faith

Which path to choose?

Left to right: Misha Kobiliansky (Luther), Matthew Bissett (Faustus) and Dylan Nouri (Hamlet) in United Players’ production of Wittenberg, which is at Jericho Arts Centre Nov. 11-Dec. 4. (photo by Nancy Caldwell)

The play Wittenberg tackles heady subjects – skepticism or faith? Divine plan or free will? – with fast-paced high- and low-brow humour, mixing the serious and the silly, an actual historical figure with characters from literature.

United Players brings David Davalos’s comedy to Jericho Arts Centre Nov. 11-Dec. 4. Directed by Jewish community member Adam Henderson, it also stars community member Misha Kobiliansky – as Martin Luther.

The play, described as a prequel to both Hamlet and Doctor Faustus, is set in the year 1517. Luther (whose writings would spark the Protestant Reformation but who also would become viciously antisemitic) teaches theology at the University of Wittenberg. His colleague is philosophy professor John Faustus (who has yet to make his deal with the devil for knowledge and pleasure, as he does in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus). They debate each other and attempt to sway the views of one of their students, Hamlet (the indecisive Prince of Denmark penned by Shakespeare).

Hamlet has returned to school, in crisis after having studied Copernicus’s radical new theory of the universe, that the earth revolves around the sun. Meanwhile, as the play description explains, Faustus “has decided to make an honest woman of Helen, once ‘of Troy,’ aka ‘the Eternal Feminine,’ but she prefers her freedom” and Luther “is outraged at the abusive practices of the church to which he has sworn obedience.” In a college tennis tournament, Laertes (another character taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) competes against Hamlet for the championship title.

Wittenberg is Kobiliansky’s debut with United Players, but he is a veteran actor. When asked how he got into acting, he said, “That’s a nice story I like to tell. Back in the day, my mother worked as a piano player for the Moscow Art Theatre and she used to take me backstage with her when I was little. I remember watching a few plays from behind the scenes and watching actors go on and off stage – the atmosphere there was incredible! I was ‘scarred’ for life.

“A few years after, our family moved to Israel and somehow acting studies never came up, until I was in my early 20s. There were a few of us, theatre enthusiasts with no acting experience, and this very seasoned director who recently came to Israel from Ukraine. He wanted to find a young group of people and do some theatre together. He worked us through a pretty rigorous acting course for about a year and then we actually staged a few plays. Those were great times.”

Prior to winning the role of Luther, Kobiliansky was only minimally familiar with the historical figure on which his character is based.

“All I knew was that he led the Reformation and that the Lutheran Church is named after him,” said Kobiliansky.

While Luther’s antisemitism is a matter of historical record, with catastrophic consequences, of his concepts that a non-Christian might be sympathetic to, the actor said, “Well, Martin Luther’s relationship with God and his struggles with faith can apply pretty much to any religion, I think…. His anti-indulgence protest could be compared to any anti-corruption movement anywhere in the world, where those in power take advantage of their position for personal benefit, by pushing an ideological concept to an extreme.”

Limiting his comments to the character of Luther, as depicted in 1517, Kobiliansky said, “The thing I probably love the most about Martin Luther’s stance in this play – he stands for filling life with purpose as opposed to freedom and progress (represented by Faustus). Progress is a nice concept, but progress for a progress’s sake gets you nowhere.”

Wittenberg also stars Matthew Bissett (Faustus), Dylan Nouri (Hamlet), Deborah Vieyra (the Eternal Feminine) and Jake Anthony (Laertes). Running Nov. 11-Dec. 4, performances take place Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sundays, 2 p.m., with talk backs Nov. 17 and 20. Tickets ($30, $26 seniors, $15 students) are available at unitedplayers.com or 604-224-8007, ext. 2.

Zohar expert’s Selichot talks

Dr. Daniel Matt will speak in Vancouver at Or Shalom over Selichot, Sept. 20-21. (photo from Or Shalom)

Even one of the world’s leading authorities on kabbalah has felt lost in the study of Jewish mysticism.

Dr. Daniel Matt began studying the Zohar, the central text of kabbalah, on a one-year exchange at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Knowing that I had just one year there, I decided to take both Beginning Zohar and Advanced Zohar simultaneously,” he recalled. “I felt somewhat lost in Advanced Zohar, but that didn’t really matter, because I also felt somewhat lost in Beginning Zohar!”

His first book, his PhD dissertation, was a scholarly edition of the first translation of the Zohar: The Book of Mirrors by Rabbi David ben Yehudah he-Hasid, composed in the 14th century. He then taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., for two decades and spent as many years translating the most authoritative English translation of the Zohar. Matt, who will be in Vancouver Sept. 19-21, has become a preeminent scholar of the text.

In the mid-1990s, Matt was approached by Margot Pritzker – of the family who owns the Hyatt hotel chain – to produce a comprehensive English translation of the 700-year-old Zohar from the original Aramaic manuscripts.

Knowing the importance of the project, Matt agreed. “The Zohar was the only Jewish classic that had never been adequately translated,” he said.

The Zohar: Pritzker Edition was published in its completion in 2018. The 12-volume set, of which Matt translated and annotated the first nine, took 18 years to complete. For the feat, he received the National Jewish Book Award and the Koret Jewish Book Award, the latter calling his translation “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.”

The honour “was thrilling,” Matt said. The actual process of completing the translation, however, was at times grueling. “I basically restructured my life so that I could stay focused on this immense project without burning out,” he explained. “I started each day with a walk in the Berkeley Hills, then worked for five hours, then went for a swim, then rested and did some prep for the next day’s adventure.”

A major challenge was that, over the centuries, scribes who copied out Zohar manuscripts made changes to the text, meaning that an accurate version of the original was hard to find. “They added explanations, simplified the unruly Aramaic, deleted erotic descriptions or difficult – or invented – words and phrases,” Matt said.

Previous English translations of the Zohar were based on printed versions that, in Matt’s view, did not reflect the original writings. But, early in his process, he came upon manuscripts from the 14th to 16th centuries that he considered superior to the printed ones. To produce a “more authentic and poetic version,” he first reconstructed an Aramaic text from those manuscripts so he could build his English translation with it and, ultimately, share that artistry with a new audience.

“It is a treasure not just of Jewish literature, but of world literature, hidden away in an Aramaic vault for 700 years,” he said.

For the past year, Matt has taught an online Zohar course and has had more than 500 students, both Jewish and otherwise, from all over the world. He has found it gratifying to see “how eager people are to find personal meaning within Judaism, to explore and challenge the traditional understanding of God and Torah.

“I find that many folks are amazed to see that what they believe most deeply has been expressed by the mystics hundreds of years ago, or what they have stumbled across in Buddhism or other spiritual teachings is right there in our own tradition, hidden for too long.”

What Matt impresses on his students, both beginner and advanced, about the Zohar is how it goes beyond the literal meaning of the Torah. “It challenges our normal ways of making sense and reveals a radically new conception of God,” he said. “God is not a bearded man up in heaven who runs the show. God is infinity. At the same time, God is equally female and male, and the feminine half of God (Shekhinah) is perhaps the greatest contribution of the Zohar.

“All of Western religion is dominated by the masculine description of God, which has influenced our culture tremendously and left us with an imbalanced view of our own human nature.” Shekhinah, he said, “helps us realize that God embraces both the feminine and the masculine realms, though ultimately God is beyond gender.”

Matt’s Vancouver visit will include a vegetarian potluck at Or Shalom on Sept. 20, after which he will talk on Shekhinah. On Sept. 21, he will present the talk How Kabbalah Can Stimulate Us to Renew Our Lives, which will include songs on the theme of yearning to join with the One and meditation led by the synagogue’s Rabbi Hannah Dresner. Program details and registration are available via orshalom.ca/selichot.

Shelley Stein-Wotten is a freelance journalist and comedy writer. She has won awards for her creative non-fiction and screenwriting and enjoys writing about the arts and environmental issues. She is based on Vancouver Island.

Safe spaces, diverse voices

Bradley West and Shayna Plaut (photos from conference organizers)

As part of Winnipeg Pride Week in May, local organizers put on the first-ever Queer and Faithful Conference.

A grassroots event created to give voice to LGBTQ2+ people of colour and their experiences with faith and spirituality, the conference featured two panel discussions with opportunity for informal roundtable discussions. The keynote speaker at the May 25-26 conference at Robert A. Steen Community Centre was writer, facilitator and performer Jenna Tenn Yuk. She spoke about exploring identity and the intersections of race, queerness and faith through personal storytelling, spoken word poetry and facilitation; encouraging interfaith conversations around intersectionality, privilege, social location and other aspects; creating safer spaces for LGBTQ2+ people of colour in faith-based environments; and ensuring safe spaces to ask questions and explore the issues as a community.

Bradley West, who has been involved with Winnipeg’s queer community for more than 20 years, and Shayna Plaut, a former Vancouverite who now lives in Winnipeg, were part of the conference’s Jewish panel.

“I think the conference came about because there were people who had been talking about the importance of keeping their faith, while also celebrating their gender and sexual diversity, and there were some people who were finding that to be a little difficult,” West told the Independent.

Explaining that it was an uncomfortable topic for many people in the broader queer community, he said, “In fact, one of the members said, on Saturday, that, ‘because faith rejected us so soundly, we have rejected faith.’ We need to create a safe space where we can come together and have these conversations – where people from the various faith communities and also from the queer community can come together in a mutual space.”

While such conversations have been going on for some time, typically led by faith leaders and queer community organizers, the aim of the recent conference was to offer a more personal approach.

“The organizers wanted to have voices of the people who are more marginalized in our community, because of their skin tone, or religion, or spirituality, or faith,” said West. “They wanted to make sure it wasn’t just centred around white voices; white, Christian voices….. Oftentimes, when we are having conversations about faith in this Canadian landscape, we default to the dominant voice which, in our historical context, is Christian.

“So, they definitely had a lot of Christians who were there and who were involved, but, in terms of the planning and the panel speakers, and in terms of how they wanted people to think, was thinking of how we might be able to create an open dialogue with each other … to be able to, first, honour our own faith journey, but then also to understand the faith journey of others, especially when that faith journey is very different from our own.”

According to conference organizers, 70 to 80 people attended over the two-day period, with attendees coming from Winnipeg, as well as from surrounding areas, such as Morden, Selkirk, Steinbach and Portage La Prairie.

“From what I experienced, everyone … was approaching it with a spirit of reflection,” said West. “They were definitely gently challenged by the speakers to reflect on their own personal participation in terms of do you really believe your faith is the only faith or the true faith … and does that subtly reinforce this idea that those who are different are ‘less than’?”

The speakers, he continued, “were gently challenging people to think about how we interact – not only with the different denominations in our faith, but everyone of Abrahamic faiths, with different strings of denominations, and also those outside of some of the faiths … different groups practising different versions of the larger faith. Sometimes, we have a tendency to think that our journey and our view is the view that is shared by everyone in our faith … and so, there were those gentle reminders to reflect on that. Overall, as a participant, I would say there was a sense of a call to self-reflection, and there wasn’t any resistance in terms of the intent to self-reflect, for sure.”

For West, one thing that struck a chord was that, even though he was in a room full of strangers at the beginning of the event, everyone got to know one another very quickly. “I think it was very much about, yes, we have differences, but we also have commonalities and, as we move forward, we need to look at both … have a bifocal lens in honouring our differences – not minimizing or whitewashing, or asking us to abandon our differences in order to get along … just focusing on our similarities. We’re going to honour that and work together, and look at how we’ll create spaces and places within our own lives. And then maybe, by extension, our own communities will allow more of these dialogues.

“The gathering had the flavour of us coming together and having these conversations, and continuing to do so outside of this space,” he said. “That core that comes from great changers, like [Mahatma] Gandhi, talking about that idea of, if you want to change something, first, change yourself, because, wherever you go, there you are. If you change yourself, you’ll automatically change the spaces you go into, because you are no longer the same person.”

Plaut’s faith has changed over the years. Born into a Chassidic home in the United States, her family decided to follow Conservative Judaism when she was 5.

“The joke I like to say is, I’m queer, I’m Jewish, I’m a mom, I have seven tattoos, 13 earrings, and I keep a modicum of kosher,” said Plaut. “I teach at the University of Winnipeg and work in the field of human rights and journalism.”

When asked to help organize the conference, Plaut jumped at the chance. She took on the role of food coordinator and ensured all the food was vegetarian, so that everyone could eat, regardless of their religious or dietary restrictions. She also took it upon herself to make sure that not only the Abrahamic faiths were represented, but also Hindu or Sikh, by reaching out to some of her students.

“Folks would use their own experiences and explore some of the strengths that they found within their faith and also some of tensions,” said Plaut about the conference. She said that some people feel like they have to choose, in terms of their identities – religious, cultural and sexual – and that the conference encouraged an exploration of various faiths’ strengths and limitations in terms of guiding people, and what it means to find acceptance within a faith.

The conference attracted a range of attendees.

“Many of the folks who came, not all, but a good proportion, may not have identified as being queer themselves,” said Plaut. “Many of them were grandparents, actually, or parents who wanted to know how to better support their children or grandchildren. They wanted to learn.”

While organizers worked hard to share with and connect people, they left it up to the participants whether to exchange their contact information with one another. Some attendees expressed interest in continuing the conversation beyond the conference and organizers are working on determining the next steps. Many of the participants joined the nearly 50,000 marchers at the Winnipeg Pride Parade, which took place June 1.

“It was amazing, our biggest Pride ever in terms of participants in the parade,” said Plaut. “There were over 112 organizations that registered either floats or walking groups.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.