In their classroom, Torah is a three-ring circus — by design

(JTA) — For a quick and barely embarrassing interval in my teenagers, I wished to run away with the circus. I despatched a letter to Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus, asking for an utility to their Clown School in Sarasota, Florida. I received again a well mannered letter saying I used to be too younger to use, however they invited me to go to backstage throughout their subsequent residency in New York.

For some cause, I didn’t take them up on their invitation. And the following time I had any contact with Ringling Brothers, I used to be operating away from the railroad tracks the place the circus was parked in Philadelphia. I used to be on task for a nationwide journal to uncover proof that the youngsters of circus performers have been being exploited. I didn’t discover what I used to be searching for, and I’ve what may be an invented reminiscence of a circus strongman in tights blocking my method. Evidently I didn’t get any backstage invites from the administration.

Once I began masking Jewish affairs, I assumed my circus days have been over. That’s, till I obtained a replica of “Beneath One Tent: Circus, Judaism, and Bible,” an intriguing new guide edited by Ora Horn Prouser, Michael Kasper and Ayal Prouser. It’s a captivating if at occasions unwieldy mashup of the historical past of Jews and circus, an introduction to what the editors name “Sacred Arts,” and a primer on how dance, circus abilities and different motion can improve the research of Jewish textual content.

Horn Prouser and Kasper are related to the Academy for Jewish Faith, the nondenominational seminary in Yonkers, New York. Ayal Prouser is co-founder of Time Flies Circus. The guide grew out of AJR’s Sacred Arts program, which makes use of “embodied” arts to discover the Jewish canon. Just like the Nationwide Endowment of the Arts, which funds circus performers, they insist that circus is an artwork type, one that features gymnastics, acrobatics, juggling, clowning and “equilibristics” (tightwalking and different balancing acts).

College students on the Academy for Jewish Faith in Yonkers, New York research a biblical textual content by way of circus motion, 2022. (Ora Horn Prouser, from “Beneath One Tent”)

Past the efficiency facets, in addition they acknowledge the “heritage, codes, and historical past of circus.” The editors contribute a chapter on Jewish circus historical past, which begins with Resh Lakish, the Talmud sage who was stated to have carried out as a gladiator at Rome’s Circus Maximus. Their Jewish circus corridor of fame consists of the mime and Holocaust survivor Marcel Marceau, the Belgian resistance fighter and lion tamer (no kidding) Sara Hauptman and Paul Binder, the cofounder of the nonprofit Huge Apple Circus.

Performer and researcher Stav Meishar writes about Jewish circuses beneath the Nazis. Famed outfits run by three Jewish households in Germany — the Blumenfelds, the Lorches and the Strassburgers — didn’t survive Hitler. Meishar mourns the “practically full annihilation of the German-Jewish circus royalty.”

However the focus of the guide is on instructional approach. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s idea of “a number of intelligences,” the editors and their contributors got down to reveal how motion generates insights past the written phrase. The editors supply an “awkwardly Freudian” instance from Genesis 24, when the patriarch Isaac beds his spouse Rebecca within the tent of his late mom Sarah. At a workshop held at Limmud NY, the annual Jewish studying competition, three ladies have been urged to think about the episode whereas forming an acrobatic pyramid, stretching to carry one another in stability. One pupil got here to know the Bible passage as “referencing intergenerational maternal and feminine assist — everybody doing their half.”

At left, posters from the Ziratron, Israel’s first everlasting circus, which opened in Tel Aviv in 1950. Far proper, an article on Jews within the circus, from “Idisher Bilder,” an illustrated Yiddish weekly, 1937. (Photographs courtesy Ben Yehuda Press)

This strategy might strike some as, effectively, a stretch, however there’s a lengthy historical past of utilizing artwork and drama to show the Bible. In 1995, Peter Pitzele wrote his guide “Our Father’s Wells,” a preferred introduction to what he referred to as “Bibliodrama” — studying Jewish textual content by way of the theater arts. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, founding father of the experimental NYC congregation Lab/Shul, makes use of such strategies in his “Storahtelling” workshops and performances. Brooklyn artist Deborah Ugoretz provides workshops in Jewish paper chopping and manuscript illumination, promising to “reveal the deeper that means present in texts and concepts.”

I often is the final particular person in a position to make mild of an strategy that mixes circus and Torah: This week I begin educating a web based class in Judaism and humor that means you possibly can unpack a Jewish joke utilizing the strategies of Torah research and are available out with insights which are no much less useful or “critical.” Conventional yeshiva-style studying emphasizes that there are as some ways to know the Bible as there are clowns in a tiny automotive, and Sacred Arts goals to uncover a couple of extra. “Studying, imagining, and pondering produce one type of understanding,” the editors write. “Making and doing produce one other.”

If meaning studying in regards to the Binding of Isaac whereas strolling a tightrope, as one pupil does within the guide, why not?

So go forward, Torah lecturers: Ship within the clowns.

is editor at giant of the New York Jewish Week and managing editor for Concepts for the Jewish Telegraphic Company.

The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the views of JTA or its mother or father firm, 70 Faces Media.