Storahtelling integrates Judaism’s oldest form of sacred storytelling with contemporary stagecraft.

Time travel is a recurrent human fascination, one that opens up at least as many questions as it hopes to solve: beyond the mechanics of how it theoretically works, if we could alter the past or preview the future, how would that affect our ability to live in the present?

The Torah service itself is a kind of time travel. According to midrash, the interpretive art of reading between the lines of our ancestral sacred texts, every time the Torah is chanted from all of us are gathered as we were at Mount Sinai, inhabiting both our real lives in the twenty-first century and a mythic part of us born much sooner.

In this year’s High Holy Day Storahtellings, characters travel across time and space to intercept one another at choice points, moments of moral decision. A contemporary Abraham meets the mythic Mother of Disobedience as he wrestles with which voices inside himself to obey. A contemporary Jew and their Torah-time ancestor connect through the strange magic of a nondescript membership services office to understand the nuances of an ancestral contract to which, it turns out, all of us are subject.

At a moment when the Jewish world has been in a sustained crisis of identity, with some of us feeling more connected than ever, others feeling profoundly alienated, many of us feeling a mix of the two, what could traveling to the past or the future have to teach us about our own resilience? At a moment where so many precepts of democratic society are in question and under siege, can engaging with our ancestral myths help us tap back into our own agency? We certainly believe so.

As we continue reviving the ancient art form of simultaneous translation and interpretation of Torah we hope all of our sense of time may be enlarged: so that we can slow down and rev up, empowered to do the work of repair that is needed now.

Shana tova,

Ben Freeman
High Holy Day Storahtelling Director and Ritual Leader

Rosh Hashanah: “Altar of Always?”

Parashat Vayera,
Genesis 22:1-4 & 10-14

Abraham wrestles with the various voices inside his head as he approaches this famous test — the voice of the god he has learned to trust telling him to sacrifice his son, and another voice urging him to make a different choice. We learn this voice is the Mother of Disobedience, who makes herself materially present to interrupt yet another cycle of violence soaking the soil of this powerful, painful place.

Abraham is every father, The Father, also every parent, wrestling with choices – will he offer up his son or save him? Will he offer up his child on the altar of communal claim, the collective spirit, or ignore this sacrifice to break free from this pattern of obedience and liberate the cycle? He is also now – a father hesitating sending off his boy to the base, to military service.

The Mother is every mother also every parent, who has already made the choice to choose and deviate – even at the price of exile from familiar. She is both here and always.

She will want Abraham to say No and free the story.
As he wrestles, so do we.
There is no clear conclusion. The test is on.
(We are being tested, too.)

Concept development and scripting:

Rabbi Amichai-Lau Lavie, Ben Freeman, and Ari L. Monts/Emet

Maven Team:

William DeMeritt as Abraham
Zo Tipp as The Mother
Zhenya Lopatnik: Sand-Art