An Essay On Ha Lachma Anya, Optimism, and Suspension of Disbelief That is Too Long For Me to Recommend You Read Aloud...

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...but, In Writing It, Has Helped Me Process How to Do Maggid This Year

(read the bolded sections aloud)

Ha Lachma Anya, the introduction to Maggid I’ve always known, is hard for me this year.

This Passover, Matzah does feel more like the bread of affliction than on any other Passover I’ve experienced.

In his Pesach Haggadah, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks writes that “What transforms the bread of oppression into the bread of freedom is the willingness to share it with others....” In a year when every place of shared nourishment (both the literal and figurative) are closed, when I am told I cannot stand closer than six feet to the people I love or welcome others into my home, when I am unwilling to share the bread of freedom with others, how can I extend an honest invitation?

And then there is Ha Lachma Anya’s conclusion, its leap to freedom and redemption. This is the least free I’ve ever felt in my otherwise now seemingly very beautifully boring and safe life. Pardon the language, but how the fuck am I supposed to think about invitation and community and freedom? How the fuck am I dreaming about a redemptive next year when we’re all taking things day, hour by hour, when who knows what next year is going to be and time has gotten slippery and days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days and I can’t say I remember when this even began, when death encroaches on all sides, when freedom and redemption couldn’t feel further away?

Do any of you artists have an initial impulse towards false uplift and sentiment, even if you hate it? For years, I strongly and vocally identified as a pessimist. Maybe that was just an ansty posture, a contrarian stance tied to anger and growing into my body and feeling like I didn’t belong in the religious community in which I was raised. People would be shocked when I told them about my straunch pessimism, maybe because I smile a lot and like baking cookies for my friends and generally making people feel better. And yet, though I would declare my self-identification with pride and defiance, I would write plays that ended neatly, where seperated loved ones were reunited and estranged family members held hands, or lovers would kiss and make up, despite everything. I am repelled by false uplift when I see it in art; I think it is both uninteresting and irresponsible. When I sniffed it out in my own work, I would have to untangle and revise my way to somewhere that felt truer: a world that is chaotic and messy and often really sad, a world that was more about tough questions than easy answers (more on questions later). “Now we are here, next year we will be in the land of Israel; this year we are slaves, next year we will be free people” smells strongly of false uplift.

In Escape Velocity: A Post-Apocalyptic Haggadah, Stanley Aaron Lebovic argues that Ha Lachma Anya’s invitation is too late to be sincere. The delay of the invitation proves “We are NOT really free! We are NOT yet home! Our exodus from Egypt has landed us in a prolonged exile of unimaginable horrors…”

So, for reasons of both the Haggadah’s structure and the current reality of our lives, the invitation isn’t a real invitation.

But, lately, I have been thinking a lot about suspension of disbelief.

In my recent applications to institutions, I’ve had to articulate what I think is radical or meaningful or even just useful about theatre. I’ve found myself narrowing in on how, when disbelief is suspended, seemingly authentic, unshakeable givens fall away. I’ve found myself writing in definitive, declarative, statements about how theatre is radical because it places the seemingly impossible within the reach of human imagination. A better world must first be imagined in order to ever come into existence. And if a better world can be rendered in imagination, then it might just be possible.

Now, I read these statements, retch a little, and qualify all of them with a small, doubtful, quiet, pleading “right?” Consider this revision for our time: When disbelief is suspended, seemingly authentic, unshakeable givens fall away, right? Theatre can be radical because it places the seemingly impossible within the reach of human imagination, right? And a better world must be imagined in order to ever come into existence, right? And if a better world can be rendered in imagination, then it might just be possible, right?

As I write this, I see the shadow of what I think might be a mouse flit across my parents’ dining room floor. I hop onto a chair, for literally no reason because mice are tiny. I tell my parents. We have a short conversation, loosely summarized:

We could call someone.

Yeah.

But no one would come.

Yeah.

And my friend Hannah texts me. She’s just angry-written two chapters of her new fantasy novel. She wanted to share her seder with her sister. They both live in Boston. Even so, they can’t be together. I can cite endless examples of everything on the spectrum of wrong to tragic to nightmarish. I know you can too.

And here we are, singing about freedom.

There is the obvious framing of the Passover story that (presumably) draws all of us as ~artists~ to exploring its various facets: Maggid as a highly theatrical act of suspension of disbelief. You’ve got props, set, script, maybe a costume. Hold your matzah aloft. Drink at appointed times. It’s Site Specific Theatre, Baby.

In an article for Scientific American, Literary Critic Norman Holland cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the coiner of the term in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, when he asked his readers for “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith,” though like many of y’all I recall first learning of suspension of disbelief through Aristotle or maybe theater camp. While neuroscience hasn’t quite figured out specifically how we suspend disbelief, Holland describes suspended disbelief in general terms. He writes “It isn't that we stop disbelieving—it's that we believe two inconsistent things. We accept that we are sitting and reading or watching a movie. We also believe or, more accurately, feel that what we are reading or viewing is happening.” When we suspend disbelief, our prefrontal cortexes do not fact-check our realities or trigger our motor impulses. But, our limbic systems make us feel the feels of the stories we’re taking in.

I Googled why we have the capacity, on a neuroscientific level, to suspend disbelief, what might be psychologically or evolutionarily valuable. I haven't had any luck finding anything definitive.

And I don’t know how I identify on the optimism-pessimism spectrum anymore, certainly not now, not in a world where there are hours when I feel the world has been sliced open, tipped over, and completely and utterly drained of purpose and there are other hours, sometimes in the same day, when I feel more grateful just to be alive than I can articulate.

Fuck Aristotelian misogyny and oppressive witch’s hat bullshit structure, but I raise my three glasses of grape juice and maybe one glass of very weak wine to suspension of disbelief and poetic faith. I invite my adolescent self with her blue sparkly eye-liner and anger and angst before she’d experienced anything like this and my present self who feels so very small and sad and scared and incapable of meaningful action. I tell myself, past and present that it’s not naive or foolish to imagine freedom, to use the devices we know from our work to get through this. It is nourishing. It is human. Maybe suspending disbelief, with its capacity to blur the world of reality and the world of story, it is an act of older, wiser, optimism for our times. I don’t know for sure, though. Leibniz’s doctrine of optimism is that this world is the best of all possible worlds. I don’t know if I can believe that about the world we’re living through.

As we embark on the journey of Maggid, we know we’re, up to a point, deluding ourselves. We’re too smart and cynical not to. We know our invitation isn’t real. We know our freedom isn’t, either.. But we’ve all been suspending disbelief, semi-constantly, for weeks: watching hours of television and movies, putting up small shows on the internet, reading books, telling each other stories virtually.

We are all famished. We are all in need. So, okay. Let’s try it. Let’s suspend disbelief. Let’s invite each other to feast. Next year, we’re going to be free.

PS. I hate that I didn’t cite any women in this, WTF.

haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

Source: Shara Feit