It's Not Real Until I Say It Out Loud

With a new plan in place to chronicle the Sabbath of strictly observant Jews, along with some stories about how others celebrate it, I now need to kick into gear and get some expert interviews (rabbis or cantors) lined up. Unfortunately, this is probably the worst time of year to line up Jewish clergy for anything. The High Holidays (Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur) start this Friday, and are immediately followed by Sukkot (a week-long fall festival that involves building a temporary structure) and Simach Torah, the rewinding of the Torah Scrolls.

I'm such an extrovert, things don't become real for me until I tell somebody about it. So I'm at the lovely Takoma Park Folk Festival today, and see a few Jewish groups with their booths set up. I walk over and introduce myself, and start talking about my project, not exactly making things up as a go along, but more like articulating things that I would be doing, but just hadn't really thought of until the moment.

Got some good idea there, reminded of a few rabbis who would be good resources for this project as well as another documentary I've been thinking about (chronicling the journey of a convert).

Email is a good thing, and I'm sending out emails explaining my project, hoping to get names and emails of people willing to share their stories.

Getting Started: From Music Video to Documentary

Inspired by Rebel without a Crew, Roberto Rodriguez's diary of the making of "Desperado", I decided to chronicle the making of my second film project about Shabbat.

I never liked Am Kolel's website of music and prayers. It's the right idea, share David Shneyer's great voice and let learner's like me follow along, but it's not particularly well integrated, it's mp3 and Windows audio files, the words aren't on the same page as when you listen to it, etc. So I thought "I'll video David singing, we can put it on youtube and DVD, that'll be a valuable contribution to the community at large."

Our second film project is to do a music video or a documentary. While filming these songs qualifies as a music video, it's fairly static, and I don't really have the interest into turning it into a more artistic, interpretative music video, so I thought, well, I can interview David about these songs and about Shabbat, so I have something else to put with the songs.

The problem with this approach is that it's still pretty static -- one guy singing Shabbat songs then talking about Shabbat. And then there was a death in David's congregation and he didn't have to time to do the video shoot, so I started thinking about how to do a real documentary, with more of a story, and maybe use the music for background.

Shabbat traditions were the first thing I was introduced to in Judaism: candles and bread and wine on Friday night. It's still probably my favorite part of being Jewish (now that I am), the conscious acknowledgement of a break between the sacred and the mundane, the profound and the normal.

Shalom and Deborah were the first people I met who are Shomer Shabbat, that is, they strictly observed the Sabbath rules. I knew that the very general idea was "no work", but that seemed easy enough. Little did I know...

So I'll get to that in another post, back to the movie. I decided to focus on how Jews observe the Sabbath, with a particular focus on those that follow the strictest rules (which, of course, makes for the most interesting story).