Storahtelling

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

Why tell the same old stories again and again? Aren’t we ready for something new?

Or: Why create new Storahtellings every time the High Holy Days come around? Don’t the Torah portions stay the same from year to year? And aren’t they perennial for a reason?

All of these questions point to the relationship between stories and shift: The way telling the same story with a slight change in aperture or frame reveals a layer previously unseen, and the risk in changing the stories we tell ourselves, how our internal, interpersonal, and societal realities might become unsettled as a result.

Each time we begin scripting, we start with questions of purpose: Why tell this story again, now? What’s alive in the world, and in the hearts and minds of our community, that might allow the familiar elements of an archetypal tale to strike a new chord, or tickle an unexpected emotional or intellectual frequency?

Once the concept is grounded in purpose, we turn to design: How might the tools of stagecraft, ritual, and play invite people into an imaginative world? And how might we help them leave that world with a new understanding of themselves, one another, or the world around them?

Ultimately, we’re asking: How can an experience create the conditions for a shift in perspective, action, or behavior?

This year, inspired by Artist in Residence Yael Kanarek’s groundbreaking work with Toratah, the Regendered Bible, and Artist in Residence Gili Getz’s work dramatizing societal shift underway in real time through the language of photography, we examine ways of shifting the focus of our ancestral narratives to make space for holy change.

On Rosh Hashanah, we begin inside the classic binding story, though retold as a mother and daughter rather than a father and son, but then travel through the power of memory into an overlooked story that happens just before: not one of violence, but rather one of peace. How do we SHIFT from what we know to what we can imagine, breaking long chains of the familiar for new horizons of the possible? Leaving the story we’ve told a thousand times to the side is one such illustration of the point.

On Yom Kippur, we examine not the expiation/atonement ritual itself but rather the moment that precedes it: the moment in which a priestess, an emissary of the divine, has to clean or prepare the altar on which forgiveness can be made. All of us live inside stories and social structures we did not create, but that we learn we must become responsible for and responsive to over time. What needs to be cleared or cleaned out in order for a new story to become possible? Or: What messes inside ourselves and in the world must we draw close to in order to SHIFT?

It has become almost a throwaway to note that “the world is on fire.” From the increasingly visible ravages of climate change to the advancingly real questions of what distinguishes human intelligence and consciousness from the artificial realm, this idiom is a way of saying: much is shifting, and much too quickly and dramatically for us to comprehend.

There’s a reason stories like The Odyssey keep finding their way back into our cultural consciousness. We may not all be grappling with monsters, sirens, and the wrath of the gods, but we are all navigating transitions, uncertainties, and the perennial questions of what we’re doing here and what it all means.

May this year’s High Holy Day Storahtellings be an invitation to all of us to slow down, to focus in, and to ask with sincerity the questions I began with:

Why create new Storahtellings every time the High Holy Days come around?

Why tell the same old stories again and again?

If you listen closely, you might hear your own answer.

Shana tova,

Ben Freeman
High Holy Day Storahtelling Director and Ritual Leader

Rosh Hashanah: “Imagine, Peace”

Parashat Vayera,
Genesis 21:22-26 & 27-31

When Emrahama raises the knife to slay her daughter in a test of faith, she is struck by a memory of making peace with one of her rivals. Upon taking an imaginative journey back to that time, she realizes she is ready to shift out of the old ways of violence and imagine something new.

Concept development and scripting:

Ben Freeman
Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie
Amanda Miller

Maven Team:

Danielle Alhassid (Animation)
Maryam Chishti (Titzhak/Imimalka)
Amanda Miller (Writer)
Tracey Erin Smith (Emrahama)