I don’t think I will ever forget seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967. I had never encountered anything so witty, brilliant, and piercingly funny. Tom Stoppard—who just passed away at 88—was a singular voice. Born in Czechoslovakia to a Jewish family, and later hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation, he transformed the way we think about story, identity, and existence.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was Stoppard’s breakthrough. In it, he reimagined Hamlet through the bewildered eyes of two minor characters who barely understand why they’re onstage at all. The result was a dizzying mix of tragedy and absurdist humor—profound, unsettling, and laugh-out-loud funny.
His biographer, Hermione Lee, once said that in Stoppard’s plays, “People arrive in the middle of history without knowing why they’re there. They don’t know whether they can get home again. They are often in exile, unable to remember their own names. They may be wrongly imprisoned, facing an impossible moral dilemma, or grieving someone they’ve lost.”
How very Jewish.
Our world often feels like an absurdist drama. We appear suddenly. We depart abruptly. And in the space between, we stumble through meaning, laughter, fear, longing, and mystery. But a Jew knows something essential: this world is the backstage, not the stage. It is the prelude, not the play. And as Shakespeare taught us, the play’s the thing.
What looks like exile is often the corridor before the entrance.
In this week’s Parsha, Yaakov crosses the river Yabok and wrestles with the angel of Esav until dawn. He is struck and wounded, and yet the angel is forced to bless him with a new name: Yisrael. The exit from Yaakov becomes the entrance into Yisrael. The wound becomes the covenant. Night becomes morning.
So it is in our lives. We think we are departing; in truth, we are arriving. What feels like collapse is often construction. What feels like loss is often the seed of birth.
Stoppard—son of a people who have crossed more rivers, borders, and eras of exile than any nation in history—gave voice to this idea, even without intending to. Behind every ending lies a beginning. Behind every concealment, revelation. Behind this world, the next.
Though not remotely religious, he articulated a worldview that could have come straight from Chazal: “Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.”
May we, like Yaakov, find the courage to cross our rivers, the faith to see doorways where others see walls, and the wisdom to know that every exit is but the first step into forever.
