Hear Our Voice

I’m a big fan of “Hamilton” the musical, however I’ve never seen it, well I’ve never seen it live in the theater.  Six years ago, I learned about “Hamilton,” downloaded it, and the soundtrack quickly became Sammy’s and my favorite school-drive soundtrack.  It rocked and it rolled, and it truly awoke in Sammy a focused interest into American history and its founders. For me too, I found myself revisiting old textbooks and recent articles inspired by the success of the reach of “Hamilton.” I listened to the soundtrack so much that I had mostly memorized the lyrics (at least the way you have them memorized while the song is playing!), and over the course of time, I had painted a whole set of images in my mind of what the words brought to life.  So when Disney+ announced that “Hamilton” on stage would be available on TV, I immediately signed up. I sat down to watch, I sang the words (gotta’ love Closed Captioning), and thoroughly enjoyed it.  But then I began hearing some folks’ opinions, read comments online, on Facebook and was surprised to hear a whole segment of folks who really didn’t enjoy it. I dug in a little bit more and I learned that most of the folks who had a bit of a negative report, not only hadn’t seen the show live, they weren’t at all familiar with the soundtrack. I was still surprised because for me, this musical, even having not seen it live, is phenomenal.  And then it dawned on me that live theater is meant to be experienced in real life. Despite the fourth wall, as it is known, there is an intimacy and connection that one experiences in live theater that it would seem, doesn’t easily translate into celluloid, or I should say, digital.  And then, as I’m sure this is what you would find yourself thinking about, I started thinking about the High Holy Days. Since the beginning of the summer, I had imagined that our great goal should be to utilize multiple video cameras to capture our traditional high holy days services but in a multi camera sort of way. But as the summer has worn on and it has become clear to all of us that everything is getting turned upside down and inside out, our High Holy Days are becoming vastly more important.  So too is the way in which we are going to experience them.  We can’t just provide you with a TV version of our services on the "bima."  Not if we are truly striving to touch your soul, to inspire you to seek forgiveness, to assess your unique gifts to make an effort to change the world.  No, if that’s our goal for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (and by the way, it is…) the medium is a crucial piece of what the message will become.   We’re not in Kansas anymore.  And we’re not simply videoing our “bima” with a few cameras.   You’re gonna’ want to join us for a High Holy Days of tremendous proportions!  Check this out to get a sense.