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