Spring of 1984

I had been working part time for more than a year at Four Winds, a residential psychiatric hospital in Katonah, New York. I had been married to my third wife, Susan, for more than a year. I had two young children; she had three teens. My previous working life had been as a teacher of literature, first at Harvard and then at Brooklyn College. I did not receive university tenure, and psychodrama was a second career. Susan was a psychotherapist with a Masters degree in counseling. I was 43 years old.

Two weeks earlier, in mid March, I had gotten a call from my boss at Four Winds, Dr. Samuel Klagsbrun; he asked me if I could teach a class for him on a Tuesday when he had to be out of town. I knew that  Dr Klagsbrun was teaching part time at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Though not himself a Rabbi, Sam, as he was called by all who knew him, had a deep interest in the psychological health of Jewish clergy. In that regard, he had devised a course for rabbinical students in their last year of seminary, the goal of which was to prepare these soon-to-be ordained men (at the time the Seminary only graduated men) for their first pulpits. As Sam saw it, these men, though schooled in texts and law, literate in the languages of Torah and Talmud, were, frankly, babes in the woods when it came to the reality of synagogue life. They had no experience working with boards of directors, with contentious congregants, with the burdens of fund-raising, or the challenges of colleagueship with clergy who were not Jewish. So Sam had devised a course that would explore some of the issues these soon-to-be Rabbis would face. He addressed their fears; he demystified the profession in its real-world aspect, and he offered them strategies for everything from negotiating contracts to managing the inevitable impossible congregant.

Sam explained this course to me over the phone when he asked me if, in two weeks I could teach a class for him in his course on “Leadership Skills.”

More fully to appreciate this moment in my life, it may be helpful to know just how unprepared I was for this assignment. (There was never a question of saying no to his request: Sam was employer, mentor, and friend.)

I had been born to Jewish parents and that was the full extent of my “Jewish identity.” I had never been inside a synagogue in my life and, as far as I knew,  I had never even met a Rabbi. It goes without saying that I had never been to a seder for passover, I had never experienced the rite of passage called a bar mitzvah, and I did not even have stories from old world Jewish grandparents, aunts or uncles. Both of my parents were only children; both had turned away from the Judaism of their mid-western family lives; both had wanted only that their only son become a man of the world, a cosmopolitan. They had no religion in their lives and could imagine no place for it in mine.

Therefore when Sam asked me to step into a classroom at a seminary that ordained men for the Conservative Movement, asked me to explore with them for a 90 minute class something that had to do with leadership issues in first pulpits, I was, to say the least, ill at ease. It felt like being asked to play as substitute in a professional sport for which I had neither training nor aptitude. I would not just make a fool of myself, I would have to experience the depth of my ignorance about my birth-certificate Judaism and to face something of the shame I felt in that ignorance. But there was no way to say no.

So on a particular day—a Tuesday morning if memory serves, and I like to think it was April 1—I passed through the portals of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, climbed—oh so slowly— four flights of stairs and entered a classroom where about fiteen men were gathered waiting for my arrival. They were not expecting Dr. Klagsbrun, they were expecting me.

I made some preliminary remarks, apologies I am sure for the ignorance I was sure to expose in myself, and then proposed the following. “I know you are thinking deeply about the issues of leadership. I’d like you to imagine you are Moses; I’d like you to step into his shoes; and I’d like you to tell me, as Moses, some aspect of leadership that you find most challenging.  “This proposal came easily enough to me since the psychological method I used in my work at the hospital—psychodrama—involved role-playing, though I had never invited anyone to role play a biblical character

A silence fell. A long, agonizing silence. And I remember thinking to myself that I had no other tactic, no other trick. If i could not get them to engage with my question, this was going to be the longest 90 minutes of my life. And I would have failed my assignment.

A hand goes up. And I remember thinking to myself that this is the member of the class whose job it is to inform this poor lost substitute teacher that this is not the kind of question rabbinical students are asked or answer.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t know what to say.”

“You are Moses?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, “I am Moses and I don’t know what to say. I am not a good public speaker. I have a stammer, and whenever I have to stand before my people and address them I feel almost…”

“Panic?” I offer.

“Yes, panic.  I rely on Aaron to do my speaking for me, but he is not always available.”

“Thank you,” I say. Silence. Another hand is raised.

“I am Moses, and I have to lead these people somewhere, except I have no idea where. I don’t have a map, and they are always fighting among themselves.”

“Thank you,” I say. Silence, but a shorter silence now. A hand is raised, Someone else raises his hand also. Something is happening. I call on another Moses.

“I am Moses and I have to deliver the law. I have to teach these people, who don’t know from law, how to act, what is right and wrong, how to make a community. But who am I to tell them? Why should they listen to me?”

More hands are raised now. The process goes on. Until the class is over.

I remember watching the students leave the classroom. It had been interesting, this—well you might call it a psychodrama of the Bible. I had heard how, wearing the mask of Moses, these men had been able to talk about their own concerns, hopes, and fears. Perhaps more honestly than they could have had they been talking directly about themselves. And I had survived.

One student lingers, and after the rest have left, he comes to me and says that he had found the process very interesting; he has never done anything like it, he says. He supposes really what I was doing is a form of midrash.

“Midrash?” I say. He writes the word on the blackboard, looking at me with a slightly puzzled expression as if to say, surely you know what midrash is, though in fact I am hearing this word for the first time in my life.

“Midrash,” he says: “it comes from a Hebrew root…” and here he dashes off three marks on the blackboard, Hebrew letters, indecipherable to me.  “This is the root meaning to explore or investigate.” I stare at the word. “Gotta get to my next class,” he says. “Thanks,” he says, “this was…this was really interesting.” And then I am alone in the classroom.

I remember thinking how very strange it was that I had dome something out of sheer desperation, marrying my psychodrama skills with my interest in literature, in character and in motivation, and that this improvisation could have a name, a Jewish name: “midrash.” I remember thinking about the French playwright Moliere, the main character in whose play the Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovers to his amazement that he has been “speaking prose” all his life. Could it be that, without any schooling, I had been speaking midrash? That thought a smile. And I was very glad the class was over.

When Sam reported to me a week later that the class had very much enjoyed what I had done, I felt pleased that he was pleased.  “They want you to come back and do it again some time.”

That was how Bibliolog began.

I said yes to Sam’s request that I come back to teach another class. I said yes when some months later Sam enlisted me to work with him at the annual convention the Conservative Movement holds in which Rabbis and their families gather for days of professional development, study, and socializing. I said yes a year later when at that same convention I was asked to do a workshop using role playing with Bible. I said yes when a group of friends, who knew about my explorations, asked me to do a psychodrama of the Bible on a Sunday afternoon at the Quaker Meeting House in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Susan and I were living. I said yes when two years later a Rabbi in Queens invited me to be his “scholar in residence” for an entire weekend and to share this work with his congregation.  He would pay me $2000 for the weekend. Was that acceptable?

And even then I did not think for a single moment that this silly thing I was doing, this Bible play, was going anywhere. So there was interest. People heard about it through some grapevine—I certainly never thought to publicize what I was doing—and the phone would ring. But I was busy doing psychodrama at the hospital, I had kids to raise, parents to take care of, a marriage to succeed in. I was moving through my mid and late forties, and “the psychodrama of the Bible” was a very small part of my life and I was sure that soon enough it would disappear. And part of me wanted it to disappear because this work constantly brought me into contact with the Jewish world and in that world I felt utterly an outsider. I didn’t know anything about Judaism, and I did not want to know. I had this odd skill, to facilitate a role-playing experience using the Bible. For some reason people loved it; they told their friends about it. The phone kept ringing. It would not go away. But I felt constantly like I was a kind of sham. It was always like walking into the classroom at The Jewish Theological Seminary where I expected to be exposed. “What kind of a Jew are you?”

What kind of a Jew was I? I began to live this question because of this work and because, in fact, I seemed to have some facility—almost like some past life memory—in which I was completely at home with this thing called “midrash.”

The details of these years are too dense to recount. Seen from this moment in time and through the eyes of someone who has long had a longing for vocation, I see these years as a slow maturation of both a set of aptitudes and an aspect of identity. I did not formally step into the Jewish world until my sixties, when I joined my first congregation and had, at the age of 65, my bar mitzvah. These steps, so long delayed and prepared for, did not mean to be that I had abandoned my other religious and spiritual loves—I maintained my Buddhist meditation practice; I continued to value my years of study of Hinduism, Christianity, and shamanism; I continued to think of myself as an outsider to Jewish life and certainly to Jewish law—but gradually I came to accept and to welcome the fact that I was, also, Jewish. Not just by birth, but by association, by friendships, by professional connection, by a sense of shared interests, and by the fact that for almost a quarter of a century Judaism had said to me, “You are one of us even if you don’t think so. There is a place for you at this table. We do not ask anything of you.”

Finally overcoming the last vestiges of childhood anathemas—the terrible shadow of the Holocaust which made Judaism such a perilous thing to embrace, and the subtle but deep anti-Semitism that was part of my father’s legacy to me–I said publicly and privately that I wished to be counted as  Jew. By then the psychodrama of the Bible had come a very long way from its beginnings and it had taken a place in the world, an institutional place, that I could never have foreseen for it.

 1997: Germany

A German born professor of  philosophy at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. In 1992 Bjorn Krondorfer edited a book called Body and Bible, which was made up of accounts of experiential approaches to biblical interpretation—and in particular “bibliodrama”— that had developed over the previous decade, particularly in Europe. Reading the book I was struck by the co-incidence that I, in the context largely of the Jewish community in the United States, had coined a term for a kind of experiential hermeneutics which had a Christian counter-part in Europe. I wrote Bjorn; we met; we did some work together;  and in l997, he secured for me an invitation to be the key-note speaker at the Bibliodrama conference, held annually in Bad Segeberg, Germany. At that conference  Susan and I met a whole community of theologians, scholars, ministers, and educators who were exploring new ways to teach the Bible and to engage people in a more embodied, imaginative, and soul-centered relationship with it.

Most importantly we met Frank Muchlinsky and Uta Phol-Patalong, both of whom recognized the special contribution this midrashic form of Bibliodrama might make to the their own work as pastors and teachers.   The year after that I came to Germany to teach the method of midrashic Bibliodrama to Uta, Frank, and perhaps a dozen others who were similarly interested. We made use of a five day training format, a model developed in this country in conjunction with Rivkah Walton, who had founded the Bibliodrama Training Institute in l993. This Institute later became the Institute for Contemporary Midrash, a multi-arts approach to biblical interpretation.

Over the next ten years, Susan and I came often to Germany to teach beginning and advanced seminars in Bibliodrama. During the same period we traveled and taught Bibliodrama in Finland and in Norway, in Israel and in Canada, as well as continuing to respond to invitations for workshops across the United States. But nowhere in my home country did Bibliodrama develop so strong a following, so concerted a training program, and so wide-spread an effect as it did in Germany. I hope that Uta and Frank will supply their own accounts of the history of this work, and I will only add here that six years ago, it became clear that Bibliodrama needed to change its name in Europe because it was too often confused with the original German form bibliodrama: what was required was a name that distinguished the two. I proposed the term Bibliolog, and that was adopted.

Now, in the year 2012, this work goes forward. A Bibliolog network has developed that reaches into many countries. More than 3000 people have been trained in the method and there are a cadre of thirty trainers who travel widely and offer pastors, educators, and lay teachers a carefully developed training experience in Bibliolog. A certification process has developed with standers and protocols. The “psychodrama of the Bible” has become a professional institution, quite beyond Susan’s or my wildest dreams.

Susan’s History of Bibliodrama/Bibliolog