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Rabbi Janet Offel
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5768
Temple Kol Tikvah

SACRED THEATER

            There are many questions that I am asked as a rabbi: questions about theology, bible, liturgy, and history but there is one question that I am asked more than any other.  And what might that age old question be?

            “Do rabbis have a central sermon bank where they go to get pre-written sermons, or at least sermon ideas?”

            How many of you have wondered that same thing?

            O.k., so in the interests of tshuvah (repentance) and setting things clear for the New Year, I am going to come clean.

            There is at least one national company that I know of that sells sermons.  And every year, the local Board of Rabbis has a sermon seminar complete with a sermon exchange.  But the truth is, I don’t know any colleagues who have ever used someone else’s sermon.  For one thing, rabbis are known for their egos, and are notorious for wanting to put their own personal imprint on everything they do.  For another, it is through the experience of writing sermons that we, as rabbis, prepare for the High Holidays.  Yes we kvetch and moan and groan about how overwhelming it feels as the fall holidays approach, but writing our High Holiday sermons becomes one of the ways that we prepare for the grand experience of these Days of Awe.

            And grand it is, with our choir having prepared painstakingly with musical director Tova Morcos for months on end, our cantor Caren Glasser being in full-voice and everyone decked out in their holiday finest.  It is truly a majestic experience, reminiscent of an opening night at the theater in days of yore.

            Often, many people do refer to these services as a “performance.”  And it does feel somewhat that way, what with the cameras focused on us up here on the bima, and our own congregant Leisa Korn up in the booth behind you directing the shots.  Yes, sometimes it does feel more than a bit theatrical.

            But that is what the experience of worshipping in community is really about—it is a form of sacred theater…

            Sacred theater. 

Just like in a secular theater, in our sacred theater the curtain comes up and we are transported, through song and dramatic dialogue, to a far away time and place that is also right here and now.  A scene that we know is being played out in synagogues and Jewish gatherings around the world tonight as it has been for generations.

In our ancient sacred text the Mishna, in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, there is a section devoted to the blowing of the shofar during the days that the Temple stood in Jerusalem.  We are told that in the temple, the Shofar to be sounded on Rosh Hashanah was that of the wild goat, straight, a mouth-piece covered with gold and with two trumpets on either side: the shofar sounded long and the trumpets cut short, since the mitzvah or obligation of the day was [to hear the sound of] the Shofar.  How is that for some pretty detailed staging notes from nearly two thousand years ago?

             In an essay entitled, Thoughts on the Theater by Maureen McLane, we are asked: “Theater: entertainment or challenge?  Palliative or irritant?  Escape from or plunge into the demands of living?  Theater can be and has been all of these things.”[1]

             But what if we were to insert the words High Holidays instead of theater?  In other words, one can ask: High Holidays, entertainment or challenge? Palliative or irritant? Escape from or plunge into the demands of living?  The High Holidays can be and has been all of these things.

             As we are reminded in a lesson from the Melton mini-school curriculum that some of our congregants participated in on September 6, “…What goes on in synagogue, particularly during this time [of the High Holidays], is a performance, carefully scripted and structured, with formal lines to be recited, its own choreography, and careful intent to portray a specific atmosphere.  Just as the person at the theater must suspend judgment, enter into the play and be open to the experience penetrating into the soul, so too at High Holidays, the individual must be open to the experience and the possibilities of transformation that can occur.”

             Yet, as my friend and colleague Rabbi Yoel Kahn notes, unlike in a secular theater, in sacred theater, there is no audience.  We are all equally the creators of this performance art.  We all contribute to the show, whether through the lines that we recite or through our attentive spiritual presence. 

             Unlike the experience of watching Hamlet on the stage, our sacred theater is more akin to a performance of “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” in which everyone takes part in the performance.  We all have copies of the script, in the machzorim or High Holiday prayerbooks that we hold in our hands, we all know the choreography of the times to stand and to sit, we all take turns at various times as audience and performer, the stage is set, the music prepared, and, of course, we can’t forget the tickets that everyone must have for admission, and the ushers who help direct us to our seats.

Yet in sacred theater, everyone is transformed, not just transfixed, by the act of participation.  Our involvement creates a vessel, a space, in which we can experience the emotions taking place within us.  For each of us is in a different situation, entering into these services from a different perspective.  For some, this is a daunting experience, a period of time that we set aside to assess ourselves and our lives, to look backward and ahead at the highs and lows that are a part of everyone’s life.  For others, this is a sad, perhaps even tragic time, as we remember loved ones who were with us just one year ago, but who are gone now, with only the memory of their love and presence to bring comfort to us.  Yet others are in a place of joy, beginning life anew with a new loved one, an exciting job, a new addition to the family.  I could go on and on, knowing what so many of you have been through this past year, the roads that you have traveled on this journey called life.  Yet together we stand, back for another year of reciting the words, the prayers, the songs that are so much a part of our tradition.  To invoke the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “this is the paradise of theater, a ‘gilded lapse of time’ in which the real is not so much escaped as intensified, purged of the non-essential and perhaps, if you are lucky, transformed and revealed to be transformable.”

 My liturgy teacher in rabbinical school, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, notes that, “Our prayers posit [a] world of integrity.  Our worship rehearses its reality in confident defiance of the injustice, cruelty, suffering, and pain with which humanity is sated… When worship works we are artists in the finest sense of affirming wholeness through the power of our traditional images… We rise from prayer, with those others in community round us, ready to impose religious order on the cacophony of the streets and the jangling inconsistencies of our own lives.”[2] 

 Just like in secular theater, so many of us have a favorite line, a favorite song that we wait for each year.  So much so that when Skylar Thompson, formerly known as the blond girl (I can’t believe you did that to your hair Sky—especially after we sent out a DVD highlighting you as the blond girl— so much for best laid plans…) Anyway, when Sky informed us this summer that she’s tired of singing her trademark Oseh Shalom, we told her too bad, sorry but you have to sing it.  For so many of our congregants, it is that central an experience of the High Holidays at Temple Kol Tikvah.

 In coming together in this sacred theater, we find a place of commonality, a place in which we can give voice to the myriad emotions within us, by joining together in the prayers and songs that we all know so well. 

 But not only does this sacred theater bring us together in shared commonalities, it helps integrate what we experience here to inform our lives elsewhere.  The meaningful words that we recite as a congregation empower us to look more deeply into our relationships with each other and with the larger world.  When the curtain comes down, at the end of Yom Kippur, we are reawakened, hopefully changed by the experience, renewed, uplifted and connected in a new way by the sacred moments and encounters for which these holidays set the stage.

 But, for all of this to occur, each of us must take our part seriously.  Each and everyone one of us must approach the performance with a pure heart, embrace the meaning of the words, and immerse ourselves in the action.

 Yes, these High Holidays are a form of theater, but it is an age-old dramatic composition in which all of us are the performers.    The stage is set, the curtain has lifted, we all have our roles to play.  So take a breath, settle in and join us on this magical voyage called sacred theater.  Over the next ten days together may our lives be transformed and souls enlivened, as we enter into the New Year renewed and sustained by this journey of art that has the power to transform our lives.