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The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: Hanoch Levin's The

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The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: Hanoch Levin's The Freddie Rokem The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: Hanoch Levin’s The Torments of Job as a Modern Tragedy 1 Finally Job cried out: God damn the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb. On that day – let there be darkness; let it never have been created; let it sink back into the void. The Book of Job2 In order to understand the importance of Hanoch Levin’s adaptation of the biblical Book of Job, The Torments of Job (first performed in 1981), which I consider a modern tragedy with profound and uncanny, even nihilistic, impli- cations, it is necessary to present certain basic contexts of the Zionist and Israe- li culture – in particular of the theatre – within which Levin’s play was written and performed and to which it reacts with such brilliance. Levin’s adaptation – which in every sense is an original play by Levin – was first performed in the early 1980’s; thus the play and its performance (as well as much of Levin’s previous and subsequent work) constituted a radical critique of mainstream Zionist-Israeli culture and its basic values. These values were initially inspired by a strong sense of ideological and physical continuity between the Bible and the state of Israel; however, after the 1967 Six Day War as well as after the 1973 October War these presuppositions gradually came to face more open interro- gation. I begin this essay by exploring the more comprehensive cultural and aes- thetic contexts of the Bible as a Hebrew “classic,” which, under certain condi- 1 I have examined different aspects of Hanoch Levin’s adaptation of the Book of Job in some of my previous publications: see Freddie Rokem, “The Bible and the Avant-Garde: The Search for a Classical Tradition in the Israeli Theatre,” in: European Review 9.3 (2001): 305–317; Ro- kem, “Narratives of Armed Conflict: Tragedy and History in Hanoch Levin’s Murder,” in: Thea- tre Journal 54.4 (2002): 555–572; Rokem, Introduction, in: Levin, Hanoch, The Labor of Life: Se- lected Plays, trans. Barbara Harshav, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto 2003, ix–xxxv; and Rokem, “Job’s Soul and Otto Weininger’s Torments: Jewish Themes In The Theatre of Hanoch Levin and Yehoshua Sobol,” in: Jewish Theatre: A Global View, ed. Edna Nahshon, Brill, Boston 2009, 257–268. My basic understanding of the play has not changed over the years. In Perform- ing History, I presented a detailed analysis of another Levin play with a similar structure, The DOI 10.1515/9783110338799.185, © 2018 Freddie Rokem, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 186 Freddie Rokem tions, can serve as a rich source of inspiration for different genres of avant- garde arts, in this case the theatre. I continue my discussion by presenting some general observations about Levin’s critical stance to the hegemonic Zion- ist culture. The analysis of The Torments of Job is preceded by a general discus- sion of the relationships between tragedy and logic, which will serve as the theoretical basis for my analysis of the play and the performance of it that Levin directed in 1981. I argue that the play is a modern tragedy, and one that confronts in particular the ethical aspects of what it means to be human. 1 Cultural and Dramaturgical Contexts for Biblical Theatre There are several features that distinguish Israeli theatre from most other na- tional theatre traditions. First, it is a young tradition. The Habima Theatre, the Boy Dreams, focusing on the narrative structure of threats as well as their characteristics as speech acts; see Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contem- porary Theatre, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2000. In Philosophers and Thespians,I attempted to theorize the relations between wishes, promises and threats; see Rokem, Philoso- phers and Thespians: Thinking Performance, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2010. In this article, I return to several of the ideas presented in my previous publications on the Hebrew and Israeli theatre as well as the work of Hanoch Levin; here I contextualize them from a much wider perspective, mainly trying to define an aspect of modern tragedy which, as I argue, has previously not received due attention. The general framework for the analysis of tragedy that I propose was first presented at the Drama and Philosophy conference at the New University of Lisbon in January 2013; an earlier version of this particular analysis of The Torments of Job was presented at the symposium “The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics,” held at Princeton University in October 2012. Parts of the present version have previously been published as “The Logic of/in Tragedy: Hanoch Levin’s Drama The Torments of Job,” in: Mod- ern Drama 56.4 (Winter 2013): 521–539. I wish to thank the participants at these conferences for their valuable comments and the editors of Modern Drama for their permission to publish the article here. For additional articles in English on Levin’s The Torments of Job, see Sharon Aronson-Lehavi,“Transformations of Religious Performativity: Sacrificial Figures in Modern Experimental Theatre,” in: Performance and Spirituality 3.1 (2012): 57–70, http://www.utdl.edu/ ojs/index.php/pas/article/view/43 last accessed Nov 23, 2013; Yael Feldman, “Deconstructing the Biblical Sources in Israeli Theater: Yisurei Iyov by Hanoch Levin,” AJS Review 12.2 (1987): 251–77, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4497552; and Matthias Naumann, Dramaturgie der Drohung. Das Theater des israelischen Dramatikers und Regisseurs Hanoch Levin, Terctum, Marburg 2006. 2 The Book of Job, trans. Stephen Mitchell, Harper Perennial, New York 1986, 13; all passages quoted are from this translation. The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage 187 first professional Hebrew theatre – meaning that the people who founded it considered the art of the stage to be their major profession as well as a spiritual vocation – was founded in 1917, in Moscow, in the wake of the Bolshevik Rev- olution and the Spring of Nations, reinforcing the initial multi-cultural and multi-national ideals of these events. Only in the mid-1930s, however, after the Habima Theatre collective had settled in the steadily growing city of Tel Aviv, and after several other theatres had been established among the Jewish set- tlers, did the Hebrew theatre – which, in 1948, became the Israeli theatre, fol- lowing the declaration of the independence of the state of Israel – begin to have a somewhat more significant influence on the cultural life of the Jewish population of what was, from 1917 to 1948, British Mandatory Palestine. To- day – 66 years later – the Israeli theatre has developed into a complex system of established theatres and includes a broad range of more avant-garde fringe groups, including other live performing arts, including ballet/dance and opera. The Habima Theatre, founded in Moscow as an avant-garde theatre collective, was declared the Israeli national theatre in the mid 1950’s. Owing to its relatively young age, the Israeli theatre lacks an indigenous tradition of classical plays which could be regularly included in the repertoire. Beginning with the establishment of the state, but particularly since the 1960’s, a remarkable number of Israeli plays have been written and performed; in most cases, however, these have been performed only once, in a single production, after which most have become more or less forgotten. No more than a handful of plays written in Hebrew have been performed more than once and become “canonized” within this young tradition.3 Theatre traditions with longer history usually have a significant reservoir of “classical” plays, to which young theatre makers feel a need to return and reinterpret in new contexts. And although many plays had been written in Hebrew before the revival of Hebrew as a spo- ken language at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century – a project in which Habima and the other theatres played an important role – they were as a rule not suited for staging. These were “literary” plays, written in a literary language, whereas the theatres served as a model for how Hebrew sounds and communicates when spoken. Most of the classics that were performed on the Hebrew stages were trans- lations of foreign plays, from other dramatic and theatrical traditions. Such “foreign” classics are, of course, performed in all countries, albeit usually in combination with productions of “local” or “native” works. Besides presenting 3 See Yael Zarhi-Levo and Freddie Rokem, “Criteria for Canonization in Israeli Theatre: Re/ evaluating the Identity of Hebrew Drama,” in: Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories, ed. Steve Wilmer, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2004, 174–200. 188 Freddie Rokem some of these foreign classics the Hebrew theatres also staged plays written in Yiddish, where the characters and their fictional world as a rule stemmed from various Jewish sources familiar to the Jewish audiences. S. Ansky’s The Dyb- buk, composed first in Russian and later translated into Yiddish (or re-com- posed in Yiddish with some additions, as in the fictional world depicted the characters would have spoken Yiddish), was, following Constantin Stanislav- ski’s recommendation, performed by the Habima Theatre, after being translat- ed into Hebrew by the national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. The Dybbuk, di- rected by the Armenian director Evgeny Vakhtangov, premiered at the Habima Theatre in January 1922, after it had been performed (in Yiddish) by the Jewish avant-garde theatre Die Vilnaer Truppe, in 1920. The Habima Theatre’s produc- tion of The Dybbuk can be regarded as the paradoxical point where an indige- nous theatre tradition in Hebrew was created.
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