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

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,