As a child, the High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)—were marked with reluctant trips to our family synagogue where the tone was somber and reflective. The gloomy music was as uncomfortable as the blue blazer I reserved only for services and bar mitzvahs. When I was not trying to decipher the purpose of the holiday through incomprehensible liturgy, I was making faces at friends or wandering out to the hallway to meet other wayward Jews, usually the parents of my friends who volunteered as ushers to avoid sitting through services. My once-radical synagogue, which had been on the front lines of the civil rights movement and hosted the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, had become staid and boring. It offered little to my generation. Not surprisingly, many of my peers drifted away from temple.
Realizing that the High Holidays no longer need to be about going to a synagogue, especially this year, Mishkan Chicago has brought together a team of performance and film artists, many who were (unsurprisingly) already connected with the organization, to produce a rare experience that merges the rituals of the holiday with music, film, and theater. They originally planned for services to take place at the Auditorium Theatre after they sold out the Vic Theatre for the past two years, but in the coronavirus era the High Holiday experience will instead be a combination of interactive streaming services online, as well as in-person experiences around Chicago.
For more information and registration, visit mishkanchicago.org.
