NOAH! Ride the Wave!

The year 2003 was a frightening one. Another year of terror. Another year of tears. For those of us who lived in Israel, it seemed that the whole world was devastated. In every city, on every road, Jews were targeted by Arab terrorists. Arlene Chertoff, Toby Klein Greenwald and I had written and were performing in ESTHER and the Secrets in the King’s Court, the story about Queen Esther and the miraculous rescue of the Jewish people from the hands of the evil Haman.

We performed with a background of almost daily terror. If terror continued, Raise Your Spirits would continue too. Arlene, Toby and I decided to write a new show. We asked ourselves, “How could our world ever rebuild itself after this destruction?” We thought of Noah, who had literally seen the end of the world, and then learned how to rebuild again.

And we wrote a poignant, funny, inspirational, fanciful show, “NOAH! Ride the Wave!” We performed in 2004 to sell out crowds, and we felt ourselves asking, as Noah did, “Why was I saved?” We felt hopeful when we sang, “Fill our world with colors…fill all our days with blessing from Above.”

If Noah could rebuild his world, so could we.

This is the tenth anniversary of “NOAH! Ride the Wave!” As I sat in the synagogue today, I thought of our Animal March as all the creatures of the world marched on to the ark, two by two. I remembered our animal’s talent show (well, what do you think they did for so long on the ark), I imagined the graceful flight of the dove, and the reluctant raven. And I thought of the rainbow, and remembered how we stood one night in Gush Katif, and waved our colored banners to our beautiful rainbow song, and then lifted our orange scarves high above our heads, and cried (photo at top).

It was quite a show. To see photos and read more about it, you can visit http://www.raiseyourspirits.org/noah.html or http://www.bible-arts.com/productions.htm.

Photo credits Rebecca Flash Kowalsky, www.imagesthroughtime.com and Sharon Katz.