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| Benim Foster and Logan Weibrecht in What the Jews Believe. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware) |
Mark Harelik’s ambitious new play,
What the Jews Believe
(
Berkshire Theatre Group), juxtaposes three religious positions. Dave
(Benim Foster) insists that his twelve-year-old son Nathan (Logan
Weibrecht) prep for his Bar Mitzvah, though they are the only Jewish family
in a small Texas town and the nearest rabbi – Rabbi Bindler (Robert
Zukerman), who married Dave and his wife Rachel (Emily Donahoe) – is in El
Paso and can come to tutor the boy only infrequently. Dave has the cockeyed
notion that somehow Nathan can learn his Torah portion from recordings made
by Dave’s grandfather. His idea of Judaism is inextricably bound up with
his feeling about family – his determination that the influence of his
father shouldn’t die out, especially in a place where everybody else is
Christian, even though (somewhat unconvincingly) the family doesn’t appear
to observe any other Jewish customs. Dave’s holding onto this plan, despite
the apparent hopelessness of the boy to learn the Hebrew, appears to be
connected to the fact that Rachel is dying of cancer. She takes advantage
of Bindler’s visit to express her despair over her condition and query him
about its spiritual meaning. When he tries to present a Jewish
philosophical stance on suffering and faith, Dave hustles him out of the
house; his answer to her anguish is to comfort her with love – that is,
again to substitute family for what a traditional Jew would see as faith.
It’s her Aunt Sarah (Cynthia Mace), a convert to Christian Science in
childhood as a result of, she believes, a miracle that saved her life, who
offers Rachel an alternative, and overnight Rachel, too, becomes a
Christian Scientist.
