The Opening to an Opening of an Opening

by Alexander Nemser

On Sunday, January 21st, a group of artists gathered at Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center in Los Angeles to respond to a single line from the traditional siddur: אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶךָ Adonai s'fatai tiftach, ufi yagid tehillatecha. “God, open my lips, that my mouth may speak your praise.” Following the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai instituted the line as the opening to the Amidah, the 18-section centerpiece of Jewish t’fillah, the liturgy of our formal prayer service. With their potent mixture of vulnerability, surrender, lyricism, and embodiment, these six Hebrew words became the portal into a multi-voiced, multi-valent collaborative exploration of Jewish prayer Eliana Light and I are calling the “Creative Siddur Project.”

When we encounter the siddur, with its fixed texts and rigid structure (siddur, like seder, means “order”), it is easy to be taken in by the pious illusion that the prayer book is complete. The prayers can seem etched in stone and delivered from on high by a divine authority like the tablets at Sinai. But the reality is that the siddur is the record of a series of remarkably creative acts of imagination attempting to articulate an ongoing dialog with what is beyond the reach of ordinary understanding. The prayers it contains are expressions of the revelations human beings have experienced from the depths of their longing and doubt and yielding, strung together in a highly intentional collage. 

And just as the pray-ers who preceded us wrestled with language to give voice to an essentially inexpressible experience of proximity to the divine (Adonai, HaShem, Chavayah, God, Shekhinah, Source, The Place—this is an energy we go on naming as we name our own longing for it), each subsequent generation inherits the challenge and opportunity of translating the prayers freshly. Using their template as a jumping off point, we the living draw on our own experiences of the sacred to translate their translation—and a direct translation is neither the only way to translate nor is it always the most faithful to the soul of the prayer. A creative act of prayer is a collaboration between our predecessors, the language of the prayers themselves, our souls and the higher realm they are yearning to commune with in the present. We all need each other in the evolution of our tradition.

In the leadup to the event, Eliana and I met with the artists on Zoom to give them an introduction to the text, including its origin and liturgical and spiritual significance, as well as an introduction to each other’s work. They then had a period of several weeks to produce their own original response to the line, either on their own or in collaboration. Some came from secular backgrounds, some religiously observant. So many of the artists expressed a sense of ambivalence about communal Jewish prayer. They shared with us how they felt excluded by their lack of knowledge, distressed by the language, alienated by the imagery, unmoved by the service, yet hungry to connect more deeply.

Some had sought refuge in Eastern contemplative practices like meditation and chanting, while others found spiritual connection through their art-making and activism for social justice.

This was an event that began again and again, opened and reopened. First, a word about the space. Der Nister is named for the pseudonym of Pinchus Kahanovich, a mystical Yiddish writer; it means “The Hidden.” Entering Der Nister feels like walking into a magical realist Yiddish book store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan a century ago. Rows of shelves hold a dizzying array of Jewish books that whisper, summon, entice, and hide in enigmatic defiance. A wall of vinyl preserves the melodies of a still-unfolding exile. At one end, our audience sat in folding chairs on a patterned rug while the muted sunlight of a winter afternoon lit the exterior walls of old downtown Los Angeles.

Leeav Sofer, musician, songleader, and co-founder of the Urban Voices Project, began the program by plucking a tune on his StrumStick and leading the audience in breathing, sighing, screaming, and joining our voices together in singing: “Take a moment / Take a breath / Take time / Take what you need.”

It felt like the room became a lung. We were starting to make contact with our lips and mouths, with the physical act of producing sound and meaning invited by the line of prayer, and feeling the potency of communal noise-making.

Then I shared the origin of the project for myself: the desire to facilitate the kind of sacred encounter I didn’t know I longed for as I sat slumped in the back row of Hebrew school in Brookline, Massachusetts, watching an Israeli VHS of Barney the Dinosaur and praying an angel would beckon me at the window and transport me to Bruegger’s Bagels or oblivion.

Eliana shared the t’fillahsophy of the Light Lab to reconnect the traditional liturgy with the deepest and holiest parts of life in the present through radical acts of translation and imagination. She expressed the intention to be inclusive, welcoming anyone to claim their right to engage with the tradition, and especially emphasized the importance of hearing from those who felt their voices were not valid or qualified.

At this point, the event began again as Rebecah Goldstone, a dancer at Ate9 Dance Company, led us in an extended guided embodiment practice.

She invited us to open and release every part of our body one by one, wheeling circles with our elbows and knees, forming fluid snakelike curves with our spines. Now the room was full of rustling clothes and silent bodies surprised by the sensations of movements they’d maybe never made before. When she was done, we had gotten a taste for what the opening described in the prayer might feel like in the whole body, and had landed more deeply in the space of surrender.

Eliana then guided us to explore the Hebrew words themselves by speaking them with delicious slowness, lingering over every syllable, sensing how every sound lived in our mouths, what meaning we could pick up from the feel of these words in our mouths alone.

From this place, we traveled back in time to the lyrical origin of the six words. Adonai s’fatai comes from Psalm 51 and is traditionally attributed to King David as he cried out to God after being rebuked by the prophet Nathan.

I retold the story of how King David arose from his “nap ministry” and, strolling on the roof of his palace, saw a beautiful woman bathing. David’s eyes bulged out of his head like the wolf from the old cartoon: a-woo-ga! He summoned the woman to the palace and lay with her. When she became pregnant, he used his authority as king to get her husband killed so he himself could marry her. When God saw what he had done, God sent Nathan to rebuke David, which prompted him to utter the words recorded as Psalm 51.

Why might the rabbis have chosen this line, cried out by a remorseful monarch called to account for his abuse of power, to begin a sequence of prayers spoken three times a day? We put this question to the audience, who discussed it in two-person chevruta pairings.

Next, Erin Mizrahi read a poem. She reflected on the intimate and godlike parting of lips, the prayer of screams, the passage of time (walking into Urban Outfitters and “walking out the oldest I’ve ever been”), the inevitability of missing important things, the renewal taking place every day in a garden. She concluded:

I mean to pray but forget to scream 

I mean to pray but I sprout roses

I mean to pray but I sprout dahlias 

I mean to pray but I sprout a lawn of clover and roll down it

Gaze up at this slice of world & smile in the mouth of it all

Finally, comedian and songleader Antonia Lassar and multimedia artist Cara Levine led us in a final ritual to distill the line of Hebrew into its most elemental parts: “Chew it up and spit it out.” Antonia started with a nigun, a wordless melody that evokes the soul.

They invited us to gather in pairs and do an exercise to attune to the rhythm of each other’s breathing through observation and song.

Then they handed out packs of chewing gum. As the afternoon reached a kind of crescendo of opening and stillness, each of us chewed a piece of gum, infusing it with our prayer for the moment, and added it to a communal altar. By the end, the record of each of our lips, our mouths, their opening, their praise, was inscribed on these malleable scrolls of gum, etched together in an off-kilter offering.

It was the ending of an opening, and the beginning of the opening to who knows what further inquiries, surrenders, and opportunities to to engage immersively with the prayers as portals to what longs most deeply to move within us in the challenge and joy of ordinary life.

Our aspiration is to gather cohorts of artists like this to make our way through the prayer book. We envision further live events, as well as zines of visual art and literature. Ultimately, we will end up with an expansive digital record of living creative response to our tradition for the benefit of all those seeking a fresh, unusual, and enlivening entry into prayer.

This event was made possible thanks to support from the Institute for Jewish Creativity.

All photography by Lena Rudnick.