Storahtelling
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What are the legends and stories that help navigate one’s journey from one destination to another, in space, and in time? With what guidebook do I navigate my daily travels, the cycles of life, the specially-marked days, the sacred places?
As a Jew in the twenty-first century, I wonder at the power of our ancestral stories in shaping contemporary road maps. Are we even aware of the invisible power of inherited stories in determining our well-being, our wars, our assumed dogmas? Whether historical or mythic, sacred scripture or oral tradition, the legends we still tell reflect where we are coming from and where we are going, but they don’t always accurately describe where we are. Some of the legends, like antique maps, portray a landscape that is changed, a social climate that has evolved. What use to my navigation is a fourteenth-century map of Berlin? How will a 3,000 year-old legend about binding one’s son to a higher purpose illuminate my parenting skills? Are we mapping our modern Jewish lives based on legends that define our current landscape or are we recycling and stumbling upon old truths and maps folded over so often that they crumble and get us lost?
Eight years ago I founded Storahtelling – a Jewish ritual theater company that is committed to reclaiming the art of Jewish storytelling as a key towards social change and personal growth. Storahtelling’s main focus is the revival of the weekly Torah service as the central ‘prime time’ slot on the communal calendar, a weekly opportunity for re-view and re-examination of the necessary rift between past and present, old legends and modern maps. Birth to Death, Eve to Moses, this 2,500 year-old re-run series of Jewish storytelling is not only among the oldest of such traditions on the planet – it is also the oldest Jewish tool to make sense of the journey that is life.
Storahtelling uses live translation, dramatized commentary, and communal interaction to bring the legend to life and to give our human journeys renewed meaning and relevance. Sometimes these modern storytelling events forge new roads and imagined places - as the many voices tell familiar tales in uniquely different ways. The weekly telling is, potentially, the revered place for rededicated purpose. The torah scroll is kissed on the spot where the story resumes: You Are Here Now.
The act of storytelling - both the story and the ritual of its telling, reflects the best in human efforts to try to make sense of existence. Can a world torn by religious wars, nurtured by a rich past, and focused on a better future learn how to use the legends of our story maps to navigate us to the promised lands of our human aspirations? It can.
Amichai Lau-Lavie is the Executive and Artistic Director of Storahtelling, Inc.
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