Our Stories, Our Selves

by Ruchama King Feuerman
Special To The Jewish Week

When I first got married, my husband and I threw storytelling parties. We invited all our Jewish friends. We told them: Just bring a story that has meaning for you — it could be about yourself or someone else, and tell it in five minutes or less.

Some were put off. “A storytelling party?!” As if we’d suggested something bizarre. Or worse, a vanilla reaction: “Hmm ... that’s nice. I’ll try to make it.” You could be sure they wouldn’t show.
Most were intrigued, if a little nervous. “I’ll come, but I don’t have any stories,” they said. That wasn’t true, of course. Everyone has a story to tell. And every culture facilitates its own way of storytelling, from the chasidishe “maysa” to

native American storytelling with drumming around a fire.

Denis Dutton in his latest book, “The Art Instinct,” argues that it is a fundamental human instinct to listen to and tell stories. What is the difference between man and animal, philosophers have asked? Man is a being who tells stories. They say the most successful salespeople tell stories. And so with God, so to speak, who began His Torah not with laws but narrative. He knew He had better tell a good story if He had to engage His people’s attention for all eternity.

And so they showed up to our parties, groups of 10, 12, not more than 15 people at a time. I loved the way stories broke down subtle and not so subtle barriers between people. I saw fade-into-the-woodwork types become wonderfully appealing, even masterful in their presentations as they revealed hilarious or poignant episodes from their lives. I saw the rich and the broke meet each other on the same playing field. I saw single men and women who’d normally never give each other a second glance now talking together in a warm, real way.

Stories are the great equalizer. Your beauty quotient or money or smarts quotient doesn’t matter. What matters is: Can you tell your story? However slight or profound that story might be? I’d feel an after-glow for weeks following a party.

But for about eight years I stopped having these gatherings. I’d moved to a new neighborhood, knew fewer people, got caught up in children, work, study, and other things. Storytelling parties seemed frivolous.
Then I attended a conference in 2007, The Conversation, sponsored by The Jewish Week in partnership with CLI (The Center for Leadership Initiatives), and there, with Jewish thinkers, artists, and philanthropists from across America, we thrashed out the Jewish future — knowing all the while that no one can even thrash out the Jewish past, let alone the future.

After all the extraordinary talk subsided, what remained for me were not the theories and collaborations and projects, but people’s stories: The loneliness and frustration of building Jewish communities against the odds, the prejudices different kinds of Jews experienced, the joys and fears of Jews I’d simply never met before. In the midst of great sophistication, diversity and progressiveness, there was still that faint-as-a-feather feeling that we might, just might, recognize each other as if we were from the same shtetl. We all felt the high.

On the last day of the conference, Joel, a comedian, called out, “Hey, let’s do this on our own. Go through the phone book and randomly pick 50 people with the last name ‘Greenberg,’ and get all the Greenbergs together talking.” I chimed in, “Let’s call it ‘50 Greenbergs’!” And then I remembered my storytelling parties of years ago, and I thought: What I used to do and stopped, I must do again.

Since then I’ve been on a roll, a story mission. I’ve led these gatherings at weekends and retreats and conferences, but truth be told, you don’t need an expert to run these groups. Anyone can do it. They’re simple in concept and they’re cheap — you don’t even need to serve food, because people are hungry for each other’s stories, and hungry to talk.

Several weeks ago my husband and I threw our latest party. And such stories were heard!
There were courtship tales, childhood tales of revenge against hooligan anti-Semites, and long dead parents relaying advice to children via dreams. Most stories were less dramatic, but revealing, or funny, while some captured a period in history. One was the story Eve, a poet, told about her father who was falsely arrested for starting a mini-riot in South Carolina in the 1960s, when in actuality he’d just been teaching black students reading and writing. Later, because of his “criminal” record, he got disqualified from the Vietnam draft, a war he didn’t support anyway.

Someone told the story of how his newborn daughter got named twice in shul. A lawyer told of his 11-year single-minded quest to nail a child molester. He spoke of that moment when he finally found the key witness who would put the molester in prison.

Sitting there, I realized that people become their narratives.
There’s a beautiful chasidic saying: “If I tell you my story, you will listen for a while, and then you will fall asleep. But, if, as I tell you my story, you begin to hear your own story, you will wake up.” Our stories awaken us to each other and to ourselves. We see the thread of yearning that runs through everyone’s story, because yearning may be at the root of every story ever told. The thread wraps around a group of storytellers, and we stand within its circle, even if for just a few seconds, a whole people, yearning together.
P.S. For those of you who’d like to throw your own storytelling party, it does help to have a timer.
Ruchama King Feuerman, who was recently awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, is the editor of the new anthology: “Everyone’s Got a Story – 41 Short Stories from a New Generation of Jewish Writers” (Judaica Press 2008). You can go to her blog to find tips on how to run a storytelling party of your own, www.writetogether.typepad.com.