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.