The Israeli entertainment business is full of baalei teshuvah: Ehud and Eviatar Banai, Etti Ankri and Shuli Rand are just a few of the Israeli Bohemia, actors and singers who have picked up the gauntlet of Yiddishkeit but have continued performing, albeit to different audiences. Actor/singer/director Golan Azulai is another. He says that secular Israelis call this religious transformation “going over to the other side.”
One of Azulai’s last roles in regular theater, thirteen years ago, while he was in the midst of trying to find his religious identity, was playing Mitch in Tennessee William’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” In it, Blanche Dubois tells him, “I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.” And somewhere during the run of a play that deals with truth and lies, reality and fantasy, Golan Azulai realized that truth lies in Torah, and was ready to embrace it.
Born in 1968 in Kiryat Shmoneh and raised in the desert town of Arad, Azulai came to Tel Aviv where he studied with Nissim Nativ, one of Israel’s foremost directors, and became a successful theater, television and movie actor, singer, comedian and director.
He married Shiri who had grown up on a Shomer Hatzair kibbutz and they had a daughter. But the marriage started to fall apart and Azulai, who loved his wife and wanted to make things work, started soul searching. He began studying the Yamima method, a psychological self-help method developed by Yamima Avital that combines psychology and Kabbalah. This learning ignited the spark in his soul that led him to search for God in Torah.
“I realized that if I want to get closer to my wife,” he says, “I have to get closer to God.”
And closer he got. Azulai slowly became shomer Shabbat and one day approached the director of the theater where he was performing and asked if he could stop performing on Shabbat. The director was not amused and instead of getting an actor to sub for him, stopped giving him choice roles. As a result, both his career and his finances began to suffer.
So he began developing shows that centered around religious themes. His latest show “Dancing between Two Worlds,” uses music and humor to tell the story of the world he left behind.
About four years ago, someone from the Carmeri Theater saw him in the show “Carlebach Live” (or “Carlebach Lives”) in the role of Rav Shlomo Carlebach z”l and the Carmeri’s artistic director invited him to perform there in another project. When Azulai called back to say yes, the assistant said, “Wait a minute, you’re shomer Shabbat. Never mind it won’t work,” and hung up. At one time, almost all state-funded theaters in Israel were shomer Shabbat but that’s not true today. This leaves Azulai and other actors with a need to develop their own genre of religious theater.
But that was nothing compared to the test that Azulai had yet to pass, one that didn’t garner him an Academy Award but certainly did get him one from the highest Director.
In 2004, Azulai was offered a role in Stephen Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005), the story of the aftermath of the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. An actor’s dream! This would get him out of his financial funk and bring him stardom. He felt that God was rewarding him for his efforts to keep Shabbos. Then his agent called. The scenes he would be filming were scheduled to be shot on Shabbat. This possibility had never occurred to him, as in Israel they don’t film on Shabbat.
This was his true screen test and Azulai passed with flying colors. He didn’t take the part; instead he took the streetcar named Shabbat to a holy destination and traded in Hollywood for Holiness.
Azulai is now the father of five. His wife Shiri works as his business manager and his show about his journey, which is also a musical and comedic overview of Israeli society (in which he sings original songs, plays guitar and Oud and uses his storytelling talents accompanied by a percussionist) is captivating audiences around the country, showcasing his many talents, his Sephardic origins and his unshakeable faith in trying to bridge two worlds.
Although Azulai’s kiruv is aimed at audiences, his family has not gone untouched by his new religious role. Among the family members who have become baalei teshuva are his father, his mother, his brother, his sister and her husband, “and there’s another sister on the way,” he adds.
Theater has its roots in the pagan rituals of the Greeks. There’s a midrash that says that in the Messianic age theaters and circuses will become houses of Torah study. And that’s what’s happening now. Azulai and his colleagues perform shows that are as much Torah lessons as they are entertainment.
Azulai loves performing his autobiographical show much more than his previous work. “It’s my greatest joy!” he says.
And he hopes to show people that “secular Jews and religious Jews are not on opposing sides at all. There aren’t two sides,” he says. “There’s only one side, one people, one God. That’s it.”
Golan Azulai will be on tour in America in May 2016 accompanying his brother, artist Shai Azulai who will be exhibiting his work. Anyone wishing to book a performance in English or Hebrew can contact him at [email protected].