Rabbi Zalman Meintz

Prayer Playground

A few years ago I was the youth director of a big Masorti (Conservative) synagogue in London. My task was firstly to run youth services on Shabbat for a handful of teenagers and maybe encourage a few more to come along. I tried a traditional service but success was limited - most of the young people I was working with just weren't that interested and could probably have got the same thing from sitting upstairs in the adult service, minus perhaps some of the extra participation in running things themselves. I changed things around after a couple months, when I realized something more creative, playful and embodied was where my own passion lay. And this was key - I could only inspire others if I was myself inspired. The approach we took then was much more experiential. We took the services to the synagogue's gym, giving us more space, crash pads, and a different kind of atmosphere. We used chant and choreographed the prayers to movement. And most significantly, I led the

Purim: Upside Down and Inside Out

Photo Credit: Scott B. Roland

Inversions on Adar
One of my favorite things about the Hebrew calendar is that each month is a chance for renewal, learning, refocusing, and celebrating. Every single Hebrew month has it’s own attributes and Adar is no exception. The Talmud curiously teaches that one who enters Adar increases in joy. In Hebrew, mi she’nichnas adar marbim b’simcha.

At the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, one way you know it’s Adar is because our Dean, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld does a headstand after

Participatory Ritual and the Carnivalesque

Joel at the Burning Man festival

'A Delightful Chaos'
Jewish ritual in performance – and performance in Jewish ritual – creates ‘a delightful chaos’, a carnival in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the word. We create a space where hierarchies are inverted, prohibitions abolished, costumes and masks worn, and the body and emotions rule as much as the head. We experience affirmation through the reflection of participants’ culturally-specific experience and framework, and suspension through the carnivalesque loss, reversal even, of received communal norms and mores.

Collective Agency
When a group sharing a set of experiences, understandings, values or cultural markers enter the ‘liminal space’ of performance, particularly carnivalesque performance involving participation,

Rabbinical Student as Medical Clown

A Clown Studying to be a Rabbi

My clown name when I'm in the States is Eloise Bumble-Bees, but that doesn't translate so well into Hebrew. When I asked some clowns here in Jerusalem what my clown name should be they said “Shoshana!” We settled on Shoshke.

Shoshke the Clown is a slightly different than Eloise. She doesn't talk nearly as much – it's hard to be in clown brain when I'm trying to speak Hebrew, or my non-existent Arabic for that matter. So Shoshke uses a lot of physical humor, facial expressions, basic mime, and gibberish.

Time to Play Large

The Energy of Transition

"Fool & House", Pat B. Allen

For me the work of creating an embodied, creative Judaism is about inventing or re-discovering forms that teach us to experience the energy of transition, from sacred to mundane, from serious to light, from day to night in a new way. Transitions are the most powerful aspects of life whether birth or death or the constant mini-versions we go through in our daily transitions that are when most of us "fall off the horse" or make missteps in fear and contraction or just out of distraction. Everything we know is changing, enlarging, opening we are experiencing transition on the grandest scale possible. I believe we are being called to understand the Eros in everything, to broaden our understanding of the life force and to practice making a greater space within ourselves, body, mind, soul and spirit to receive more light. It is time to PLAY LARGE.

The "Sacred Fool" in Judaism

From Jill Hammer and Holly Shere's forthcoming book, The Hebrew Priestess:

"The Fool", Pat B. Allen

One role of the sacred fool is to bring sexuality into the public sphere—to name that area of life and make it visible.  At the ancient celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, women celebrated Demeter and Persephone by telling bawdy jokes and stories.  In Japan, the goddess Uzume lured the sulking sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave by telling bawdy jokes and dancing lasciviously—thus saving the world from chaos and darkness.  In sixteenth century Europe, Jewish women would tell bawdy jokes to the bride on the night before her wedding.  The bride would sit with a bowl in her lap, and as her hair was braided, people would throw money and presents into the bowl.  Women would sit around the bride, “chatting with her to make her merry, and telling her about naughty things to make her laugh.”  This ritual would have defused the bride’s fear and tension, and perhaps

Arab-Jewish Youth Circus

From a correspondence with Rabbi Marc Rosenstein:

After the riots in the Galilee in 2000, a number of local "dialogue groups" got organized, in which Jews and Arabs met to discuss what had happened, why, what changes were called for, and how they could be achieved.   At one such gathering, a subgroup formed to discuss how the arts might be a tool for creating a cultural common denominator – for the Galilee is de facto segregated to a large extent – where people live, the schools they attend, the cultural events they attend, the languages they speak.  The arts might

Circus Shul

Hoop-dancing at shul

Circus Arts in Shul

This is a sample curriculum for teaching circus arts in a Jewish context. There are so many ways to do this, but hopefully this illustration is helpful! Its broad goal in this particular series is to teach participants how to use their bodies to engage with Jewish tradition through movement, circus arts, reflection, group work and text study.

Towards that end, it introduces participants to body awareness and movement, creates a playful

The Fire-Juggling Rabbis of Beit Hashoevah

A fire-juggling rabbi

Below are some wonderful excerpts from the Talmud that vividly describe the juggling rabbis during Beit haShoevah (the water drawing ceremony that happened during Sukkot in the time of the First Temple) along with an English translation.

The Joy of the Water Drawing

תלמוד בבלי מסכת סוכה דף נא עמוד א, ב

משנה. מי שלא ראה שמחת בית השואבה לא ראה שמחה מימיו. במוצאי יום טוב הראשון של חג ירדו לעזרת נשים ומתקנין שם תיקון גדול. מנורות של זהב היו שם, וארבעה ספלים של זהב בראשיהם, וארבעה סולמות לכל אחד ואחד, וארבעה ילדים מפירחי כהונה, ובידיהם כדים של מאה ועשרים לוג שהן מטילין לכל ספל וספל. מבלאי מכנסי כהנים ומהמייניהן, מהן

A Jewish Circus Vocabulary

At "Gragger", Workmen's Circle's radical Purim party

Badchanim/Badchaniot: (meaning "joker" or "clown") is a scholarly comedian who traditionally entertains before and after Ashkenazic Jewish weddings. They are generally learned men and women comparable to a maggid or sermonizer. Currently they are only common in the Hasidic world. In Europe during the Middle Ages, there were among the Jewish communities traveling merrymakers who probably originally patterned themselves after the troubadours, but soon

Purim: The Seeds of a Jewish Circus

At a hoop-dance class in Tel Aviv

Circus arts education has great potential to engage with and reinforce a deeper and more playful sense of Jewish identity. Purim is a holiday that expresses the carnivalesque in Judaism through costume, mask and clowning, and lends itself naturally to circus performances. But circus imagery appears in many other texts and traditions within Judaism: descriptions of the Levite's musical performance during the Temple service, the Talmud's depiction of Beit haShoevah, and the appearance

The Background Image

The background image was included
in the exhibit "Emunah v'Omanut"
at Hebrew College in 2010

Fire in the Temple
Sefer Vayikra describes, in precise detail, the way the ancient Temple’s sacrificial system and burnt offerings served to balance the Cosmos. For me, as for the ancient priests, incorporating fire into ritual acts represents is a profound act of prayer and offering.

Firedancing
Unchecked, fire can be frightening, unpredictable, and destructive. "Fire-dancing", whether literally or through metaphor, allows us to play with this powerful energy. "Dancing" with fire is also a  kavannah (intention) in working with the "fiery" and potentially harmful pieces of our own and other’s personalities.

Isha and Eish

The Zohar teaches that in the ancient Temple, sacrifice was done for the sake of God’s unpronounceable four-letter name (yud, hey, vav, hey). In the letters of this name,