The kaddish consultant who worked on The Lehman Triology

Honey is a bit of a misnomer at Rosh Hashanah. All that dipping into a sweet golden substance suggests good times are coming. But then it’s straight in to ten days of repentance and instead of fireworks, it’s all about forgiveness, then fasting. Also known as the Ten Days of Awe, which they aren’t, they do provide time to work on your rusty Kaddish. Mumbling the mourning prayer misses the point, as Rabbi Daniel Epstein will tell you, and as Kaddish consultant for The Lehman Trilogy, he should know.  Recruited when the play opened at the National Theatre in 2018, he is poised to bring his influence to bear when it reopens, at the Gillian Lynne theatre, in January.

It seems that Jewish director Sam Mendes, who was raised in Primrose Hill, could not have done the play without him, as it was Epstein worked on the pronunciation, the context and the phrasing of the all-important Kaddish recital .

“According to the hair-and-makeup supervisor at the National Theatre who happens to be a member of my shul,” says the Rabbi of the Western Marble Arch Synagogue. “She overheard the cast saying the Hebrew and realised that their Jewish knowledge was, understandably, lacking. So she asked Sam Mendes if she could bring me into help and he immediately agreed.”

That this was a departure from day-to-day rabbinical duties cannot be underestimated, as Epstein’s role as pronunciation expert quickly expanded into that of a Jewish history tutor, as he felt it was not enough for the actors to just say the words, he wanted them to know what they meant.

Written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, The Lehman Trilogy charts the rise and fall of three Bavarian Jewish immigrant brothers – the Lehmans – who went from running a dry goods store in Alabama in the 1840s to opening the bank whose collapse heralded the financial crisis of 2008.

Hugely successful in London and then in New York where it won five Tonys, the play – a three-hander – is loaded with Jewish references, and praise for it was closely shadowed by criticism of its use of antisemitic tropes:  Jewish power and money.

Of course Rabbi Epstein had no idea about these uncomfortable cliches when he was initially asked to improve the way the actors delivered yitgadal v’yitkadash.

“But because of them, we ended up discussing for hours the uncomfortable questions the play raises about antisemitism and stereotypes. I wanted the actors to see these complicated Jewish men in a more forgiving historical context and to make the Jewish elements of the play ring true.”

Rabbi Epstein knew that Jewish theatre-goers would appreciate accuracy if they were ever to enjoy a running time of 200 minutes, filled with Chanukah candle-lighting, saying kaddish, sitting shiva and observing shloshim, the 30-day period after the burial.

“The cast (then Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, Ben Miles) had questions about the story. Questions that in another sense would have been borderline antisemitic,” says Epstein, “But they were asking from a genuine place of knowledge – why is it that Jews and money are always so connected?”

Rabbi Epstein became the sounding board for issues within the play that rankled outside, such as the Lehman family being overtly Jewish (closing their shop on Shabbat) while benefitting from slavery (not in the play) and then pushing the global economy towards ruin with the largest bankruptcy filing in American history.

Though he couldn’t change the facts, Rabbi Epstein felt he could change perception, so he taught the actors about feudalism, Christian Europe and Tsarist Russia.

“I told them about the creativity and determination the Jews needed to survive in European systems that prevented them from owning land or accruing wealth. In America, the Lehmans were able to apply the same ingenuity, but without having to deal with the obstacles faced by their ancestors. That they got rich doing this was a problem for other people.”

As he wasn’t 100 percent sure of all the history, the rabbi focused on the contextual. “I made the actors see that this was how it was then; how it worked. I also believe that Jews weren’t primarily involved in the physical trading of people. However, these cliches about Jews have damaged Jewish people for centuries. But I don’t think the play is antisemitic. It’s a morality tale.”

Rabbi Epstein says that the Lehmans believed that their moral imperative was to be philanthropic with their wealth and it could be argued that when that philanthropy reduced as a core value, so did their wealth. He also points to their diminishing observance corresponding to their increasing business woes. “I felt no sense of worry, animosity or anxiety about seeing Jews becoming successful, because you see the firm being spectacularly unsuccessful at the end.”

Actor Simon Russell Beale had already learned kaddish by the time Epstein arrived, but in modern Hebrew. “I had to tell him that nobody spoke modern Hebrew in 1840s Germany and rejigged the kaddish to give it a thick Teutonic twist —which meant that instead of tushbechata v’nechemata, it was tushbechoosuh v’nechemoosuh.

All three actors, as yet unannounced for the upcoming run, get to say Kaddish. In the run at the National, Adam Godley was the only Jewish actor, and had lost his father a few weeks earlier.

“I got very emotional when I heard this, then told him that when he recited the kaddish on stage, it was likely that Jewish audience members would instinctively respond ‘amen.’ In a theatre of more than 1,000, a minyan was virtually guaranteed, which meant Godley would be fulfilling the mitzvah of saying kaddish for his father, several nights a week.”

Briefly Epstein wondered if he had overestimated the audience’s participation, but when he went along on the second night of previews to watch, as he predicted they responded after the actor said the prayer.

“At that point I completely lost it. It was overwhelming,” says Epstein who was “awestruck” when he heard from Godley that this happened every night. With only three more days to Yom Kippur, this is your prompt to practice. Rabbi Epstein will be listening.

The Lehman Trilogy opens at the Gillian Lynne Theatre on 24 January 2023