Reclaiming Our Agency
Frank London is the co-artistic director of this year's Kumah Festival
Dear friends,
We have a week and change until our Kumah Festival, and the excitement among the team is palpable. What began as an idea to pick up the trodden spirits has taken form as a celebratory night of unity and beauty in the face of brutality and division. This week’s chilling toll: the horrific murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky z”l, the two Israeli embassy workers in DC, the 29 children and elderly people who died of hunger in Gaza, along with around 370 killed in bombings – only make more palpable the need for an uplifting event that brings us back in touch with our values, our agency and our joy.
The Festival is taking place on the sacred night of Shavuot, on which we celebrate receiving the Torah. The ancient Israelites made pilgrimage on this day to the Temple in Jerusalem. We will be coming home to the New York that we might have forgotten we live in: artsy, edgy, diverse, outspoken and unique. This will be one of those nights that can only happen in New York.
It’ll be a night that celebrates the very best of humanity. When you walk into the lobby of Theater for the New City, a downtown stronghold of political art since the 1960’s, you’ll find yourself in a photography exhibit of joint Israeli-Palestinian activism, by Gili Getz and Itamar Dotan Katz. If you like, you’ll have the chance to participate in an art-build of giant puppets for the No Kings March on June 14, led by my incredible neighbor, artist Julie Peppito (with help from our wonderful Suzanne Tick!).
In the theater we will dream our way into the night through music, ritual, poetry and carnival. We’ll have North African master musicians singing nighttime chants written by African slaves hundreds of years ago, accompanied by leading contemporary jazz musicians. We’ll have Appalachian music expressing kabbalistic ideas of oneness. We’ll have a brand new series of protest songs to give voice to our anger, our hopes and our dreams. We’ll have Broadway stars, Grammy winners, gospel choirs and philharmonic front-liners. We’ll have Jewish and Arab Jerusalemites playing a prayer for peace together, sung by children. We will create the hope that will carry us forward.
We will also hear words from people at the forefront of various local and international struggles for a humanity-first world.
The bands will play from 7pm until 2am, at which point whoever is still awake will transition to a Shavuot tisch, with singing led by Frank and Daphna and guests, teachings from Shaul Magid, yours truly and guests, and mystical wine drinking til the break of dawn.
Shavuot celebrates receiving the Torah on that mythical day, thousands of years ago, when we heard God speak to all of us directly saying “I am the force that led you out of slavery in the land of narrowness.” I can’t wait to hear that force rising out of the music next weekend, inviting us to forge our way into the great wide open.
Tickets are selling very quickly, please get yours if you haven’t already.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha