Take a Dream of Life With You

Michael Rutenberg z"l and I in rehearsals for The Fist in 2004

Dear friends,

There were, so far, a few things I’ve been called upon to do in this lifetime: father my boys, partner with Erika, lead a shul, create a school, protest injustice and war, study holy books, play basketball. And then there is the theater. I first heard that call at age 9, again in high school, once more at 21, and then in a loud and clear voice two years later from my teacher at Hunter College, Professor Michael Rutenberg. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I learned about Mike’s death on the week of Parashat Vayikra: “And He called upon.” This is often the week when we ponder our callings, listen for new ones, and wonder whether we’ve missed any. 

With Mike, missing the call to become a playwright would have been impossible. I took the one undergraduate playwriting class the theater department offered, which Mike taught. At the end of the semester, I handed in a one act play I called The Fist, about an IDF officer who informs his family that he signed a public letter stating that he refuses to serve in the Occupied Territories. Over the course of the next 3 years, Mike worked closely with me to develop the script into a full-length play, through thousands of emails and hundreds of hours of meetings and rehearsals, to bring it to production in Florida and New York. He taught me not only how to write and rewrite a play, cast and direct it and do it all over again, but how to devote yourself to teaching, how to guide and share knowledge, how to obsess fully and whole heartedly over a project your heart commands you to get just right. He directed The Fist Off Broadway, with me as the lead, and the production was a big success. And just like that, Mike handed me a career in the theater. 

Mike had, like most theater people, heard the call to a life in the theater in an overpowering way. It was his ticket out of the rough streets of Brooklyn where he grew up, and as an late teen he would stay up nights rehearsing plays with friends until they were just right. That led him to the Yale School of Drama, and to the Actors Studio, where he worked with Marylin Monroe and Paul Newman, and had funny stories about watching Gene Wilder try to be dramatic and eliciting laughs. He taught acting, directing and playwriting at Hunter College until he was 82, where he shepherded countless young people in the same way he did with me, and then til close to 90 in another university in Florida after he retired.  

His final obsession, which kept him busy from Covid until his death in late 2024 was an old Yiddish play that had never been produced in English, and which he said is “an anti-war play much more significant now than when it was written in 1920.” Der Toiter Mensch, or The Dead Man, by the great Yiddish playwright, Sholem Asch. In typical entrepreneurial spirit, Mike found a yeshiva bocher, gave him the script with the instruction to make a literal translation into English, and then he freely adapted it into modern English. The play is about a dead soldier who mysteriously returns to his war-torn, ravaged village in an attempt to convince the people there to follow him to a new village just across the river where war and hunger no longer exist. It strikes the notes of chaos and despair that have only gotten more pronounced since Mike’s death, and calls on us, like a voice from beyond to create new life out of the chaos. 

I’ll leave you with a few lines from Mike’s script. 

Yoysef: 
Take a dream of life with you, on the last step from this world into the other, for after your death. 

Dinah: 
Where are the dreams? 

Yoysef: 
Look within yourself.  Search for a beam of light and spin of it a dream, for the darkness of your days. 

Dinah: 
I remember nothing from that life.  Everything sinks into a mist.  Only little lights that spark and vanish, lasting the blink of an eye. 

Yoysef: 
Take hold of a spark, to light your final footstep. 

Dinah: 
I can’t, alone.  I sink back into the darkness.  Help me, Yoysef, to raise up the light. 

Yoysef: 
Only the living dream.  The dead are dead.  (Stops at the bridge.)  This is the last instant, the last step.  Tell me.  Tell me. 

Dinah: 
Now I see.  A light ascends to me. 

Yoysef: 
Dream well… Dream well… 

Mike’s final dream was to bring this old masterwork to production. If you feel called to be a part of that effort – let me know! 

Shabbat shalom, 

Rabbi Misha