By Julia Lustig
Being someone who has grown up with a well-rounded education in Jewish text study through my many years at Jewish day school, I often feel well prepared and relatively knowledgeable when engaging in the texts of our biblical history. I have often struggled with the question of why Jewish day schools stress the importance of learning such stories, especially when they are about seemingly irrelevant scenarios in relation to my own daily life, even my own daily Jewish life. It feels quite distant to me at times, more like a universal history textbook rather than a book of my people’s past.
I must admit, the idea of Bibliodrama sounded crazy to me at first. It took many of us a few minutes to feel comfortable shouting out emotions as if we were a part of the story ourselves, but Yael Unterman pushed us to try it out and it was a lot of fun by the end. I felt that this session really shifted the way I think about these ancient Jewish stories, and it seemed like many people felt the same way I did.
We dove into a text about Miriam, a character who I have learned about countless times in many different ways. Perhaps I could say I previously admired Miriam simply because she was a woman of significance in her time, but I feel that way about any woman I read about in history, Jewish or not. Yael read a few lines of a text with us, about Miriam watching Moses getting saved by Pharoah’s daughter. She then asked us to close our eyes and put ourselves in the place of Miriam. We spoke about what it means to save your brother and then see him put in a place of power without giving you any credit—were we mad? Disappointed? Proud? The reactions varied.
I walked away from this session feeling like I had discovered new insights about the Torah that I had been learning for so long—I often forget that biblical figures are written as real people, with feelings beyond what is said or shown through the text. Instead of seeing Miriam as a distant figure in the ancient history of the world, I now feel a very human connection to her, and to the Bible as a whole.
