Atonement through drama
Ahead of Yom Kippur, performers at Washington DC’s Jewish Community Center share with audience moments of moral crisis they faced in their own lives
A pioneering Washington-based performance group called Speakeasy Storytelling has teamed up with the city’s Jewish Community Center to create a unique event focused on the themes of atonement and redemption.
Video courtesy of jn1.tv
" I wanted to kind of make the idea of atonement accessible to the audience, allow them to really look deeply and do some introspection without feeling like they were in a stuffy synagogue setting," explains Lili Kalish Gersch, director of literary, music and dance programming at the DCJCC.
Speakeasy Storytelling trains ordinary people to tell deeply personal stories to the public, and director Amy Saidman says the Day of Atonement worked well with the group’s style.
"Everybody has experiences where they’ve atoned or made amends or redeemed themselves or someone else has been redeemed in their eyes," she says. "I feel there’s no religious, racial, or any gender boundary to that."
Based around the Jewish holiday, many of the performers at the JCC were not Jewish. They agree that the theme of redemption and making amends held something for everyone.
"I think atonement is a universal theme," says performer Mike Kane. "I think you see it not only in every religious structure, but you also see it just in everyday life.”
"I think everybody periodically needs to be refocused on their family and the people closest to them," says another performer, Colin Murchie. "Especially in DC, where people tend to be so idealistic and try to be solving the world’s problems, you need to also make sure that you’re caring for the people closest to you."
Learning from experiences
With both laughter and tears, performers told personal stories about times they had to make amends, from lighter offences like cheating at scrabble to more serious reconciliations, such as dealing with the death of a parent. Audience members say they took something special away from the evening.
One of them, Alex, things that "one of the hardest things you can do is face your own mistakes and your own weaknesses, and seeing people do that in front of other people had to create sparks."
“I think it’s really important to learn from the experience you’ve had and from the experiences other people have had too," says Bonnie, another audience member. "Some of these experiences were really special and some of the stories they told were really personal, and I think I learned a lot from what they had to say.”
The women behind the production acknowledge that there might also be something especially Jewish about the confessional style.
"I do think Jewish people have a history of having a sense of humor about ourselves and being able to be self-reflective and be talkers and be wordsmiths and play with language, so I do think there is some truth to that," Amy Saidman says.
Lili Kalish Gersch believes that "storytelling is a very strong tradition in Judaism, since pretty much the Bible."
As events like this one show, there are many ways to participate in the Jewish tradition of atonement – and not all of them saved for private reflection – something audience members are sure to keep in mind during the High Holidays.
