FOREWORD—1
FOREWORD I began collecting stories because Shlomo Carlebach told stories. For a long time I considered myself to be just a teacher who told stories. It took Peninnah Schram to convince me that I was a storyteller and Robbie Gringris to put me in a context in which I was regularly telling stories. Telling stories got me to collect stories. Torah Aura Productions gave me a context in which I was using my stories as curriculum. About ten years ago I began to see a pattern connecting midrashim to prayers. This book has grown out of my search for that pattern. Torah Aura gave me the space and the time for this quest. Much of this material originally was found for Torah Aura’s T’fillah Curriculum. Midrash doesn’t understand truth the way that logic does. In it things can be simultaneously contradictory and true. Midrash works with the logic of the myth, and a myth is “a truth frozen in a story” (Robert Bly). Truth is different from history. In myth, two or more things are usually true at the same time; simultaneous ambivalent truth is the way of the world, and the way of midrash. The Rabbis were not systematic writers; rather, they worked associatively. That means that it is impossible to find a midrash or aggadah for every prayer in the liturgy. But the Jewish tradition is larger than just the Rabbinic one. Often, not in shaping the liturgy, but in exploring it, folktales or Hasidic stories dig to the heart of a prayer. In choosing the stories for this collection I was not always able to find the midrashic “origin” story. Sometimes I had to work backwards from other sources. All these stories have a Jewish context, sometimes evolving through Jewish folk literature, sometimes through original works of fiction, particularly by Yiddish writers or their American extensions between the 1930s and 1950s who were well schooled in Jewish forms and Jewish insights. What can be said about this collection is that it has a preference for Rabbinic origin stories. Where these could not be found, other branches