'Live from Mount Sinai' 
 
Combining Jewish studies with theater and educational entrepreneurship, Mandel Jerusalem Fellow Amichai Lau-Lavie is bringing his unique method "Storahtelling" to Israel. Haaretz reports on this creative thinker's recent endeavors.
 
"Torah service is a disservice," says Amichai Lau-Lavie, moving easily between the rhyming discourse of hip-hop and advertising slogans, between biblical quotations and academic reflections, as he discusses his current project: finding a way to engage Israelis with the texts of the Bible. "I should have gone into advertising," he says, "but my customers are not buying something - they're getting something."
 
Lau-Lavie is one of a select group of Jerusalem Fellows - who are "changing the definition of what it means to be a Jewish educator," according to Abigail Dauber Sterne, an official at the Mandel Leadership Institute, which sponsors the fellows enterprise...
 
...Reclaiming a ritual that has become, in his words, "so boring no one wants to go near it," through music, audience participation and performance art, Lau-Lavie's method - "Storahtelling" - revives the ancient role of interpreter in the synagogue, "translating" the texts into contemporary discourse. Although he has met substantial success in overcoming the apathy of American Jews...

To read the rest of the article by Ayelet Dekel, featured in Haaretz, click here

To read more about Storahtelling, click here