On the Way from Chelm

Bella, a girl from a secular Jewish family steeped in Ashkenazi cultural traditions, has taken up her grandmother’s love of storytelling. As the family prepares a holiday meal and an evening of celebration, Bella struggles with what it means to have a cultural heritage, family, and identity of her own. As she entertains friends and family with a humorous story of Chelm, the town of fools from Yiddish folklore, she falls asleep and dreams herself into the tale as first one character and then another, from rabbi’s disciples to goats to inanimate objects in the shtetl of her ancestors. Awakening back into her real life, Bella feels more secure in her identity when it’s challenged at school. The story posits time spent in community, the value of dreaming, and a visit with a cultural past closer to village life as restorative experiences, embodying the principles of Shmita, which help Bella learn who she is and where she can find the puzzle pieces of origin, self, community and family to fit into her present life in a world where identity is less prescribed and constricted and, while more open-ended, sometimes also more elusive. The meal preparation at the beginning of the piece illuminates my own practice, which also embodies Shmita, as it is rooted in the belief that people who prepare, cook and eat food together, followed by restful companionship and sharing, receive an essential, grounding connection that eases conflict in favor of love and commitment. Through the intermingling of traditional narrative, folklore, and dream sequence, I ask the audience to suspend reality for a moment of fanciful imagining; and through this imagining, to feel how culture carried within us from childhood can be reasserted in new ways, addressing new issues and circumstances to the benefit of all.