The eruv is a weird little corner of Jewish law. It is a legal construction that the rabbis devised to allow us to carry things between private and public space on shabbat. It is an imaginative boundary. It is a line we draw around the edges of a community.* It says: this is home.

I am queer. I grew up in an interfaith family. For a long time I figured that making any kind of life in Jewish community would mean leaving a part of me elsewhere, beyond the walls. There were certain things I simply didn’t permit myself to carry into Jewish spaces.

Lately I am reminding myself that the boundaries of belonging are always — have always been — imaginative boundaries. What would it mean to take up that work of imagination together — consciously — ourselves?

Since October 7, the impulse in many Jewish communities has been to build higher, more impenetrable walls. Who is in? Who is out? Who is safe? Who is an enemy? Surely we have other tools for imagining the edge of a container called “home.”

I am a playwright. I tell stories. Often the walls that enclose the stories I tell are the walls of a theater. The walls of a play might be the walls of a family, the walls of a society.

But I am restless with walls. The theater I love sloshes out into the streets of the city.

An eruv is a logistical, physical project. It’s something you install and maintain. But the wires and sticks are mostly there to support a leap of imagination. It’s a counter-map, for shabbat, to the city we live in during the week.


SPIRITUAL GERRYMANDER.
URBANISM OF THE WOO. MESSIANIC COMMONS.

Something happens when you make a play. Actors learn lines and speak them in front of an audience. For an hour or two, a world is created. Those words are the liturgy. But there were days, weeks, months, years before the audience showed up. Those conversations live behind the liturgy, before it. There were conversations with dramaturgs, designers, technicians, hosts, neighbors, funders. Those conversations establish infrastructure, tend it. Those words create worlds, too.


What might an eruv of the future look like?

What artist will design the markers that hang from telephone poles?
Who walks together to check the edges?
Who repairs unexpected ruptures?
Who do we turn to for permission to re-map the land?
Who tends the stewpot, nourishing the center?
An eruv is a secret code. An obscure communal poem.
And also: it is highly visible – a way of being Jewish in public.


What is a story but an eruv?
Of course a story is an eruv.

A ritual enclosure that, for a period of time, allows us to carry our most intimate thoughts and memories into a semi-public domain.

That allows us to bring ourselves across otherwise uncrossable borders.

See, briefly, our domains as they might appear, intermingled.

The plays I write are imaginative eruvin. Mapping, for a messianic moment, worlds that redraw the edges of our living.

The walls are no thicker than imagination, suspended from the existing infrastructure of What Is.

An eruv is just a story.
What parts of ourselves will it permit us to carry into a Jewish future?

* If we’re getting technical, an eruv is actually a food item. A box of matza, or a pot of soup. Anyway what does a boundary mean if there is no center?