I

BEHIND THE SCENES …

For Mircea Eliade, the opposite of sacred is not simply the profane. When he discusses religious man's abject fear of having to live beyond consecrated space, the word he employs to define this territory is 'chaos.' Emptied of 'ontic substance,' there is no human alternative but death, provoking a condition, he argues, that matches precisely the individual's dread of nothingness.(1)

In Judaism, I would argue, it is appropriate to read 'exile' for Eliade's 'chaos.' In some of the earliest pentateuchal descriptions of what divine abandonment might entail, followed by subsequent expressions of prophetic castigation and lamentation after the fact, one confronts the rawness of Israel's existential terror writ large. But this is a broad canvas daubed with bold brush-strokes. Were it instead represented as a pencil drawing on vellum, this pre- and post-exilic saga would of necessity include the fine detail of law and legend, of gender and genealogy and of covenantal conditionality all superimposed upon a luminous and audacious narrative that spanned an ancient millennium.

That said, however, using metaphors of art and image to shed light on Judaism – ancient or modern, Orthodox or Reform – is more than a little unseemly, for Judaism is one of the earliest recorded religions not to hold by iconography. Conventional forms and figures associated with consecrated or legendary subject matter find scant place in a tradition which considers the fashioning or worshipping of graven images an anathema. It is the word, and each discrete letter of the alphabet, which is paramount, dominant and overriding of all devices [page 236] utilised to chronicle both edict and account of the Jews. More than that, without the word, creation itself would have been impossible.

In the Zohar, the primary text of Kabbalah, which Arthur Green describes as that "great mediaeval Jewish compendium of mysticism, myth, and esoteric teaching … a work of sacred fantasy,"(2) Rabbi Hammuna Sava is quoted as declaring: "When the Blessed Holy One wished to fashion the world, all the letters were hidden away (within the divine mind…). For two thousand years before creating the world, the Blessed Holy One contemplated them and played with them. As He verged on creating the world, all the letters presented themselves before Him, from last to first."(3)

For all that this is a foundation myth pertaining to the very beginnings of the world, there is still much speculation concerning the nature of the written Torah which cannot actually be, it is claimed, the inked calligraphy visible on the parchment. These markings are deemed by many scholars to be merely a design and a pattern covering the numinous whiteness of the true letters on the scroll which we are unable to see at all.(4) The best we can hope for is access to the ongoing staging of the oral tradition, for ultimately it is the Voice (or voice, perhaps) that is the instrument of creation.

Is it such an immense leap of logic, therefore, to suggest that theatre might become the next frontier, the platform, as it were, on which the pursuit of communicating the sacred concepts and perceptions of Judaism may advance? In terms of precedent or model, the idea itself is hardly original. In a radical move for the times, disdaining theatrical convention which allowed for only a single actor and a circular ballet around a designated sacred item, Aeschylus introduced a second actor into proceedings. Sophocles, his younger contemporary, both a man [page 237] of war and of the gods, radicalised matters still further by launching a third actor onto the stage: heady and impressive innovations to be sure, but all this is merely to acknowledge an artistic revolution which erupted in Antiquity. And, like so many ritual institutions of other nations, it would ipso facto have been considered at once taboo and impure by the Jews, automatically shunned and proscribed.

So the questions arise and remain to be answered today: can the notion of Jewish theatre have any cultural or even religious legitimacy and if so, what may it validly be held to comprise? How may it be designated? Is it theatre written by Jews? Or by Jews on Jewish subjects? Or by anyone on Jewish subjects. Is it Steven Spielberg's up-market cartoon of the exodus from Egypt? Is it a movie with big-name actors forced to make agonising choices at the hands of brutal persecutors? Or is it Paul Newman waxing heroic on a battered boat, a latter-day Moses leading latter-day Jews home? The above examples are drawn chiefly from cinema, but I find no more illumination if I turn to the stage. Do I refer to the infamous play depicting the predicament of Anne Frank, so dreary it provoked an audience member to hiss at the actors playing Nazis, 'She's in the attic!' simply to bring the tedium to a close? Or will referencing the ground-breaking works of Harvey Fierstein and Tony Kushner aid my cause in finding a solution to a puzzle that has afflicted me for over a decade?

I do not think so, for such an approach does not address what truly troubles me.

What happens if we go directly to the source, removing the sacred vocabulary from its privileged place in scroll and synagogue and open it up to the profane, some might say chaotic, space of theatre? What happens, in fact, when we move the ancient words of the Jewish tradition from page to stage and subject what transpires to the bright lights of performance? Given these considerations, what then happens when the playwright is a feminist and the work she has been commissioned to write is slated to be hagiography of the female as represented in the holy writ, yet evolves – by chaotic yet inexorable theatrical impetus – into a protest that finds itself questioning the very rudiments of traditionalist teachings? And finally, what is to be done when it emerges that these teachings are further destabilised by subversive texts, along with commentaries and footnotes to the texts, found within the very canon itself?

[page 238] The stage, ladies and gentlemen, is set. Let the curtain rise.

II

BACKSTAGE …

It began with a poem.

Some might have argued that the poem itself, probably written in the 1940s (but there is no longer any way of ascertaining that), was the first profanity. Others actually did argue that the work was a tribute and a paean to Jewish womanhood through the ages. Whatever one's perspective, it seems only fair to readers to print the work in its entirety(5) so that they may judge. I should also observe that my researcher and I were assigned the task of creating one scene per verse. Now some might also argue that this is too great an infringement upon the artistic freedom of the writer. Undertaking the task as a working playwright, however, I was content to be provided with a structure. Operating within such secure parameters, what could possibly go wrong?

I Am Woman(6)
---- by Malka Heifetz Tussman,

 

I am the exalted Rachel
Whose love lit the way for Rabbi Akiba.

I am the small, bashful village girl
who grew up among the tall poplars
and blushed at the "Good morning" of her brother's tutor.

[page 239] I am the pious girl
who paled as her mother raised her hands to her eyes
for the blessing over the Sabbath candles.

I am the obedient bride
who humbly bent her head beneath the shears
the night before the wedding.

I am the rabbi's daughter
who offered her chaste body to save a Jewish town
and afterwards set fire to herself.

I am the woman of valor
who bore and fed children
for a promised bit of paradise.

I am the mother
who, in great hardship,
raised sons to be righteous men.

I am the Hassid's daughter,
infused with her father's fervor
who went out defiant, with her hair cropped,
to educate the people.

I am the barrier-breaker
who freed love from the wedding canopy.

I am the pampered girl
who set herself behind a plow
to force the gray desert into life.

I am the one whose fingers
tightened around the hoe,
on guard for the steps of the enemy.

I am the one who stubbornly
carries around a strange alphabet
to impart to children's ears.

I am all these and many more.

And everywhere, always, I am woman.

[page 240]

III

NOISES OFF …

I discovered that try as I might to employ techniques for emptying the mind, for deactivating the switch responsible for emotional vulnerability to the heroic, my ingrained responses to such stimuli were far too strong. I am of the generation born and bred on epic tales of Holocaust survival followed by dreams of the Zionist Socialist triumph. This poem was designed to push every button I possessed and then to create a few I did not possess before pushing them too. That those at the Jewish Museum of Australia who commissioned the work to be based on it also responded in kind to this piece – as have many readers world-wide, it would seem – made matters, if anything, more difficult. Some fourteen years previously, we had all worked on an enterprise with similar goals, but that was well before Jewish feminism of the Orthodox variety had reached Melbourne's distant shores. At the time, I was content to pen niceties about the heroism of Ruth following her mother-in-law withersoever, or about Eve silently accepting blame and submitting to fate on account of the apple affair.

No longer.

The more I read "I am Woman," the more I became aware of a subliminal hum vibrating along the furrow separating left and right brain hemispheres. Two syllables. Implacable, unremitting. Like a robot with a faulty voice implant, it persisted over a week of sleepless nights until a mercifully insurgent cerebral core allowed me to decode its pulse.

Subvert.
Subvert.
Subvert.

[page 241] At length I knew that I would illuminate the story behind the story of the exalted Rachel whose love enabled Rabbi Akiva's learning habit. The obedient bride, prenuptially aroused at humbly bending her head and the rabbi's daughter offering her chaste body, all in honour of Tradition and "Law" would face exposure of another kind. When it came time to consider the freeing of love from the wedding canopy, my researcher's eyes glittered as she created a folder entitled 'Jewish Lesbianism.' I felt momentary, visceral dread at thought of the Museum's patrons, gulped and continued. The pampered pioneer would also be required to bear harsh scrutiny. We would take no prisoners. Even or especially, the raising of sons to be righteous men would be deconstructed.

And this was Melbourne, so there could be no performance tracing 5,000 years of the Patriarchy without mentioning the Holocaust. In our fair city alone, we have the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside Israel.(7) Not only are we well-satisfied at such an achievement, members of the State Parliament are immensely proud of it as well and regularly find a context in which to make mention of it. Such being the case, even though the poem contained no reference to the event, our play must needs insert a relevant scene in an attempt to acknowledge some sort of meaning of the female experience in those times.

Thus through music, dance, poetry and dialogue, moulded from text both ancient and sacred, modern and iconoclastic, A Celebration of Women, as we were instructed to entitle the production, would smash the glass. For the duration of writing, rehearsal and performance, I could not rid my imagination of this fancy. At weddings, with the vows in place (the woman's silence denoting consent), the glass is crushed beneath the heel of the groom. By this shattering, even in the midst of celebration, we are charged by tradition to recall tragedy – the destruction of our Temples, the defiling of our scrolls, the slaughter of our people, perhaps even the perfect primeval light that splintered to facilitate Creation – and remember the Holy Blessed One(8) who delivered us from evil.

[page 242] I could not but wonder whether the tragedy with which we are constantly enjoined to conjure did indeed serve as potent reminder to these episodes, or was possibly a subtle counter tradition that had somehow crept into and survived the Patriarchy. Was it, no less and no more, a metaphor for the very women Jews have been so proud of themselves for celebrating through the ages? Beneath the wedding canopy, what was really symbolised by the glass, swathed and hidden within folds of white damask – its pieces kept where and for what purpose – being fragmented?

IV

DIRECTOR AND CAST …

A brief note only, but imperative. The director was a man. This was not intended as irony or tokenism, nor was it misunderstood by any involved as a statement about which sex actually held the power in all endeavours of significance in our community. It was as much by accident as it was by design. The effort of fourteen years ago had had little, if any, feminist consciousness. The director (let us call him Hillel for his mildness and his creativity with theatrical lore and law), had directed it then simply because he was the best we had and he could and would. Feminist consciousness not withstanding a decade and a half later, the same tenet applied.

The cast of eleven was a group of women drawn from a potpourri of professional, community and amateur players, singers and musicians. It ranged from the best on offer to the least experienced and most enthusiastic. Because, however, Jewish theatre in Melbourne has its origins in the Yiddishist, Bundist traditions, the most talented have always been drawn from their descendants and disciples. Children and grandchildren of the brave and irreligious, of the politically incorrect rupturors of conservative certainty, have always been attracted to the stage in our town. These would comprise the majority of our cast.

[page 243] They did not have my tortured love-hate relationship with the text that both enraged and defined me. They did not care deeply if at all about the politics of religion as it pertained to gender. Feminists all, they had been taught from infancy that the sancta of Judaism were there only to exclude them, forever to cast them in roles of secondary importance. They came to my script like fuming novices banished, if you will forgive the allusion, to a convent, like conscripts to boot camp, but they came and they brought with them in the end – even those with the least know-how and proficiency – an irreverent passion that forced me to rethink my convictions and rewrite my inspiration countless times. For reasons that still mystify me, all, including myself, were prepared to work for nominal payment, possibly because all were led to believe that in under ten weeks the entire enterprise would be over, forgotten, forgiven.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

For a multitude of reasons, most of them important, none of them significant to this writing, an entire year was to pass before our production would hit the stage, risk the wrath of the community and be invited north to a festival of women's theatre that had no understanding of our challenge, but applauded us humanely at show's end. Perhaps they were simply pleased to be released. Or perhaps they understood, as we had come to understand, that there was indeed much to celebrate, even if the glass was irretrievably shattered. At the next wedding, a new glass would be produced and crushed, but always there would be more glasses, no matter how many heels presented themselves. It was not a willingness to be trampled that was being marked. On the contrary: it was a consciousness that for all of tradition's demands, we would yet rise and make voices – directed to be silent in prayer and in song – wild, fierce and, above all, audible. We would put the glass together again, fill it to overflowing and invite all to drink from it.