Body Post #2

Teaching the Body in Times of War
Yair Lipshitz

We were studying about the body as a vehicle and obstacle for religious experience when the war in Gaza began. Teaching in times of war always seems to me like a weak political action – and, at the same time, one which must not be avoided. We decided to put a halt to our regular syllabus, and discuss together the religious language which persists in surrounding the modern discourse about the body at war. Not only through terms such as "sacrifice" – but also by the process of dedicating an individual, private body into a "larger" cause, a cause which claims to give the body a new kind of significance and meaning.

This tension between the "private" and "public" dimensions of the body in times of war was at the center of our studies. Deuteronomy 20:1-9 places this tension at the center of the liminal moment of going-to-war. During a speech given by the officers to the soldiers, a section is included which might come as a surprise to contemporary Israeli readers: “Who among you has built a new house and not dedicated it? He may go home, lest he die in battle and someone else dedicate it. Or who among you has planted a vineyard and not benefited from it? He may go home, lest he die in battle and someone else benefit from it. Or who among you has become engaged to a woman but has not married her? He may go home, lest he dies in battle and someone else marries her … Who among you is afraid and fainthearted? He may go home so that he will not make his fellow soldier’s heart as fearful as his own.”

We were wondering together what the limits of the private body are in times of war, according to this text. Is this a text which listens with sensitivity to this private body – to what it has to lose, to its fears and hopes? Or is this a text which wishes to leave behind all that is private, and all those who are still attached to it, in order to create a "pure" public body that can do the job: fight, kill and be killed? Indeed, the Mishnah at Tractate Sotah 8:5 portrays a picture in which after this speech – the bodies which remain in the battlefield turn entirely public and "at the rear of the people, they station guards in front of them and others behind them, with iron axes in their hands, and should anyone wish to flee, they have permission to smite his thighs."

That Beit-Midrash session was concluded by reading excerpts from Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis. Tracing the various dramatizations of Iphigenia's sacrifice – a sacrifice ordered by the goddess Artemis as a price to be paid by the army before they are to kill the children of Troy (no-one can have pretenses to kill others without paying the most dear of prices) – I have noticed that in Euripides's theatre, Iphigenia is turning her own body into some kind of performance. At first, she performs a private body – consciously playing the part of her father's little daughter, in order to arise mercy in him and prevent her being sacrificed. Later on, she will drastically change her mind (Euripides covers this moment with layers of irony and ambivalence) and agree to die for Greece and thus turn her own body into a public vehicle for national glory. In both cases, however, the body is performance: the "private" body is no less a deliberate theatrical performance than the "public" one. Indeed, in Euripides's tragedy, it seems that the only way to politically resist the public claim over the body – is to publicly perform it as private. And this strategy, tragically, fails as well.

I left the Beit-Midrash that evening with a heavy heart – still wondering how does one teach the body in times of war? And why?

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Yair Lipshitz holds a Masters Degree in Drama from Tel Aviv University. His doctoral work focuses on the body as a site for commentary on Jewish culture in the theater and in drama. He is a junior fellow at the Hartman Institute. His book, "The Holy Tongue, the comedy version – and the rest of the inter-textual dramas on the Jewish stage in the Renaissance" is due to be published shortly. His debut play, "A Time of Wellbeing" has been included in the anthology "New Voices in Israeli Drama" (2006).

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The Theatrical Body: A Jewish Drama
Basmat Hazan Arnoff

Rabbi Zusya of Hanipoli uttered right before death, “In the world to come they won’t ask me, 'Why weren’t you Moses our Prophet' Rather they will ask me, 'Why weren’t you Zusya'"

This short and often quoted Chasidic story describes a reality which is the opposite of theatrical reality. And in a way, it is a contrast that exemplifies the contradiction between Judaism and theater. Scholar and director Michal Govrin describes the Jewish ritual in this way:

[N]on-permanence is perhaps the most faithful expression of Jewish sacred theatre. This theatre is not performed before an audience, but before the Divine Spectator, who is always before the Jew. Its goal is not to reconstruct the many acts of mythological drama, not to portray convincingly a character from the past, but to work diligently as individual and group in this very present moment through the ritual, in order to sustain the intimate, real relation between the individual, the community and the Creator.

We can talk about an audience (God) and an actor (the Jew), but the very essence of the ritual, the "performed" act, is almost “anti-theater." But theater is not only the art of imitation or mimicry. Something real happens in every performance. The actor “plays a part,” and at the same time embodies with his or her own real and actual body the character that he or she is playing.

As a theater teacher in a modern Orthodox high school for girls in Jerusalem some years ago, I faced a problem that has branded much of my work as a theater director that followed. As part of the girls' studies in the 12th grade, it was required to put on a production. As their teacher and as well as a person who believed deeply in the power of theater, my challenge was to find plays that would be both meaningful creatively and appropriate within the norms of the community. We had worked on adaptations of significant stories like S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Story, Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav’s The Seven Beggars, and Yair Lipshitz’s adaptation of The Book of Esther, entitled Not of the King Alone. Each one of these works provided the necessary elements for crafting a great script, but each also posed a challenge: they included male parts, and the cast consisted only of young women.

Leaning on historic theatrical traditions of single gender casts I started to investigate options for dramatic reversal. My most favorite form of this reversal has always been drag. The point of departure of this artistic form is its exaggerated theatricality. It does not at all pretend it is reality, perhaps because its entire existence is a charade. The essence of drag is the grotesque depiction of the body. The drama happens as it is – a gap between the gender and body of the actor and the gender of the character. Witnessing this combination is like holding your breath while watching the tight rope walker in the circus: Will he make it or not?

One of the seminal plays in the history of Jewish theater (and my personal favorite) is The Dybbuk (Yid. דער דיבוק אדער צווישן צוויי וועלטן). A play completed in 1914 by S. Ansky, it relates the story of a young bride, Leah, who is possessed on the eve of her wedding by a dybbuk – a malicious occupying spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person. Set in Eastern Europe in the end of the 19th century, Ansky's story revolves around a pair of ill-fated lovers – penniless Chanan, a devout student of Jewish mysticism and Leah, the young woman he adores and is destined to marry. When Leah's greedy father breaks the marriage contract to marry Leah off to a richer man, Chanan dies instantly; his soul, however, lives on as a Dybbuk, entering Leah's body in order to gain possession of her lover for all eternity. After various nefarious deeds come to be revealed, the rabbi, aided by other rabbinical judges, finally succeeds in exorcising the Dybbuk, using incantations and rituals followed by blasts of a shofar. Meanwhile, Leah must confront a choice between marriage to a man for whom she feels nothing or an unworldly union with her dead lover's spirit.

Playwright and scholar Yair Lifshitz writes of this work in an article in Hebrew entitled “The Dybbuk: The Jewish Body in the Entanglement" that
with no doubt the body in The Dybbuk is indeed a site, a location in the simplest sense – a place, a space which is being penetrated into. Chanan’s spirit relates to Leah’s body as its ‘habitation’…There is not only the tension between a pairing, a shiduch, made in advance and the active way in which one can abolish it but also a tension between body and soul.

The stage performance of The Dybbuk tells the story of the male and female grafted together into one body, which makes a very complex syntax of physical gestures – a feminine body being controlled from the inside by the spirit of her male lover, the drama not only the external drama of the play, but the physical drama of the body.

In my current work as a director, Binding, a dance theater piece in collaboration with Jesse Zaritt, one of the sections of the performance deals with the ritual of sotah, the testing of an adulteress woman. In this ritual a woman suspected of committing adultery is brought to the Temple and is made to drink bitter water in which the name of the divine is dissolved. After she drinks – a grand drama of the body begins: if she is "guilty" she experiences a brutal change of her body. Some say that this leads to death. If she is innocent she conceives seed. What a wild drama of the Jewish body! In Binding, a pairing between a woman and the name (or spirit) of God is performed by a male dancer, with a masked face, a naked upper body, and an ancient ritual earns a whole new meaning.

Facing the challenge of working in single gender casts years ago created for me an opportunity to examine and challenge the traditional templates in which I saw male and female and to create alternatives that might, through a narrow reality, create a wider view of the "Jewish" body. Combinations of male and female in the same entity allows the simple and extreme drama of the body itself to open up the mind in a new, surprising, and often conflicting ways.

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Basmat Hazan Arnoff is a writer and theater director and a member of the faculty of LABA: The National Laboratory for New Jewish Culture at the 14th Street Y. She has served on the faculty of Skirball, Brandeis Collegiate Institute, Kolot, and Elul, the last two based in Israel. She is the author of Mayyim Hafoochim, a novel, and works as a theater director. Her play, LeShem Yichud, won the award for best ensemble at the Akko Theater Festival. She recently adapted David Grossman's See: Under Love for the stage in Tel Aviv and New York.