Communal Performance and Communal Identity

I’m leaning against the wall in the side aisles of the huge, wood-panelled chapel space in Hebrew Union College when somebody hands me a handkerchief. It takes me a moment to realize that they’re going around the room and giving them out to everyone: identical dark teal squares with intricate images and Yiddish text hand-printed in bright white. The voice from the stage invites us to hold the cloths in our right hands, and take up our neighbor’s handkerchief with our left. Soon, everyone in the auditorium, the hundreds in their seats and more spilling out into the aisles, is connected.

From my spot in the outer corners, I can’t see the stage, but I hear a group of singers with guitars and accordions start leading the room in song. All I can see is the crowd, dotted with familiar faces, each one joined with a swath of blue. We’re swaying together, singing the familiar syllables that have accompanied wordless tunes in Jewish spaces since time immemorial. Something completely unnameable yet completely recognizable fills the space. I think back on years in and out of Hebrew school, years of my grandparents laughing at the idea of religious piety, years of feeling out of place at synagogue and out of place anywhere else. The feeling of connectedness, of heritage, that eludes me almost every day, finds me there: at a concert by the klezmer group A Glezele Tey at this year’s Yiddish New York festival.

I love a crowd. I love feeling swallowed up in a rush of people. It’s no surprise I’ve spent my life in the theater, getting my creative output as tangled up as possible in the people around me. Making something that couldn’t exist without every single one of us. I tell people, in response to two different questions, that I go to the theater for the exact same reason I go to synagogue. It’s about the room and the people in it and the sounds filling it. It’s about the feeling of being connected to something older and larger than anything you’ll ever understand. It’s the audience and the cast and crew all joining together. I have never felt more Jewish than when I’ve been in a communal performance space.

It’s not exactly that performing, or watching performances, makes me feel more Jewish. It’s that being around people makes me feel more Jewish. I’ve spent years going back and forth between being the only Jewish family around in sleepy Western Massachusetts, where I live, and being surrounded by an infinitely diverse Jewish community in New York City, where my family’s from. Maybe I just have a habit, a knee-jerk reaction, of feeling ten times more connected to my heritage when I’m somewhere that’s bustling and crowded and loud. But the very heritage I reach for, alone in my suburban town or surrounded in Manhattan, is fundamentally a heritage of community and togetherness. It’s a tradition of crowds—in theaters, in synagogues, on train stations, in lecture halls.

My dad recently unearthed some old writings of my great-grandfather’s, memories of his youth in the Jewish community of interwar Poland. The story that most struck me was about my great-grandfather’s memory of the famed Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem's visit to his city of Radom. He remembers the feeling of all the Jews packed into an auditorium to listen to Aleichem read. He remembers the power of their laughter: “It was a rarity to see so many Jews laughing.” He writes of how that memory stays with him more than any other, overwhelming the images of poverty, suffering, and fear that must linger in the mind of a man who lost so much family only a few years after that moment. It’s Sholem Aleichem’s voice, and the laughter that comes with it, that sticks, that perseveres. It’s the crowd, the collective emotion, the communal experience. I know that well.

The feeling that comes over me in the crowd at Yiddish New York, around the fire when my friends sing Ale Brider, as the curtain falls on opening night and everyone swarms the stage in congratulations, is the same one my great-grandfather remembers feeling in the room with Sholem Aleichem, decades later. As a twenty-first-century diasporic American Jew, I never expected to feel that kind of connection with a Polish Zionist born in 1898. But it doesn’t matter that I am separated from that moment by an entire century, two continents, and a major feeling of political dissonance. The temporal, geographic, and ideological divisions between my great-grandfather and me feel minuscule compared to the power of communal experience. 

Communal experience, communal identity, means it does not matter that I am different from you in these unimaginably huge ways. We are here, we are feeling the same thing right now, and that is enough.