One (and only?)

Kalamandalam John

Dear friends, 

Before I begin, I'd like to invite you all to a very special gathering we're holding this evening, which can connect us to both the reality of the current situation in Israel/Palestine, and the hopeful ways people are working to overcome it.  Spirit of the Galilee is an important organization working on co-existence between different faiths and cultural groups in the north of Israel. We will be joined by Ghadir Haney, a renowned and highly influential Muslim social activist, from the city of Acre, Fr. Saba Haj, the leader of a 5,000-member Christian-Arab-Orthodox Church in the town of Iblin, and Rabbi Or Zohar, Reform Rabbi of the Misgav region and director of the Spirit of the Galilee Association (SOG). These are critical voices for us to hear and take in here in the US, and I hope you can all join in person or tune in.

And now I'll pick it up from where I left off last week.

When he was fifteen years old, John was living a perfectly normal life for a Christian teenager in the South Indian state of Kerala. He went to the local school, and to the nearby Orthodox church for religious instruction . And then something happened that radically changed his life. He went to the theater.

Kerala is home to two of the oldest existing theatrical traditions in the world, which are kept as national treasures, but watched by very small audiences. Kudiyatam is the slower and more drama oriented form, in which a play lasts between 9 and 43 nights, each night between 2-5 hours. Kathakali is a form of dance theater with a faster pace, resulting in plays that only last one full night. At fifteen, John witnessed the latter and immediately fell in love. It did not matter to him that Kathakali tells only the stories of the Hindu gods from the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Nor did it matter that most performances took place in Hindu temples, and included the actors paying obeisance to the temple gods. John left his school and his church education and devoted himself entirely to becoming a Kathakali actor.

For 9 years he studied the ins and outs of the form, at the prime school for Kathakali, the Kerala Kalamandalam. The full day, physically demanding days teach the actors techniques of controlling each part of their bodies, from head to toe. Mornings begin with eye exercises, continue with the study of abhinaya, the unique sign language used in Kathakali and Kudiyatam, and end with rigorous dancing. When he graduated, John was awarded an excellence award, and became the world’s first ever Christian Kathakali actor, and was awarded the honorific Kalamandalam John.He performed the Hindu plays for many years. When the opportunity presented itself he created a Kathakali play about the Christian saint who first came to the region from Syria. Despite controversy, he performed the saint without the elaborate make up and costume, in a simple monk’s outfit.

His wife Marie also shook things up in the Kathakali world, when she learned the art of Kathakali make up and began to prepare John for performances, (as you can see in the picture above) a process which takes three hours. She is the first and only Indian woman Kathakali make up artist.

John exhibits two things that impress me deeply, beyond the incredible talent and knowledge that come with 50 years of performing and teaching Kathakali. The first is a rare openness to experimentation and new creations, which remains rooted in this ancient theatrical form. And the other is the deep-seated openness around divinity that I have only witnessed in India. How could a devout Christian pay obeisance to Siva, Rama, Brahma, Vishnu or any of the other Hindu gods? How could he participate in a play written by a rabbi who considers the performance an offering to God? Because God is one.

The old Indian way is welcoming and inclusive of any and all gods. “Who, Jesus? Sure! Bring him into the temple! Adonai you said? An invisible god? Great, let’s put one of his symbols next to Ganesh.” This welcoming multiplicity comes from a deep understanding that God is simultaneously the most serious business we have, and a manifestation of human play. It’s so real that it goes beyond the categories we habitually use for reality. Using God to exclude or denigrate others is the ugliest type of idol worship.

My play, Pharaoh is in part an attempt to define what we mean by the phrase “one god.”

“What does it mean when you say ‘one and only God,’” Pharaoh asks Moses in one scene. After Moses scoffs at the question Pharaoh digs further: "So you're saying that everything we Egyptians believe in is a......"
"Fantasy," Moses answers. 

This absurdly vain idea, that my imagining of God negates yours, has been bugging me since the first time I ever stepped into a Hindu temple, and was slapped with my people's centuries of guilt and prohibitions. I was sixteen and vulnerable to such guilt trips. And yet I quickly began to see how that exclusionary vision is being used not only for religious and cultural reasons, but for political purposes, with dire consequences.

Both monotheistic and polytheistic traditions can be either inclusive or exclusive, depending on your interpretation of the core idea of godliness in them. The current Indian government is taking an inclusive and playful faith tradition, and twisting it to exclude and humiliate Muslims and other faiths. Some Christians, Muslims and Jews around the world sin by interpreting the notion of one god as an exclusive and punishing “truth.” The faith I live by is a monotheism that is not threatened by other gods or notions of divinity, but raised up and buoyed by them. “Adonai Echad,” "God is one," means we are all one, a part of the all. The idea that “only my god is real” is, to my mind the opposite of the Torah’s charge.

Today, when John inhabits a character, he is in a glorious and unified command of his body. A decade of rigorous training followed by four decades of performing and teaching all over the world manifest in the spectator’s sense of watching a master at work. Countless times in rehearsal, Michael, Alysia and me have been swept into wonder watching John bring Pharaoh to life through movement.

Let us all take a page from Dr. Kalamandalam John in bringing true glory to God, through the open creativity, playfulness and inclusive understanding of the concept of God, and its expression through the wonder of the human body.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha