Acting, Czechoslovakia and the Power of Living with Kavvanah

By Josh Tobias
KOC Assistant Editor
Brown University

I am not a very good actor. I am awful at memorizing lines, I can't fake a good smile and the closest I've come to a starring role is playing the shkediah (almond) tree in my second grade Tu B'shvat play. But being a bad actor also has its benefits: the people around me always know how I am feeling. When I'm feeling happy I act happy and when I'm upset, well, everyone knows I am upset.

I am not saying that people who are good actors always try to hide their feelings from others. Acting is a skill, one that doesn't have to be continued once the actor leaves the stage or the set. But the essence of acting is to pretend that you are someone or something that you are not. Good actors can convince you that they actually are that person (think of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump). But despite the strength of their acting skills, or the quality of the makeup job, the actor can never be the character that they are playing. An actor is always expressing a lie, conveying information that is not true. To paraphrase Picasso: Acting is a lie.

In our world, acting is harmless. Everyone knows that Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks go home after they finish shooting a movie and live completely different lives than their characters on screen. But imagine if you were living in a world where acting was a part of everyday life. A world where people constantly needed to pretend that they believed things they did not believe. A place where you always had to be on guard, always watching what you said or to whom you said it.

From my studies in Prague this semester, I have learned a great deal about what daily life was like under the Communist regime, which controlled the country from 1945 through 1989. During that period, everyone was expected to act in accordance with the official ideology of the regime. Any deviance was considered an act of rebellion and many people lost their jobs and sometimes were sent to jail for expressing their beliefs. Under Communism, acting became a part of everyday life and people were never free to leave behind their "stage faces."

In his essay "Power of the Powerless," Vaclav Havel, a dissident who became the first president of the Czech Republic, argued that in this type of culture, life becomes a series of meaningless gestures and expressions. Havel, who was also a playwright, saw that in Communist countries, people were forced to live a lie, to act a certain way in order to appease the system. Havel's solution was to "live the truth," to ignore the proscriptions of the Communist and live according to one's own beliefs. Havel believed that if people began to break away from the false pretenses of Communist life then the system would fall apart. He was proven right when the Communist regime collapsed in November 1989, thanks largely to massive protests against it.

In Judaism, there is an idea similar to Havel's "living the truth," called kavvanah. Kavvanah literally means intention, but it has a whole host of other contextual meanings. Often, Jewish texts will explain praying with kavvanah to mean that someone is concentrating on their prayer, not mumbling through the words while their head is in another place. In the first situation, the person is actually praying, while in the second situation, the person is only acting like they are praying. While I believe that praying with kavvanah is important, I do not think that is enough: I think we need to live with kavvanah. Although we are not under the same pressures to conform as those who lived under Communism, there are many situations in which people act in a way which is not truthful to themselves. To live with kavvanah means living the way that you believe is best for you, not the way others believe you should live. In a world where we often feel pressure to act like a certain person, living with kavvanah gives us the freedom to be ourselves.

[Posted 04/18/07]