Kissing the Lock: Aesthetic Potentials in Jewish Liturgy

Avre este abajour bijou
Avre la tu ventana
Por ver tu kara morena
Al Dio dare mi alma
Por la tu puerta yo pasi
Yo la topi cerrada
La levandura yo bezi
Como bezar tu kara
Traditional Ladino

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This discussion comes in response to a question asked in one of Rabbi Dan Ain’s weekly lunch-hour meetings at Congregation Beth Sholom in SF. The question was: “what do I do if I do not believe the liturgy I find in the prayer book?”
We could ask in response: why do anything about it? After all, the reader of liturgy is free to close the book and put it aside. But the question itself, this “what to do,” implies that even though they feel this disagreement, they still want to continue reading the text, to keep engaging with it. This need to do something about the disagreement suggests that the questioner is identifying themself with the text in some way, they feel attached to it, they feel that it represents them. Otherwise why not just leave the disagreement alone? What would be the problem with “not believing the liturgy?”
But what if Jewish liturgy is not there to be believed-in or not-believed-in? What if our Wise Ancestors who have handed it down to us were not expecting us to simply say “yes” to every word or idea they wrote down?
In meeting with these Jewish liturgical texts, it’s practically impossible for anyone to feel complete agreement, to feel no friction. I think this would be true really for anyone, not only for secular liberal people. I think that that is part of the point of Jewish liturgy, and maybe of liturgy as such: to place certain issues right in your face and to challenge you to deal with them somehow. And perhaps that is precisely what our Wise Ancestors intended for us when they formulated the fixed parts of our prayers and blessings.
I’m thinking of two particularly high-voltage examples:

So what do you do with these? Really there is no way out. But perhaps there are a few ways in.
Because they’ve been transmitted in text form, in prayer books, it’s easy to think that these liturgies are just made of words. But Jewish liturgy is––and has been––transmitted through more than just the writing and recitation of text. Jewish prayer practices include a whole array of nonverbal elements, too––sound, movement and relational setups. To pray is not simply to say text, but to do text, that is to perform it, to bring its potentials to realization, to live it out. If you have spent a lot of time in conventional synagogue services, then you are probably familiar with the vocal and choreographic elements, the call and response situations, and the layered (albeit hinted) theatrics of various ritual moments.

Take for example the קדושה section of תפילת שבע, the prayer proper of the Shabbat morning service. In this most potent liturgical moment, the congregation takes up the task of purifying and sanctifying in the perceptible world the Name of Oneness as It is sanctified by higher beings in the spiritual realms beyond human perception. You may be familiar with the turning side to side while chanting “זה אל זה,” and the raising of the heels three times in sync with the chanting of “קדוש קדוש קדוש.”
Here is a bit from the Kedusha section of the Shabbat morning prayer:

To do text, to live it out, is what poetry and magic are all about, too. In writing or performing a poem, you’re making something happen, setting events in motion. The poet’s maxim “show, don’t tell,” holds in the liturgical setting too. When commuted into liturgical space from the merely literary space, this maxim points to a kind of poetic-shamanic practice. The קדושת השם liturgy is derived––verbal and kinetic text alike––from an immensely powerful prophetic vision, a kind of cosmological icon that serves as a blueprint for one of Judaism’s key liturgical/poetic/magical tasks: to unify the Divine Name, to turn towards Oneness from within the pile of shards that is the differentiated world. The minimal choreography, sound and interaction that have survived of this ritual in conventional practice can at best serve as shorthand for a vastly more aesthetically powerful liturgical event.
Here are the famous verses from Isaiah that the Kedusha draws from:

This may be a good moment to recall that according to tradition, Jewish prayer may take any form—sound or silence, verbal or nonverbal, movement or thought—and may also arise at any time, not only or necessarily at the traditionally prescribed three times a day. The prayer book formulations, the prescribed prayer services, the well-known movement and sound elements—those show only one set of possibilities in Jewish prayer, namely, those possibilities that have gelled into conventional practice. The traditional dual setup of קבע and כוונה already leaves the door open to dynamic expression and free experimentation. But as it is with such things, it’s now up to us whether we choose to walk through that open door.
In my work with foreignfire, I have attempted this "walking through the open door of Jewish liturgy," this unfolding of the liturgical shorthand. Here's a sample from absolute one, foreignfire's extended שמע ישראל ritual from 2018.
Each of the 21 instruction cards in the set contains only one consonant or vowel from שמע ישראל. Participants hold one card and sing their assigned phoneme, cued by the wrestlers' movements or by other participants' speech sounds. In this way the Shma text is pronounced out loud in a chain of fragmented consonants and vowels, while the choreography layers the Shma liturgy with the biblical image of Jacob wrestling with the angel, which is also the moment in which Jacob receives the name Israel:

The ritual moment is a generative moment, a living moment, a moment of emergence, of an encounter with and a stepping into the Unknown, a brush with the Real. As such, it is also a moment of freedom and agency, of power and transformation. In other words, walking through this door that our Wise Ancestors have left open for us would involve meeting the truth of our freedom to shape our own lives.
Here is another example from foreignfire, this time taking-on the Shavuot custom of midnight Torah study. Ruth's gleaning in the field and her final meeting with Boaz on the threshing floor are lived out in sound, movement and gesture:

Compared with this predicament––facing the freedom to shape our own lives, it now may seem easier to just say “Amen” to words you don’t truly believe in. It feels safer to do so, too, even if it limits your range of motion, because conventional practice is known, predictable, and dependable. Also I don’t have to be held responsible if anything breaks. However, to leave that sense of security behind, to open up to the Unknown and to embrace the insecurity that goes together with freedom is to step into life.
And I’m not the only one saying this. In her brilliant essay for the Applied Research Collective for American Jewery at NYU, Maia Ipp says this:

Maia Ipp, Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde p.6:
“Without visionary experiments, the status quo instead gets sanctified, absolutized, and rendered invisibly “natural” or “right.” (Some philosophers say this nearly mystical power of visual art was the source of the religious ban on idolatry; that images of this world, olam hazeh, so forcefully fix and legitimize it that they don’t allow, let alone inspire, an orientation toward olam haba, the world to come.) Art that demands we participate in meaning-making suggests an alternative to a fixed version of the world and empowers us to see ourselves as creators and agents of change.“

For life to take place, certain elements have to cooperate and come into contact with each other. You have to have fire, you have to have sensation, there’s gotta be love, there’s gotta be pleasure. Yes, the liturgical moment is an erotic moment. It’s erotic in the sense that it revolves around desire, the tensions of longing and fulfillment, and ultimately, around the orientation towards Life. By the way, I’m not making this one up either––anyone who studied Plato and Aristotle, or our own amazing Maimonides (not to mention King Solomon or the Palms of David) should already be familiar with this idea, that the longing for knowledge is an erotic longing, and that the desire for closeness with The Divine is essentially an erotic desire.
In moments of intense erotic longing, you might find yourself wishing that your lover had no skin to keep their flesh from your touch. The body itself might feel like an obstacle in the way of the lovers’ longing for closeness. Not only the physical body but also the bodies of stories, feelings and beliefs––those too may come up as obstacles to intimacy. But the body and its surfaces––as well as the emotional and spiritual aspects of individuality and separateness––are necessary for love making. They provide the interface between lovers, between the I and the Other. And the frictions they impose help generate the heat that keeps the encounter vital and dynamic. The gritty interface between two (or more) longing bodies is necessary for generating the energy that drives agency, freedom, emergence and renewal––the energy that feeds life.
The same purposes are served by the friction you feel in the meeting with liturgy. Every disagreement, every point of conflict helps generate the heat that’s necessary to drive your agency in the emergence of new life, Jewish and non-Jewish––your own, as well as your community's. The text, with its many flammable materials, works like the lock on your lover’s door, or the skin on your lover’s body, or the aversion you feel towards your lover’s parents.
Okay—
So maybe now the longing for closeness, the prospect of transformation and the practice of freedom outweigh the aversions and the disagreements. Maybe now you feel ready to change and be changed through an erotically dynamic and generative encounter with Jewish liturgy. But what if now––now that you actually do want to approach––it’s not friction or resistance that you are feeling, but rather fear? What if in the heat of love you end up harming the ancient, precious, one-of-a-kind heirloom artifact that you found, or that was handed down to you by your parents through a generations-long succession?
Here's more from Maia Ipp that might move this along:

Ibid. p.12:
"This insecurity—the red lines, the fact that communal leaders and funders see some Jewish art or activism as actually (Jewish) life threatening—is another symptom of our lack of vision, what one could also call a lack of faith. Despite what the panicked analyses of the last 30 years have told us, it isn’t intermarriage or a fraying relationship to Israel that threatens the future of our community—it is this toxic undercurrent of fear, red lines, and a lack of forward vision."

Our Jewish tradition is indeed precious. It is indeed a unique, priceless treasure that makes its way to us through numberless members of our people who have lived it and loved it before us. Nevertheless, though it is truly priceless, it is certainly not fragile. If it were sensitive to damage or destructive impulses, then it could not have made it all the way to us through this long intergenerational succession. People before you were just as dangerous to these traditions as you are. They too had destructive potentials and impulses, and have certainly released them on their received heritage. This is one of the amazing things about Jewish tradition––it can and does survive the harshest treatment. Remember Exodus 1:12?

For sure then, Jewish heritage content can handle your love, even if it’s a little tough. Even if it’s very tough. Even if it’s not so much love, but more like disdain or maybe even hatred. What to do when you do not believe what you find in the prayer book? Get over the fear of breaking or damaging the tradition, and remove your latex gloves.
You are called to enter in a mutually transformative relationship with your chosen or ancestral heritage. Saying yes to that is one possible approach. Other approaches may get you to force yourself to accept the liturgy as-is, or to avoid any contact with it altogether, or to find any other valueless form of non-engagement. Waterpuller, our Great Teacher said: “Look––I give it to your face right now: The Living and The Good, or The Death and The Evil.״ Or in a more familiar translation:

In choosing to engage with the liturgy, in permitting yourself to affect it and to be affected by it, you are taking part in a vitalizing and renewing process akin to the hottest and most fertile love-making imaginable. If, when meeting with a piece of liturgy, you find yourself standing in front of your lover’s locked door, remember that once you finish yelling, banging with your fists, weeping and nursing your bleeding knuckles, you can always kiss the lock as if it were your lover’s lips.

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David Israel Katz is a singer, composer and performance artist deeply rooted in Jewish community. His recent work has been drawing on biblical and prayer-book texts, as well as on the nonverbal text of Jewish ritual. David studied Composition and Improvisation at Mills College, and Art and Social Change at CIIS, and has specialized in voice and movement improvisation. As director of foreignfire, he organizes ensemble improvisations, writes performance and art-ritual scores, and facilitates creative workshopping processes. Ha’aretz described him as “an uber-performer,” and his art-ritual, THRESH, was praised by Jewish Currents as “an intense game you can lose yourself in.” Recent appearances include Musrara Mix Festival, (Jerusalem); Xavier Veilhan’s Studio Venezia (Venice Biennale); and Naomi Rincon Gallardo’s Formaldehyde Trip (SFMOMA, The Broad).