Origin Story by Lizzie Stern
We are living in the wake of an event of mass extinction. Deep cynicism strikes us regularly. We say, it feels like end times. And it might be more comforting to assume the worst than to accept uncertainty. But we are not at the end. We are – terrifyingly – at the beginning. And we need a foothold, a place from which we can start over.
We need a new origin story. And Agnes Borinsky has brought us The Trees.
The Trees is a creation myth in the style of a midrash. A midrash is a rabbinic form of commentary on the Torah, which treats the Torah as a living document, and often takes the shape of a story. By telling these stories, we make and remake meaning across generations of the Jewish diaspora as if we are all having one long conversation.
In Deuteronomy, there is a stray phrase – כִּ֤י הָֽאָדָם֙ עֵ֣ץ, which translates, literally, to because the man is a tree.
And Agnes responded, what if? What if two people became trees?
That question is the play’s inciting incident: late one night, drunk-stumbling home through a park in Connecticut, two siblings named Sheila and David take root in the earth. Word spreads like wildfire about this extraordinary event – bringing together an otherwise disparate group of strangers, each seeking renewed purpose, belonging, or sense of wonder.
Among their thought-leaders is a Midwestern rabbi named Saul. Saul, lately, has been picking up on a perilous spirit of indifference in our culture: “I've felt a great sliding in the world,” he observes. “Like we're all sliding off this planet into somewhere... dark and ugly and dead. It seems a little bit like it's all on autopilot. Like God is off... somewhere... else.”
Sheila and David’s metamorphosis is, to Saul, an act of divine intervention: a rupture infusing ordinary life with miraculous possibility that demands our attention and shakes us from our hardened beliefs and routines.
Saul, and the people around him, radically change their lives over the course of the play; they leave their homes and move to Connecticut. They cook for one another, make art together, and fall in love. Organically, they form a kind of new society: a collective of mutual care which strives to resist the more corrosive parts of capitalism.
In our world, billionaires are working to colonize Mars and relocate people’s lives to the Metaverse. We are cursed by a compulsive need to go on to the next, what Karl Marx calls the endless and limitless drive.
Escapism is a byproduct of capitalism. It fuels, and is fueled, by constant motion in a destructive cycle. The more that’s demanded, the more that’s created, the more that’s thrown away.
If we look at our conditioning from a rabbinical perspective, we can recognize that it is not just materially destructive – it is existentially fatal. As the eminent 20th century rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, famously phrased it: “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.”
So if the rabbis are right, if it is not a cataclysmic event but our everyday culture which will kill us and our planet – what, then, is our salvation?
It’s tempting to read The Trees as a straightforward allegory, and imagine that it promises a lesson on how to change our habits and perspectives; the more we slow down, the more we appreciate, the more we care, the more we guard our survival. But this is a Jewish story, and a queer one. It resists the finality of binaries, and it answers questions with questions.
“How can we have a more expansive notion of what change is possible?” Agnes asked me recently. “Of change that doesn't require a rush forward, out of the discomfort of the way things are?”
For us to reckon with the way things are, we have to stop long enough to observe it. And when Agnes imagines change, she wonders, how can we break our limitless drive? “How can we make peace with our uncertainty, rather than scramble for answers that we think will protect us from fear, from death, or from more uncertainty?” she asked. “How can we find the courage to let things die and see our endings as beginnings? How can we soak the soil with the water of the future, while staying in the present?”
The miracle of this midrash is not just the phenomenal human metamorphosis, but the ordinary stillness which follows; the vulnerability of taking root not in the earth, but in each other. This is a new way of being which is evolving in Agnes’s theater, an ancient analog art, a sacred gathering of strangers journeying together through a question.
And what is a question if not a beginning?
