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

The Kotzker Rebbe, a 19th century Chassidic rabbi, taught: “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

Who among us has not had their heart broken in one of several ways this year? The devastating violence we have collectively borne witness to abroad and here. The rupture of relationships over politics, the frightening decline of democracy. Maybe the end of a romance. A death.

In her recent book The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR shares a teaching based in a relatively obscure passage from the Mishnah (the first major work of rabbinic literature, written and compiled in the first and second centuries of the Common Era). In the text (Mishnah Middot 2:2), the rabbis describe an ancient pilgrimage ritual in which massive crowds gathered at the holy Temple in Jerusalem. Upon entering the Temple complex, most people moved to the right, making a giant circle around the holy place. But another group of people — those to whom something terrible had happened since the last gathering, or those who had been isolated from the community due to wrongdoing — circled to the left. Whenever someone from the first circle encountered someone from the second, they would ask, “Mah lach?” which Rabbi Brous translates essentially as “What happened to you?” The person circling to the left would answer, and the person circling to the right would then offer a blessing: some way of seeing the other in their full humanity and wishing them protection, the embrace of the community, better days ahead.

The characters we meet in this year’s Storahtellings are certainly those with a broken heart, and those looking for blessings of protection: on Rosh Hashanah, Hagar and Ishmael, having been kicked out of Sarah and Abraham’s home; Sarah, threatening to leave if Abraham doesn’t put her son first, and Isaac, deprived of his older brother when he needs him most. On Yom Kippur, two ordinary Israelites on the outskirts of the temple complex wrestling over what, if anything, this yearly ritual of atonement means, whether anyone can be truly saved by it; and a priest figuring out how to stand before the community when his own connection to his sense of purpose is broken.

At Lab/Shul we don’t just tell the same stories over and over again; each year we create a brand new translation of them, responsive to the present moment and focused around a different core idea, or bullseye, and filtered through distinct voices or perspectives that can open up the text in a new way. The hope is that, in so doing, these stories, which are so laden with violence and trauma and are not at all clear guidebooks for how to live a good life, might break our hearts in a new way. Opening a path toward a clearer seeing of ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. Perhaps that is what the Kotzker Rebbe meant when he taught that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart: if we live in a world that breaks the heart constantly — and, to my mind, we certainly do — then the surest path to wholeness is to let it happen, completely, until everything else but an enormous compassion remains, a compassion that moves us to action.

May we be inscribed in a book of life whose words are written with this in mind.

Shana tova,

Ben Freeman, Associate Clergy and Creative Producer of this year’s Storahtellings

Yom Kippur: “I Love You, I’m Sorry”

In our reading of the story this year, many of us identified with a sense of powerlessness, or disembodied power, that we imagined ordinary Israelites must have felt coming to the outskirts of the Holy of Holies once a year, knowing that some mysterious ritual would take place inside that did not involve them and yet intimately concerned them, the purgation of and atonement for their individual and collective sins.

Coming out of a year where we have witnessed so much violence, and heading into a crucial presidential election where democracy itself seems to be on the ballot, many of us are wondering: does my voice count? Do I have power? How do I participate effectively in making change? Is it possible? If I’m not the one making decisions, do the people “in the room where it happens” actually know me? Do they represent me? And if they don’t, how can the rituals of our common life be meaningful?

Perhaps some of us consider ourselves the high priests in our respective contexts. Perhaps we are considered that way by others. Many of us consider ourselves, and many of us are in fact, the ordinary people on the outskirts of the temple complex wondering how to make our voices heard inside.

Concept development and scripting:

Ben Freeman, Shira Kline, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, Emet Monts, Jon Adam Ross, and Sarah Sokolic

Maven Team:
Alan Altschuler as Aaron
Nemuna Ceesay as Believer
Ben Freeman as Skeptic

Rosh Hashanah: THE REBIRTH OF LAUGHTER

Parashat Vayera, Genesis 21.5-13

In this go-round of reading this story, our attention snagged on a word in Genesis 21.9, מְצַחֵֽק (m’tzachek). Translated as “playing,” as in “Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing,” our collaborator Emet Monts observed that the word is intrinsically tied to the Hebrew name for Isaac, Yitzchak. Thought of this way, what Sarah responded to that prompted her to cast Hagar and Ishmael out was not Ishmael “playing” so much as Ishmael “Isaac-ing”: threatening to take the place of her own baby. Threatening her sense of the natural order of things. We don’t have to agree with Sarah’s choice to be curious about what it says about each of us.

This caused us to ask: when we become aware of ourselves in another and another in ourselves, how do we become responsible for each other? In this moment for Sarah, the future of a people rests on her actions. In this moment in 2024, silos are calcifying and division is threatening to permanently sever the fabric of our civil society. We’ve got to be able to see ourselves, and see others — and have the self-awareness to understand which parts of us are speaking when we do.

Concept development and scripting:

Ben Freeman, Shira Kline, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, Emet Monts, and Jon Adam Ross

Maven Team:

Desi Grady as Isaac/Ishmael
Doris Gramovot as Sarah
Naamah Imir as Hagar