A Heart of Flesh: Beyond “Creative Liturgy”

Catherine Madsen

(Presented at “Jewish Renaissance and Renaissances: New Perspectives on a Cultural Theme,” a conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the University of Virginia’s Jewish Studies program, November 14-15, 2010.)

In the mid-1980s a young acting student, Thomas Richards, took a two-week workshop in California with the great Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Grotowski was the intellectual heir of Konstantin Stanislavski and the founder of laboratory theatre, a school of acting based on intensive improvisation and concentrated emotional power. His aim was to create what he called “a poor theatre,” in which the actor’s sharply honed skills took the place of elaborate sets and props. Sometimes he spoke of a “holy theatre,” whose spareness and intensity could raise performance to the level of ritual. As a first assignment in the workshop, Grotowski asked Richards and the other students to show him what they thought they would be doing there. They put together a short piece that involved spontaneous singing, chanting, dancing, and running barefoot into the prickly desert. To their confusion, Grotowski denounced these initial attempts as “universal human banalities” (20), and sent three of them off to renew their tetanus shots.

 For the first solo assignment, each student was to compose a brief “mystery play” built on a traditional song from childhood. Richards put together a sequence of symbolic actions to express his feelings for his father, added some unrehearsed elements at the last minute, and gave a performance he felt as cathartic, soul-baring, exhausting. Grotowski watched him impassively and said simply, “Please repeat.”

 As Richards discovered over the next two weeks through much humiliating critique, Grotowski’s use of improvisation was not at all free-form and spontaneous. It was highly structured and painstakingly revised. It ruthlessly cannibalized past experience and spontaneous emotion for clear and repeatable moves. Richards had assumed that emotional intensity would communicate itself simply by being intense; as it turned out, his audience only saw him working himself into a frenzy for no intelligible reason. Long afterward—by this time having worked as Grotowski’s assistant for several years—Richards reflected, “I had mistaken agitated nerves for true emotions; I had avoided true practical work, and tried to pump an emotional state” (36).

 Anyone familiar with contemporary liberal Jewish liturgy will recognize some of the same beginners’ mistakes. The quick and uncritical construction, the emphasis on kavvanah or “intention,” the assumption that feeling conveys itself automatically, the effort to generate ecstatic states without first having laid a solid structural groundwork: these are more or less the working methods of the Jewish Renewal movement, feminist experimental liturgy, the current Reconstructionist siddur, and (minus the ecstatic states) liberal Jewish interpretive prayer generally. The emphasis is on “having a liturgical experience,” not on “performing a liturgical act,” and the Orthodox sense of fulfilling a liturgical obligation is out of the picture. Yet an experience is not always available for the asking. Even kavvanah cannot be reliably summoned, and is apt to evaporate at the fatal imperative, “Please repeat.”

 Liturgy differs from theatre in several obvious ways. It is meant for participants, not spectators; it is slower-moving and less compactly dramatic; it is in no sense an entertainment, but makes a direct, naked effort to intervene in our lives. Theatre, like literature generally, operates at one remove from actually giving commands. In this sense liturgy is not and cannot be a purely literary form. But liturgy shares with theatre the need for aesthetic and psychological coherence. The participant in liturgy, like the audience at a play, must have the sense of being expertly guided. Inept writing, sudden gratuitous political gestures, and a sweet tooth for novelty—those hallmarks of contemporary “creative liturgy”—produce neither holy theatre nor durable prayer. The leopards in Kafka’s parable break into the temple so dependably that they finally become part of the ritual, but there are kavvanot that will never be more than irritants no matter how often we hear them.  ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​​​ 

 On what basis can “creative liturgy” be evaluated? Does it want to be evaluated? It turns away critique with those two dread adjectives, elitist and judgmental. But repetition leads inevitably to evaluation. A one-time audience may not be highly critical of the play, but the actors who must produce the same effects night after night know when something works badly. The first-time bar mitzvah guest may enjoy the stray Mary Oliver poem for its vividness and theological neutrality, but if the poem is used every week the regular participants will soon find it a detour from the real work. Even more of a detour are the poems of non-poets, usually rabbis, printed in prayer books for use ad infinitum by their colleagues: the rabbis may be admirable teachers, counselors and administrators, but their poems are exhausted by the first use. Certain Buddhist-influenced rabbis dismiss language as mere spiritual white noise, a stance incongruous in a religion of the Book and a handy excuse for not revising their poems. The first draft with one or two promising phrases gives way, not to a concentrated and compelling final draft, but to a new first draft on another subject with one or two more promising phrases. Grotowski excoriated this approach in his acting students as “tourism.” In liturgical circles, rather as in grade school, the word “creativity” is not an incitement to artistic concentration but a code for dilettantism, a messy, happy splashing in raw materials with no sense of the long term. The mere suggestion of the long term provokes the intellectual equivalent of the reproachful stare and the trembling lower lip.

 Given the example of the traditional liturgy, including the Psalms, why do contemporary liturgists aim so low? Why are they willing to present so unconvincingly the social and theological principles they are convinced of? Why do they all but explicitly renounce aesthetic competence? The recent book Ritual and Its Consequences: The Limits of Sincerity, by Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon, gives a cogent analysis of the situation. The authors make the case that contemporary liturgical culture values sincere expression of feeling and belief far above the imaginative or “subjunctive” mode of traditional ritual. “Sincerity,” in this sense, repudiates any statement or emotion dissonant with the modern sensibility; far from trying to equal the past, we are meant to reject its formulas as benighted and irrelevant, and construct acceptable substitutes in a hurry. The subjunctive mode, by contrast, is not quite about us; it does not reveal its relevance all at once, but yields it gradually through participation. Sincerity is concerned with the “as-is”—reinforcing our present collective self-concept—and the subjunctive with the “as-if,” a reality we bring into being through collective ritual practice. Seligman et al. suggest that religious ritual, like social ritual, is meant to function more or less as a reflex; it is not meant to be consciously assented to each time, but to be performed automatically. Just as in social ritual we say “please” and “thank you” whether we mean it or not, in religious ritual we address and appeal to a God we may or may not believe in, regardless of our private commitment to the speech act. The authors say that

In doing a ritual, the whole issue of our internal states is irrelevant. What you are is what you are in the doing, which is of course an external act. This is very different from modernist concerns with sincerity and authenticity….Getting it right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again—it is an act of world construction. (24)

 Paradoxically, sincerity is a constantly receding goal: it disappears from the hastily codified new formulas as soon as our attitudes change, or as soon as we expect our children to share them. The subjunctive mode, not being based on belief, is actually broadly inclusive, whereas sincerity, which believes in inclusion, tends toward the inquisitorial. For sincerity, say Seligman et al., “there is never enough evidence, cannot be, anywhere, at any time.” Even the Mary Oliver poem or the quasi-Buddhist dismissal of words comes to function as a boundary enforcer, a loyalty oath. As a result the traditional forms are forced away from the subjunctive and become charged with a counter-sincerity that turns them into loyalty oaths in their turn. Fundamentalist religion, as Seligman and his colleagues remind us, is quintessentially modern and savagely sincere: it retaliates against the disruptions of modernist protest by recreating them in full force from the opposing side. The totalistic nature of sincerity, whether on the right or the left, profoundly threatens the slow, patient courtesy of liturgical world construction. Sincerity specializes in pumping emotion; it intercepts and re-routes—to the right or to the left—the loyalty that in ritual practice belongs only to God.

 Stanislavski once said, “Don’t talk to me about feeling. We cannot set feeling. We can only set physical action” (Richards 67). He came to this idea late in his career, and did not live to develop it; it was Grotowski who carried it further. As the young Thomas Richards gradually found, “setting physical action” meant conveying emotion not by reproducing it psychically at every performance, but by attentively searching for the physical and vocal markers of the emotion, breaking them down into small enough units to engage the actor’s attention at every performance, and rigorously rehearsing the whole series of units until it was fluent and compelling. Essentially, it was the artistic equivalent of scientific method: the search for the reproducible result. Richards broke through to understanding several months later, while carrying an object to someone during a group exercise. Grotowski suddenly stopped him and said, “Yes, something is there….You were walking for someone.” Richards had been remembering a childhood incident of bringing a present to his father in the hospital, defying the nurses who said he was too young to be there alone. Grotowski did not know what the memory was, but he saw its signature. “Every time…I was to remember how I had walked for my father in the hospital. I should not remember my feeling, but the way in which I had done it, and for whom….I should not try to feel proud. That I cannot do, but I can ask myself: in that moment when I was proud, how did I walk?” (66-67).

 Da lifnei mi atah omed, “know before whom you stand.” This talmudic injunction (Brachot 28b), written over the ark in many synagogues, is a prompt or trigger for this kind of physical memory. It does not tell you that you stand before Freud or Marx or Mordecai Kaplan, before Betty Friedan or Judith Plaskow, before Eric Voegelin or the Satmar Rebbe or Sarah Palin; it does not tell you in so many words that you stand before God. It asks you to discover—the verb da is the one used for carnal knowledge—to discover through intimate experience to whom you hold yourself responsible. This is not the search for rational assent or ecstatic trance or even personal authenticity; it is the search for emotional and moral landmarks. To ask yourself before whom you stand—or “For whom did I walk?”—is to discover the private loyalty, which is inviolable and stands against the shallow public allegiance. The formulaic sincerities of left and right ask you to be loyal to feminist theory or free enterprise or the 1960s. The private loyalty forces all this through the narrow channel of your experience, where generalities drop away. At the heart of our subjectivity we discover something uncompromising: not what we want to express but what we want to be held to, brought back to from every distraction. This is where reproducible results begin.

 If we’re going to talk about a Jewish renaissance, we should be clear what we’re asking for. A renaissance is not just a burst of enthusiasm or a proliferation of theory: it is an exuberant and disciplined pursuit of high competence that involves a whole culture. Renaissance work is exacting and accurate; it is interested in measurement, pattern, proportion, fine detail, mental acuity. Its striking emotional effects are achieved through strict observation and full control of one’s medium. Renaissance artists are intensely interested in tradition, not because tradition is already perfect and finished, but because tradition serves as a scaffolding for a new attempt at perfection. The sense of rebirth is the sense of mastery, potency, competence to achieve: the sense of having the tools and techniques and energies to produce exceptional work.

 Every art, not only the actor’s, is accomplished through a series of small reproducible units. A visual artist establishes critical points and rough lines, refines the sketchy lines into shapes and accurate contours, then represents the play of light on the object through variations in line quality and subtly graded shadow shapes. A musician learns the notes of a piece, and by playing them hundreds of times learns to play them each time as if discovering them for the first time. A singer makes constant fine adjustments of posture, breath, vocal placement, pronunciation, projection, expressiveness and remoteness. A poet listens for intersections of sound and rhythm and meaning, fixing emotion so the words must yield it at each reading, forcing words to function as physical actions. The supposed opposition between sincerity and tradition, spontaneity and repetition, is artificial: you need the repetition to render the spontaneity. “The…tension between the inner process and the form strengthens both,” wrote Grotowski. “The form is like a baited trap, to which the spiritual process responds spontaneously and against which it struggles” (Towards a Poor Theatre 17).

 A specifically Jewish renaissance, presumably, stands on Torah, avodah, and gemilut chasadim—study, worship, and acts of kindness: a sort of three-point perspective for evaluating one’s work. It’s comparatively easy to evaluate Torah and gemilut chasadim: we can measure a person’s knowledge of texts, accuracy with Torah trope, indebtedness to Jewish modes of thought. We can see the consequences of acts of kindness: see individuals and institutions flourishing, count the money given in tzedakah, read the donor plaques. But in avodah, no longer measured as it was in the Temple, in he-goats and bullocks and yearling lambs, but in “the service of the heart,” how do we recognize exceptional work? In liberal Jewish liturgy, where exceptional work is not even the aim, what would a renaissance look like?

 In traditional Judaism, the structure of small reproducible units is the system of mitzvot. Some of these are specifically liturgical and some are not, but all that still obtain in the absence of the Temple are practiced regardless of kavvanah or willingness. It makes no difference how you feel about observing Shabbat, davvening three times a day, keeping kosher or giving money to the poor, you do it because you are commanded. In non-halachic Judaism, which from its inception has been defined by the practices it does not require, what is the structure of small reproducible units? The guidelines for “inclusive language” do not demand or incite a high level of skill. The new prayers are still at the level of running barefoot into the desert, the work of people who do not understand their craft. Is there, even latently, another structure in liberal Judaism that will serve?

 In the absence of halacha, what remains is biblical text—shorn of its authority to establish communal norms, but retaining and even exerting more strongly its literary authority. The Bible is actually more disturbing when the talmudic fence is knocked down: there is no layer of mild, pacific commentary between us and the trickster patriarchs and matriarchs, the corrosive relations of Moses and the Israelites, the prophetic threats and promises relaying the wrath and love of an uncanny God. If liberal Jews were hoping to look more like Protestants, they got more than they bargained for in this confrontation with the raw biblical text. Understandably, some of them today would rather have Mary Oliver poems about nature or quasi-Buddhist reassurances that words are mere chatter. The Bible’s demand for sincerity is embedded in wounding language, which cannot be appeased by theological or theoretical or ritual adjustments but only by physical actions. God’s commands, whether we take them to mean the system of mitzvot or something more ambiguous, are meant to yield a reproducible result: deeds, ma’asey yadeinu, the work of our hands.

 If liberal Judaism has a function other than relaxing the standards of observance, it might be to create a new standard of attention: to discover what Jeremiah meant when he said that in place of the covenant we broke, God would put his Torah in our inward parts and write it on our hearts (31:32). “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least unto the greatest of them” (31:33). Is this a statement of spiritual democracy or of an unremitting imaginative demand? Protagoras’ maxim “Man the measure of all things” was understood in his own time as a statement of subjectivity, even relativism: you may feel the cold more or less than I do, you may like Mary Oliver and I may like Jeremiah, and how can either of us be wrong? But in the Renaissance it was differently understood: the human mind is a measuring instrument. We calculate and calibrate, revise and rework; we are in the grip of a difficult task.

 If a renaissance involves reworking—or cannibalizing—classical material and techniques for the use of a later time with its own preoccupations, the Bible is not exhausted as a source. The old liturgical technique of biblical patchwork is not much used by modern liturgists, but I suggest it as an enlightening exercise, and offer the following sample as a beginning and a challenge.

Come and let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, and he will heal us; he has wounded, and he will bind us up. (Hos. 6:1) Take words with you and return to the Lord (Hos. 14:3); be strong and of good courage, fear not. (Deut. 31:6) O Lord, revive your work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy; (Hab. 3:2) that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. (Ps. 51:10)

O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out to thee of violence, and thou wilt not save! (Hab. 1:2) O that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. (Jer. 8:23) Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cuts and cleaves wood on the earth. (Ps. 141:7) They cried, but there was none to save them; to the Lord, but he answered them not. (Ps. 18:41) Ah Lord God! Wilt thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel? (Ezek. 11:13) From the end of the earth I will cry unto thee. (Ps. 61:3)

Behold, my word is like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that shatters rock. (Jer. 23:29) See now that I, I am he, and there is no god beside me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; none can deliver out of my hand. (Deut. 32:39) I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things. (Isa. 45:7)

This is my God, and I will adorn him; (Exod. 15:2) this is my sickness, and I must endure it. (Jer. 10:19) My soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land where is no water. (Ps. 63:2) Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart; prove me, and examine my thoughts. (Ps. 139:23) Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Make us glad according to the days you have tormented us, for the years we have seen evil. (Ps. 90:12, 15) I am a stranger on the earth; hide not thy commandments from me. (Ps. 119:19)

For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end: it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it: it will surely come, it will not delay. (Hab. 2:3) For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and a splinter shall answer it from the beams: (Hab. 2:11) The whole earth is full of God’s glory. (Isa. 6:3)

I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. (Ps. 118:17) He stretches out the north over the void, and hangs the earth upon nothing. (Job 26:7) Though the fig tree shall not blossom, and no fruit shall be on the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail and the fields yield no food; the flock shall be cut off from the fold and there shall be no herd in the stalls; yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. (Hab. 3:17-18.)

Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built. (Jer. 31:3) If your outcasts be at the uttermost parts of heaven, from there will the Lord your God gather you, and from there he will fetch you. (Deut. 30:4) Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the ends of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that labors together; a great company shall return there. They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them; I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble. (Jer. 31:7-8)

For this commandment that I command you today, it is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh unto you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it. (Deut. 30:11-14)

Only beware and guard yourself carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen and lest they stray from your heart all the days of your life. (Deut. 4:9) And a new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:26) See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands (Isa. 49:16); no evil shall befall you. (Ps. 91:10) And I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. (Hos. 2:21-22)

WORKS CITED

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Holstebro, Denmark: Odin Teatrets Forlag, 1968.

Richards, Thomas. At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions. London: Routledge, 1995.

Seligman, Adam, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

(Thanks to Joel Kaminsky for the reference to Ritual and Its Consequences.)