LOOKING AROUND: The sound of music
By Barbara Sofer
December, 20 2001
(December 20) Although I've read to the end of the book, my pulse always quickens as Judah steps forward to approach Joseph at the beginning of Vayigash, the Torah portion in Genesis read this Shabbat on all continents. Three weeks of reading the Joseph saga climax with the face-off between brothers in Egypt, a foreshadowing, as commentators will doubtless remind us, of the two Messiahs in our future, one from the house of Joseph and the other from the house of Judah's descendent David. May they come soon!
My experience of Joseph the Righteous has been forever enhanced by the more worldly commentary of the performance of the Efrat/Gush Etzion Raise Your Spirits Summer Stock Company production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I like the Webber take on the story well enough, but it is the Gush Etzion take on the Webber take that is even more riveting.
Last summer, the careworn women of the Gush Etzion were seeking a Joseph-like solution to the tough question of how to face the combination of bleak current events with no discernible solution and maintain optimism. Seven members of the community had already been killed. Even close relatives made excuses for not traveling to the Gush to celebrate bar mitzva parties or make shiva calls. Cars traveling on the once picturesque tunnel roads had become moving targets for snipers.
A new gemah, a free-lending society, was offering bullet-proof vests.
Each new government plan felt more like a clinical trial than an inspired solution kept in a drawer for just this problem. The old arguments between Right and Left that used to liven up Shabbat dinners had succumbed to gloominess.
That extra dimension of Jewish womanhood - the need to be a fount of optimism even in dark times - ruled out slumping into downheartedness. Busy though they were with large families and challenging careers, they decided to do something about it.
The women of Gush Etzion started by sending out e-mails on the Efrat internal list suggesting different activities like bringing a circus to town, game days, or screening old episodes of Wagon Train. Then Sharon Katz, a magazine editor and mother of five, suggested putting on an all-women production of Joseph. She was joined by Toby Klein Greenwald, editor-in-chief of wholeFamily.com, a mother of six with a lot of drama experience from American summer camps, and by Arlene Chertoff, a professional choreographer and assistant director and a mother of three.
Any girl or woman who wanted to act or sing could join the huge cast.
There were several caveats. Because these were women who observed stringent rules of modesty, they would perform before audiences of only women. No performance would be cancelled because of a terrorist attack. Not even the September 11 show was called off, although it was preceded by the reading of psalms, and followed by a public singing of Ani Maamin, ( I believe), our somber Jewish hymn of faith.
The few scheduled summer performances stretched through the winter to sold-out audiences, arriving by bullet-proof buses along beleaguered roads and by more conventional conveyances.
But the play went way beyond community therapy. It was simply sensational, a great night at the theater with the elation and catharsis that good theater brings. Joseph, a ketuba artist and mother of six by day, and her 11 siblings infused the story with so much effervescence and conviviality that one had to wonder how the original story would have been different if it had focused on 12 daughters.
The happiest surprise was that the acting and singing were superior to much of the so-called professional productions at city theaters and much-touted festivals. Nor did the show bear the slightest resemblance to the stiff and over-serious plays parents endure at schools and youth movement celebrations, or in that new ubiquitous genre of "religious theater."
Although most of the staff members lacked professional resumes, they brought along experience of the arts from countries where school and informal educational systems afforded a more laid back setting. They could dance, they could sing and they could act.
My pride grew with each moment as my English-speaking Israeli sisters performed. But along with that came the uneasy recognition that little of the talent of our immigrant group was being expressed within Israeli society in general and within our own religious world in particular. Where have these amazing women been from the main narrative of Israeli opinion-making? Are they to be relegated to anonymity like the supposed twin sisters born along with Jacob's male offspring? When are we going to overcome our embarrassment at our accents, (every immigrant group has some disability; ours is foreign-language acquisition) to make our voices heard?
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that the ultimate Jewish singer, a cantor, is called hazan, because the word means both vision and prophecy. Music is derived from the same place as prophecy. Let the music that emanated from the women of Gush Etzion be a start. The combined pragmatism and creativity which gave birth to Joseph is sorely needed at every level of decision-making.
The good news is that the Gush Etzion players will put on one additional performance: for the women's caucus of the Knesset. It's time, daughters of Jacob, to step up and be heard.
