”

Rachel Wetter is an educator and history nerd living in New York who also goes by Rokhl.

Images via Facebook.

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