Saying Kaddish for Peter Brook

He was a man of amazing vitality and influence and since his death a few weeks ago, aged 97, I have been wondering about what it means to possess that quality of the soul, that aliveness; and wondering too about what remains alive and present when the person is gone. When we say Kaddish for someone who is gone we aren’t of course keeping them alive, literally, but we are keeping something alive - what they meant for us, maybe. ‘May their memory be a blessing’, we say. People enter eternity when we keep alive the sparks their soul, their presence, generated in us.

So in this last few weeks I have been wondering : who is saying Kaddish for Peter Brook?  Quite possibly no-one – the director, internationally renowned,  was a defiantly secular Jewish atheist: like many of his generation he threw off the last, inherited vestiges of Judaism very early on, disdainful of all that archaic Jewish thought and practice and ritual. Who would want the unsophisticated primitivism and bloodshed of the Bible when you could have the sophisticated bloodshed of, say, Hamlet – aged seven he acted out a four-hour version of the play for his parents, on his own. Such stuff are legends made of.

He was of course too young to appreciate the lines of continuity between Shakespeare and those ancient texts he rejected; too young to appreciate that the greatest writer in the English language shared with those ancient storytellers a parallel quest for meaning: “The great eternal question that we ask ourselves”, as Brook put it, “How are we to live?” (There Are No Secrets, 1993, p.62)

I’ve always been fascinated by Peter Brook’s distinctive approach to theatre, his almost Kabbalistic emphasis on the experience of immediacy, of aliveness, of presentness, that he tried to create with and through his actors; the way he mines the present moment for deep insights into the fabric of reality, the way he distils actions and speech to their essence. 

There is of course an irony in the way he devoted his life to creating in a theatrical context the spiritual intensity, the sense of ever-emergent possibilities and interconnections, that seem to have been absorbed - as if by osmosis, or alchemy - from the traditions and practices of Jewish mysticism. He spoke often about the centrality of myth and ritual for the nurturing of the human imagination, and the exploration of life’s core values. And so every culture in the world became available to be investigated and expressed and distilled – except the culture that was his birthright. So, yes, ironical; but also kind of sad.

His loss, I suppose, and ours too, I’m sure. One can only wonder what a nine hour production of the five books of Moses, the Torah, would have looked like analogous to his production of the Indian epic cycle the Mahabharata?  It would have been a thing of wonder, I’m sure, a true “holy theatre” - his term for theatre which recognises that, in his words, “there is an invisible world that needs to be made visible” (p.58).

One of the reasons why Peter Brook has mattered to me is that, to my mind, he was trying to get at something through his work that I connect directly to the activity we Jews engage in during our liturgical services.  Now those services aren’t theatre and if I lead such a service I am not an actor on stage  - nevertheless, something is being performed when we meet together. We could say that we too are involved through prayer, through assembling together at a fixed and place, and taking our seats, and entering into the ritual drama – we too are  exploring how, yes, “there is an invisible world that needs to be made visible”. So I have found that it’s worth listening in to what Brook was teaching about this mysterious process. 

“The problem is”, he wrote, “that the invisible is not obliged to make itself visible. Although the invisible is not compelled to manifest itself, it may at the same time do so anywhere, and at any moment, through anyone, as long as the conditions are right”. He could be talking (in a secularised way, he is talking) about how the ruach ha’kodesh becomes present, the divine spirit.  And the mystery of that. 

"I don’t think there is any point in reproducing the sacred rituals of the past…”, he continues, “The only thing which may help us is an awareness of the present. If the present moment is welcomed in a particularly intense manner…the elusive spark of life can appear within the right sound, the right gesture, the right look, the right exchange. So, in a thousand unexpected forms, the invisible may appear”. This is gold dust for anyone (of any faith tradition?) who lead services.

He's trying to put into words something which is hard to describe in language, but which nevertheless can be experienced.  And on the stage the key seems to be – and here I am condensing radically Brook’s discussion about this – the key seems to be, he says, if an actor can find this invisible presence “in a certain silence within himself. What one could call ‘sacred theatre’, the theatre in which the invisible appears, takes root in this silence…Theatre is always both about a search for meaning and a way of making this meaning meaningful for others. This is the mystery.” (p.76).

That seems to me to be a great definition of what is at the heart of Jewish prayer life in our services: it’s “always both about a search for meaning and a way of making this meaning meaningful for others.”

You might be able to see why these thoughts are so compelling for someone like me who leads services. Nobody in my experience has written so helpfully, so deeply, so perceptively about the challenges of leading communal worship, - of ‘doing tefillah’, as we say these days - as Peter Brook. Of course he never knew that’s what he was doing, unwittingly. Perhaps he’d be horrified, but I like to think he would be flattered. He should be. Some of those old-style Jewish atheists have a lot to teach us, still.

A final vignette about this. About thirty years ago I went to see a production of ‘The Dybbuk’, the play by the Yiddish writer, S. Ansky: it was on in Hampstead (I think) and although I don’t think it was a Brook production, the male lead was taken by Bruce Myers, a Jewish member of Brook’s Paris-based ensemble. He worked with Brook off and on for fifty years.

At one point in the play, the family are preparing to light the Shabbat candles, and as they prepare to do so the everyday hectic energy fades away and there was a stillness on stage, the actors were very quiet, very contained and there was a silence – it pervaded the whole theatre – nothing was happening (although something is always happening), but it wasn’t an empty silence, Myers was generated a silence from within himself, and one knew in that moment that here was a world in which the spiritual was real, the invisible was being made visible, the divine moment of Shabbat’s coming-into-being was being made present through attention, through devotion, it was being brought into being, on a stage in Hampstead.

And the words of the blessing were chanted, flowing out of the silence, and it was as if I had never really heard them before. And I have never heard them like that ever again. They spoke of something true and real and sacred and unchanging and always available and yet hardly ever experienced.

It was a revelation, to me – this is what prayer could be. This is what blessing meant. I try to hold this moment in mind when I am in the synagogue, gathered together for prayer – isn’t this the experience we want? To know that there is meaning? To know that there is purpose? To know that we are part of a sacred story?

Bruce Myers died at the beginning of Covid, of the virus. He was 78. I don’t know if anyone is saying Kaddish for him either. But that evening in Hampstead he offered one response to Brook’s eternal question: ‘How are we to live?’

If we can make space in our lives for the sacred to be present – in whatever form it takes, in whatever way it presents itself to us,  through whoever it makes itself known  -  isn’t this how we are to live? Isn’t this how we want to live?

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 22nd, 2022]