Voices from the CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM

Giving Voice to Hagar

2011-12-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

Note to Museum Visitors: If you watch this music video while at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), please use earphones so as to not disturb other visitors.

Just before launching into the world premiere of her gorgeous new song “The Arrow and the Bow,” commissioned by the CJM in connection with its exhibition Jacques Lipchitz: Hagar in the Desert, musician Alicia Jo Rabins invoked the young inter-disciplinary muse Miranda July: “Limitations are where art begins.”

In the case of Rabins’ song about Hagar, as well as the musical commentaries on biblical women from her band’s albums Girls in Trouble (2009) and Half You Half Me (2011), our limited access to the inner lives of these ancient women creates an artistic opportunity to radically re-imagine their psyches without departing from the confines of the texts.

There is a name for this bounded creativity within Jewish tradition, and it’s called midrash–a strategy employed by ancient rabbinic commentaries desperate to understand the ambiguities of characters and events in the Bible. Contemporary midrash, looser and broader than its rabbinical model, has been energized by women inspired to reclaim the agency and contributions of biblical heroines, some of whom are almost unknown today. Rabins pushes the practice even further by couching her interpretive poetry in the musical language of pop, rock, punk and country.

After the CJM concert on November 17, 2011, Rabins joked that when she played at underground rock clubs, creating hypnotic violin and vocal loops in echo-y basements, no one cared about the words. And when she played at Jewish institutions, where the biblically-inspired lyrics were the main event, few asked about the melodies. Hopefully CJM listeners will come to Rabins’ work appreciating her genius at both.

Listen to a podcast interview with Alicia Jo Rabins.

Picasso is My Rabbi

2011-08-31T09:41:00.001-07:00

There are moments when art and religion come together perfectly. This happened to me recently, after returning from the wonderful Picasso show at the de Young Museum, all tanked up on the cubist view of the world. Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris foregrounds the autobiographical dimension of his work, which is appropriate since Picasso held onto this collection until he died, expressing as it did something essential about his vision of the world. Curator Timothy Bugard in the audio guide, describes Picasso’s understanding of art as a kind of magic, with the artist—through the hocus pocus of oil, pencil or metal—creating life out of inert objects.

How is all this Jewish? Last week’s reading from the Torah (in Hebrew, parsha Re’eh) focuses on the power of “vision” just before Moses lets the Jews enter the land of Israel on their own. God asks the people to see the possible futures in front of them—one based on moral rectitude, and therefore of communal success; the other based on impulse and paganism, leading to downfall. The vigor of the biblical language asks the reader, as God asked the ancient Jews, to keep in mind the different futures that simultaneously existed.

The “magic” of God here (so to speak) is the ability to see all possibilities simultaneously. This is also the magic of Picasso. His presentation of people and objects from multiple points of view has transformed our understanding not just of art, but of time and space, which Picasso conflated much the same way Einstein did with his theories of relativity.

My favorite piece in the show? A sculpture of Picasso’s mistress, her head sporting outlandish ridges evoking the folds of her brain, suggesting that her essence must be understood as a unification of inside and outside. Similarly, Jewish liturgy describes God as having the power to see inside of us as easily as we see the skin of our neighbors. Picasso’s authority in twentieth-century art rests, among other things, on his pointing us into the promised land of modern art, telling us what we will see long before that future will arrive.

Dan Schifrin in writer in residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Watching the Flowers of Friendship Fade

2011-08-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Stein was creative not only in her writing but also in establishing and defining her relationships. Her social circle was forever fluctuating; associations changing often with the exception of her life-time partner, Alice B. Toklas. The women enjoyed the company of artists, literati and their wives at their Saturday night salons. Wanting to establish the couple at the heart of the art movement, Gertrude transforms their relationship into a mythical status when she writes as Alice, “[N]ow I will tell you how two Americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world knew nothing about” (Stein 26). While their presence and contributions cannot be questioned, one can question their sensitivity. Gertrude told Ernest Hemingway that he must quit journalism to become a proper writer. This sounds a little callous coming from a woman with a trust fund. However, not having to work allowed Gertrude the freedom to write, pose, and purchase art. In doing this, she created and established her legacy to literature and the art world.

Gertrude was a self-declared gossip and cultivated relationships with other like-minded individuals. At times a gossip-mongering group, they reveled in supporting one another while later talking behind each other’s backs. Or so it seems; Gertrude was not the only one to edit her friendships; other artists altered and then recorded their relationships in letters and books adding to the Modernist canon. Hemingway wrote a memoir, F. Scott Fitzgerald based his novels on his life with his wife, Zelda, and Gertrude wrote the autobiography of Alice. Even though their relationships changed, they still savored their celebrity identities and referenced one another through art and/or gossip. They were the creative celebrities of their day and used one another’s lives as fodder for their writing.

“Matisse was a good gossip and so was [Gertrude Stein] and…they delighted in telling tales to each other” (Stein 63).

“Matisse and Picasso...became friends but they were enemies. Now they are neither friends nor enemies. At the time they were both” (Stein 60).

“[Picasso] said that Jean Cocteau was getting…so popular you could find his poems on every table of any smart coiffeur” Later, it was translated into French and Picasso avoided Cocteau and only retracted the statement after Cocteau’s mother guilted him (Stein 209).
Although friends, they can never completely trust the compliments given by their contemporaries:

Gertrude “thinks Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten. Fitzgerald always says that he thinks Gertrude Stein says these things just to annoy him by making him think that she means them, and he adds in his favorite way, and her doing it is the cruelest thing I ever heard” (Stein 206).

Everyone is eager to be declared at the forefront of the new artistic movement. Accusations are rampant among artists poaching other people’s style. Everyone claims responsibility for the other’s success:

“As [Picasso] once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it” (Stein 22).

After being quoted in one of his stories, Gertrude tells Hemingway that “remarks are not literature,” which he includes in A Moveable Feast and she also relates in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (72).

Hemingway “liked all his contemporaries except [E.E.] Cummings. He accused Cummings of having copied everything, not from anybody, but from somebody” (Stein 205).

“Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway.... [He] had been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds. Hemingway, at one moment, when he had repudiated Sherwood Anderson and all his works, written him a letter in the name of American literature which he, Hemingway, in company with his contemporaries was about to save, telling Sherwood just what he, Hemingway thought about Sherwood’s work, and, that thinking, was in no sense complimentary” (Stein 203).

Gertrude describes Hemingway: “He looks like a modern and he smells of the museums” (Stein 204).

And while there was no cross-pollination within the group, there was of course, always the hint of it and a one-sided desire:

Hemingway wrote that Gertrude “used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it” (Malcolm 215).

Like a quarreling family, they gave each other the silent treatment while presenting a unified front to outsiders:

“This was the time when Gertrude Stein and Picasso were not seeing each other. They always talked with the tenderest friendship about each other to anyone who had known them both but they did not see each other” (Stein 183).

Picasso and Gertrude fight and give each other the silent treatment for a year until they run into each other at “some picture gallery and Picasso came up and put his hand on Gertrude Stein’s shoulder and said, oh hell, let’s be friends. Sure, said Gertrude Stein and they embraced” (Stein 179).

"Later on when things were difficult between Stein and Hemingway, she always remembered with gratitude that after all it was Hemingway…. She always says, yes, sure I have a weakness for Hemingway. After all he was the first of the young men to knock at my door” (Stein 203).

And then there were the outcasts that were never allowed to return to the fold:

Ezra Pound, a poet and facist, was initially respected by his peers who later took to insulting him in various ways. After falling off a chair in their living room, Pound asked to call on Gertrude and Alice again. Stein responded, “I am so sorry but Miss Toklas has a bad tooth and we are busy picking wildflowers” (Stein 190).

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald named their dog Ezra Pound.

Regardless of their tempestuous relationships, these artists are forever connected by their history and collaborations. They gave each other the silent treatment and poked fun at one another but they were friends at one point, and literature reminds us of that.

Sources

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Perennial, 2001.

Stein, Gertrude. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 1-237.
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Learn more about the exhibition: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
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Melanie Samay studied literature at Fordham University in New York and received her Masters from San Francisco State University. Currently she works for a museum in downtown San Francisco. She spends her time reading, walking around the city, sitting inthe park with friends and hanging around dark spaces at night listening to loud music.

An Artist Responds to Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?

2011-07-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Musician Rykarda Parasol reflects on her father's past, art, and immortality.

Faced with the Nazi invasion of Poland, my grandparents made a heart-wrenching decision in 1943 to hand over my father to relative strangers in the hope that he might live. He was only six years old, suddenly parentless, and he faced physical danger day and night. His survival had been no sure bet. My grandparents must have understood that their end was coming and that my father’s life was the only slim hope of extension. Such risks, to me, were not only acts of protection, but also acts of defiance and survival—ways that Jews could passively continue on. I can imagine my grandparents thinking like Charlotte Salomon, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Our births, our children, are a testament to our existence. We were there, in beauty and in struggle, and that is not something, no matter how many millions gone, can be denied.

There are many unheard stories of everyday individuals who stood up against the German army and who fought back knowing they were outnumbered and unarmed. In desperate times there are ways in which artists create a rich inner life. I’m not sure how entirely consoling it is, but it is something. The act of art is almost a universal religion. Creativity is not just how beautifully one draws, but how beautifully one draws from within, speaks out, and carries their message forward. Sometimes, there is no other way. It’s doubtful that Salomon thought of such things entirely while working. But I am certain it was with some consciousness of validation and continuation. This is in part what makes her work so powerful.

I was introduced to Salomon’s art after wrestling with my own concerns about my work, namely music, and the sad lingering question of its prolongation. It has been an exhausting decade of writing, performing, organizing. At one time, music was my dearest salvation. Art was a space in which I could confess my darkest true-life tales and surrender to both souvenir and examination.

Like Salomon, I know a little bit about retelling one’s life history. It has often been entirely essential to do so and within that, there is no disconnect between art and artist. It’s an umbilical cord. When work is so personal it is an extension of oneself, it can feel like offspring and the desire, as I’ve experienced it, is that it will keep living long after you’ve retired or passed on. It is a strong sensation to give so much. And quite obvious Salomon had such a gift of giving herself.

Like a lot of little lives, not everything created is meant to last. Not every artist shall be heard or seen. If you happen to be an artist, consider the tasks of someone like Salomon. It’s a good reminder to me of what is most prized in one’s efforts and the true goal of construction. Loving the process isn’t always something one recognizes in a painting as we stand in front of it at a museum. But that is something you can immediately distinguish in Salomon. One has to wonder how many more great series Salomon was capable of creating. While her light was so early extinguished, we still have the brilliance of her work that carries an essence of someone with hopes and dreams. In some strange metaphysical way her life did continue on. Is that something we can consider?

Salomon may have lived in another time and while hers is perhaps part of a vast collective of Holocaust stories, bear in mind that her work is just coming to light now and thus, so is she. Artists exist among us, but no one is to say when in history their work will arise and find its way into our contemporary mindset. Artists are in fact, survivors whether they live or die, young or old. Immortal. It is only a matter of time before we are educated to their rare and significant presence.

Images: Charlotte Salomon, "Life? or Theatre?," 1940-1942, Villefranche, France. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Copyright Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Right image is a detail.

Learn more about the exhibition Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?

Rykarda Parasol uses the term “Rock Noir” to best describe her brand of dark and mysterious music. In it, there is a cinematic component that calls up images akin to David Lynch or Alfred Hitchcock giving way to an icy blonde plot. Indeed, the notion of the smart fearless femme fatale is an image that Parasol finds intriguing and one that her low sultry sing/talk seems to embody. Often compared to the likes of Nick Cave and The Velvet Underground, Parasol’s music personifies both swamp and sophistication. A uniquely gender-bending voice, her strength is in delivering William Faulkner-like tales with conviction and suspense. Her music draws on American rock, soul and southern influences as well as the Northern European styles imparted to her by her parents. Parasol has self-produced and self-released two acclaimed albums (“For Blood and Wine” 2009 and “Our Hearts First Meet” 2006). A strong presence on the San Francisco music scene, Parasol continues to write songs based on her true-life occurrences and performs near and far.

Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein: Mona Lisa of the Twentieth Century

2011-07-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

by Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., author of Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures.

Walking through Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, I noticed that the show is just like Gertrude Stein herself: sumptuous, good-humored, highly intelligent, brainy and eccentric, sophisticated and unpretentious all at the same time.

In my first blog post about the exhibition, I said, “In the cornucopia of photographs, original art work, posters and of course books, there is enough of the familiar (the art-covered studio walls at 27, rue de Fleurus, the portraits of Stein by all the famous photographers and artists, the Ford, the dogs and the country house) to set a solid base for the intention of the show to present Stein’s less familiar faces.” What a welcome shock then, to walk across the street, around the block, and take in the second exhibition, SFMOMA’s The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Here, two of the most familiar aspects of Gertrude Stein are presented in overwhelming richness: the Paris studio where the salon took place, as well as the collection of avant-garde art that Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael and her sister-in-law Sarah Stein collected at the very beginning of the 20th century. We follow picture by picture how Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and the most exciting revolutionaries in fauvist and soon cubist painting came to fill the rooms of these “Four Americans in Paris,” pioneer patrons of modernism.

With the combination of both shows, we now have many stories inviting us to compose a portrait of the woman who is at the center of what has been coined “the Summer of Stein.” It has never before been undertaken to compose a portrait of Gertrude Stein’s personality in a museum show. The thrill and vastness of modernism at the moment of its birth has never been so vibrantly presented in a personal context as in The Steins Collect. Never before have two San Francisco museums collaborated in one shared investigation: exploring the imprint of personalities on art and the impact of art on those who saw, loved and bought it, who talked and wrote about it—particularly one person who engaged deeply with both art and writing: Gertrude Stein.

To me, the most touching aspect of wandering from Seeing Gertrude Stein over to The Steins Collect, was coming face to face with the portrait that got it all started and seems to sum it all up: Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein from 1905-06. The portrait has a small pre-history. A young, unknown Spanish master painter who had trouble mastering French, met with a new American expatriate who had the same trouble. Language notwithstanding, the two of them clearly shared a temperament that Stein defined for herself as “aggressive liveliness.” Stein remembers their first social meeting in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
“Picasso in those days was what a (…) friend of mine (…) called, a good-looking bootblack. He was thin, dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not rough way. He was sitting next to Gertrude Stein at dinner and she took up a piece of bread. 'This', said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, 'this piece of bread is mine.' She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy.”¹

The unknown young painter had endeared himself to his American patrons by doing sketches of Leo and nephew Allan Stein. It was natural that he would want Leo’s massive, striking sister to model for him as well. Day after day, Stein tells us, she would walk up the steep hill from Montparnasse to Picasso’s studio in the dilapidated Bateau Lavoir on Montmartre to sit for him – a legendary story, especially considering what the excellent SFMOMA catalogue tells us: Picasso usually worked with enormous speed. But when one knows that Stein simply loved Picasso’s company and loved to pose, the story makes sense. “During these long poses (…) Gertrude Stein meditated and made sentences.” ²

Famously, Picasso one day wiped out Stein’s face on his easel, annoyed that he could no longer “see” her, then he set out for a long sojourn in Spain. Upon his return he quickly painted in the face the way he usually worked: fast and from memory. Nobody thought the portrait looked like her. During Picasso’s time in Spain, a shift in his style had happened. The primitive art, the African masks he had often discussed with Leo and Gertrude, as well as the flattening effects of photography had entered his work. The way Picasso “remembered” Stein’s face after his return gives her face a mask-like, abstract quality that makes her more than real. An expression of brooding together with a sharp intelligence and mental concentration are the predominant characteristics captured in the portrait. Other facets of her personality can be found in Seeing Gertrude Stein—her good-natured, no-nonsense self-presentation, her sensuous nature, and her childlike playfulness, always ready for a “beefsteak laugh.”³ As co-curator Wanda Corn pointed out at the opening of Seeing Gertrude Stein, Picasso portrayed her the way only men used to be portrayed in classical painting. She doesn’t hold a fan or flower in her hands or wear a fancy hat. She doesn’t cock her head with feminine charm. She simply leans forward, representing only herself. With this groundbreaking portrait, Picasso rids himself of the bounds of classical painting, and at the same time breaks Stein free from traditional gender limitations.

This is how most later artists and photographers depicted her, the way Picasso once addressed her jokingly: “Mlle Gertrude Stein, homme de lettres”, man of letters.⁴ To Stein herself, Picasso’s portrait was the one that she most identified with: “...for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.”⁵ To Picasso it was irrelevant that viewers didn’t quite see the resemblance in the painting. “Yes," he said, "everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will…”⁶

Picasso’s new style of painting—it would soon lead to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Cubism—gave Gertrude Stein a mysterious impenetrability, the mask of a sphinx perfectly attuned to the riddles she posed in her experimental writing, the aura of sibyl who would be ridiculed as the “high priestess of modernism” or admired as “the mother of the Lost Generation.” The one who taught Hemingway and the other young American writers at her salon that “remarks are not literature.” ⁷ Going from one museum to the other and back again, we can trace the birth of a portrait that embodies the timeless mysteries of portraiture, the birth of modernism, the potency of the dialogue between visual art and writing, and the power of image-making. We are indeed seeing Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s Mona Lisa of the twentieth century.

Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (renatestendhal.com) is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and spiritual counselor with a private practice in San Francisco and Pt. Reyes Station. Among her publications are True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships and the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her Gertrude Stein blog “Quoting Gertrude Stein” can be found at quotinggertrudestein.com or on facebook, and her cultural reviews can be found at scene4.com. She just finished a Parisian novel, Catch Her If You Can.

¹Gertrude Stein. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (Random House: 1933) 46.
²Ibid. 45-46.
³ Mabel Dodge Luhan. European Experiences, 1935.
⁴Janet Bishop, et al. The Steins Collect (Yale University Press: 2011) 224.
⁵Ed. Edward Burns. Gertrude Stein on Picasso. (Liveright, New York: 1970) 14.
⁶Gertrude Stein. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (Random House: 1933) 46.
⁷Ibid.

Image: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Currently on view at SFMOMA, in The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Opera Season at the CJM

2011-06-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Dan Schifrin, the CJM's Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence, on Who's Afraid of Richard Wagner?

Once a generation, a major institution like the San Francisco Opera stages the four-part Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner. The slightly arch title of our June 23 program, Who’s Afraid of Richard Wagner?, is suggestive of the difficulty of engaging this titan of nineteenth-century music, both because his work is sonically overwhelming and because his politics were anti-Semitic.

Conversations about Wagner’s art and politics have already been going on for months, from a conversation at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center (is Wagner’s music inherently anti-Semitic?) to the University of San Francisco (exploring Buddhist influences on the composer). The Museum programmed this panel discussion, with UC Berkeley scholars Nicholas Mathew and Francesco Spagnolo, to provide a forum to discuss the ways in which art, politics, and Jewish ideas connect not just in Wagner’s work, but in its cultural and political afterlife.

More specifically, we asked Professors Spagnolo and Mathew to respond to Wagner’s infamous essay Judaism in Music, in which he accused Jews of being incapable of true creative originality, lacking a style of their own. We want the conversation to proceed organically, but initially Spagnolo will offer some important historical context about how Jews at the time, just before the dawn of political Zionism, were asking themselves similar questions as Wagner, while Mathew will explore the question of whether Israel’s inconsistent ban on Wagner’s work tells us something more general about the dark, transformative power of music.

I have my own questions for the panel. For instance, why did Wagner hire the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi to bring his beloved opera Parsifal to life? If he did so because Levi was the best in the field, it begs several other questions, ranging from the very general (can art, and artistic collaboration, overcome political differences and even prejudice?) to the more academic (was Wagner’s antipathy directed at Jews, or at Judaism?)

Oddly, the question of opera and creative collaboration is an important part of both our major exhibitions this summer. In Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theater? visitors encounter hundreds of paintings designed as an operetta in three parts, inspired in part of Charlotte’s step-mother, opera singer Paula Salomon-Lindberg. And in Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, the story of Stein’s partnership with composer Virgil Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of us All) is brought to life.

Learn more and purchase tickets to Who's Afraid of Richard Wagner?

Photo of Richard Wagner from Wikimedia Commons.

What Is This Place?

2011-06-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

Dan Schifrin, the CJM's Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence, on Dinner

When visitors enter the CJM’s Steven and Maribelle Leavitt “Yud” gallery for the first time, there is often a breathtaking moment. “What is this place?” they ask, “and what is supposed to happen here?”

This is the same question the Jews asked themselves as they received the Torah at Mt. Sinai, celebrated this week with the holiday of Shavuot. And it’s the same question that artists Gil Gershoni and Ken Goldberg asked themselves when they first ascended to the Yud to consider their commission, which became the current exhibition: Are We There Yet? Five Thousand Years of Answering Questions with Questions.

Although Are We There Yet? is not a “religious” installation, Goldberg has described the Yud gallery’s spare, soaring, slightly disorienting vibe as akin to the feel of the desert on the way to the Promised Land, brimming with possibilities and questions.

Where do you go to feel filled with possibility?

Photo of the Yud gallery by Mark Darley. Cactus image from Flickr user ForestforTrees.

Dinner: The Art of Turning the World on its Head

2011-05-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

Dan Schifrin, the CJM's Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence, on Dinner

What would Gertrude Stein and Michael Jackson say to each other at a dinner party? Or Billie Holiday and Virginia Woolf? More importantly, what would they eat?

The art of the conversation was the signal achievement of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, and her forays into artistic friendships are key to our current exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum through September 6.

Today’s equivalent of walking into 27 Rue de Fleurus, where Stein, Picasso and Matisse turned the world on its head, might be a visit to our post-modern YUD gallery on Thursday, June 2 and Sunday, June 5, when poet Jesse Nathan and artist/composer Chris Janzen unveil Dinner, a Stein-style salon in which dead eccentrics push art, culture, and language to its breaking point–and beyond.

The performances of Dinner, rife with period-savvy food and drink, are an extension of the multimedia evenings Nathan and Janzen have presented nationally over the last couple of years, built on top of Nathan’s book of poems, also called Dinner. Nathan, an editor at McSweeney’s, and Janzen, a composer and art professor at Fresno Pacific University, agreed to recreate their salon for the Stein show in order to give visitors access to the kind of radical, boundary-breaking conversations that happen when geniuses get together for long periods in small rooms.

Nathan recently quipped about Dinner: “It’s a deranged Passover, but with an electric guitar and no exodus.” This fits the Museum’s mission of reinventing both the rituals of conversation and art-making. With Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and its attendant programs, the Museum attempts to offer a new take on Jewish life through the prism of art, and a fresh look at modernity through the adventures of a headstrong Jewish girl who escaped Oakland for Paris – and immortality.

Learn more and purchase tickets to Dinner.

Recap: The CJM's Second Annual Out of Order Seder

2011-04-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, April 23, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) hosted its second annual Out of Order Seder. As a multi-arts, non-traditional Seder created by and for young adults, it's the only event of its kind in the Bay Area. The Seder demonstrated the Museum’s commitment to serving young adults as a lively and creative venue in which to convene and experience contemporary Jewish arts and culture.

According to one of the evening’s hosts, Dave Saxe, “The event attracted a diverse crowd of young Jews and non-Jews from throughout the Bay Area, many of whom will be the next generation of leaders in our community. The feedback from our peers has been extremely positive.”

And speaking about her role on the host committee Eve Myers added, “We were able to organize an event that continues to build the enthusiasm and camaraderie that is so important to our Jewish community.”

The social aspect was even stronger this year. Sold out again, but now in the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Hall, the event was larger than last year with over 160 guests. Before the meal, the Koret Taube Lobby was boom bangin’ to the sounds of DJ Matt “Haze” Kaftor of JDub Records.

Dinner by Savoy Catering was Sephardic-style, allowing for rice and legumes, which caught some guests by surprise. And the Israeli half of Savoy prepared the central Seder plate with a chicken wing, rather than the more traditional Ashkenazi lamb shank.

Based on feedback from last year’s Out of Order Seder, the program was lighter. Though shorter, the list of presenters was strong, including:

Rabbi Noa Rachael Kushner, founder of The Kitchen; poet, essayist
Sarah Lefton, G-dcast.com creator/producer
Ken Goldberg and Gil Gershoni who together created Are We There Yet?, a new media art installation in the CJM's Stephen and Maribelle Leavitt Yud Gallery that’s been garnering tremendous press.

After the program and before dessert, guests were invited to do activities throughout the Museum, including the making of a Golden Calf out of outmoded handheld electronics — like cell phones and PDAs — and a large scale game of Jenga, evoking the building of pyramids that are a central part of the story of the Jews in Egypt before the exodus. There was also a photo booth, where guests were encouraged to bring in a question on a chalkboard.

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats created a multiple that was a pillbox with empty, clear capsules called “Philosophical Manna for a Pharmaceutical Era.”

In the printed program for the evening Dan Schifrin, the CJM's Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence, summed up the event as follows:

The holiday of Passover is upon us, a multidimensional feast of food, social justice and ritual reenactments. Tradition demands that we tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, but how we tell it depends on us.

Despite the holiday's origins in one people's escape from bondage in Egypt, Passover is among the most universal of Jewish holidays, and its rituals and questions ask us to consider where we are stuck in our lives; how we can do a spiritual ‘spring cleaning’; and in what ways we can see more clearly the bondage of others—materially, politically, emotionally.

The new exhibition, Are We There Yet? Five Thousand Years of Answering Questions with Questions, brilliantly echoes many of Passover’s key themes:

The interrogative impulse behind the story of liberation and the way questions force a deeper understanding of rituals
The injunction to physically re-live the story of Exodus—art and ritual as physical movement
The need for participation. Like Are We There Yet?, the Passover Seder—indeed all of Judaism—doesn’t happen without one's active engagement.
Tonight is not a formal Passover Seder (Hebrew for “order”), with the expectation of hitting every note of the ritual melody called the Haggadah. Instead, in this second Out of Order Seder, we dig down into the mud of the questions—religious, philosophical, personal—that are our guideposts through the complex desert of our lives.

The motto of the CJM is: Come with Answers, Leave with Questions. Did we succeed?

Bottom line, it was a great event. Stay tuned for more participatory programming at the Museum in the month ahead. And the next big event will be the Third Annual Family Gala on December 3.

For making the Out of Order Seder possible, the CJM graciously wants to thanks the following:

The Out of Order Host Committee: Adam Felson, Danielle Foreman, Charlie Kirschner, Rachel Masters, Eve Myers, David Saxe, Beth Sherman, Stacey Silver and Alessandra Wollner

Event Sponsors: The Koret Foundation and the David B. Gold Foundation

The Honorary Host Committee: Lisa and Douglas Goldman, John and Marcia Goldman and Ruth and Don Seiler

Table sponsors: Claudia and Rick Felson and Family, Susan and Russell Holdstein, Julie and David Levine, Jamie and Mark Myers, Eleanor Myers, John and Lisa Pritzker, Dorothy R. Saxe, Shelley and Loren Saxe, Roselyne Chroman Swig and The Wollner Family through the Kismet Fund

Wine was provided by Irony Wines.

Photos: © Kira Shemano

Could a Nazi Exhibition on Degenerate Art Have Provided Inspiration to Charlotte Salomon?

2011-04-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

In 1937, the Nazis mounted an exhibition of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich. The exhibition featured over 650 modernist paintings, sculptures, prints, and books which had been confiscated from public museums throughout Germany. Included were works by Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian, among others. They were crudely hung and accompanied by derisive labels and graffiti like: "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul" and "The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself."

As Nazi propaganda, the exhibition was meant to mock modernism and expose a Jewish "corruption of art." Over 3 million attended the exhibition which traveled to 11 cities in Germany and Austria.

In the spring of 1938, it traveled to Berlin where Charlotte Salomon attended, according to her biographer Mary Felsteiner in To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. Could she have found inspiration behind the hatred? And how many of those who attended the exhibition might have been like Salomon—artists who came to see and appreciate the works on display? We'll likely never know, but this footage from the Holocaust Museum gives you a look inside Entartete Kunst.

Watch the footage from the exhibition »

How Are We There Yet? Works

2011-04-06T09:43:00.001-07:00

A look at the technology behind the exhibition Are We There Yet?.

As visitors to this installation walk through the gallery, their movement triggers the state-of-the-art computerized audio system, creating a unique experience for each person in the space. Read on to learn more about the technology behind this customized system.

Computer Vision System

With a camera, this computer system tracks each visitor’s movement in the exhibition. Based on emerging research in robotics, the system uses machine learning to maintain a statistical model of each camera pixel. Those pixels, shown here as white shapes within boxes, represent the visitors’ movement.

Audio Spacemap

The audio system’s “Spacemap” illustrates the placement of speakers and audio focal points in the gallery using the groundbreaking D-Mitri System by Meyer Sound. The Spacemap is uniquely designed to deliver sound so that the voices (recorded questions) move smoothly and float through the gallery.

Question Database

During the run of the exhibition, a database of questions is being expanded, based on submissions from the community via social media. The questions that you hear while you move around the space are selected from thousands of audio tracks recorded by a variety of voices.

Sound Levels

Drawing from the Computer Vision System, the Spacemap, and the Question Database, this screen shows the dynamic sound levels used to create a unique audio experience for each visitor.

Connie Wolf (Director of the CJM) on Why You Should See Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

2011-03-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Charlotte's Time

Many years ago, I had one of those transformative life experiences: I saw the work of a German artist named Charlotte Salomon. Her work was so meaningful, beautiful, so transcendent that its impact on me has only grown over time. Indeed, her story is in itself powerful and compelling. A young artist in her early 20s, Charlotte made over 1000 paintings in less than two years while in hiding from the Nazis.

Yet what Charlotte accomplished while living under such terrifying circumstances is what distinguishes her and sets her apart. Her art is among the best painting I have ever seen. Her use of color, her imaginative narrative, her unique style and technique, and her passion for life come together to demonstrate the power and value of art, encouraging people to think in new and important ways.

When I first arrived in San Francisco and we were dreaming of what would become the Contemporary Jewish Museum, I frequently thought about what we would present once the building was completed. One of my dreams was to present the work of Charlotte because I wanted the “next” generation to experience first-hand the value of art making as Charlotte so beautifully conveyed.

When I tell friends and colleagues about this show, I am stunned by how many have never heard of her—even more reason why this show matters. The Holocaust eliminated an entire generation of possible artists including Charlotte. But she left us with an incredible legacy. Charlotte was murdered when she was just 26. I often wonder “what if” she had survived, what else would she have created? There are a handful of extraordinary young female artists who died all too young: Eva Hesse at 34. Francesca Woodman was only 23. These are artists whom I admire and both now have their own following in the contemporary art world. It is time for Charlotte Salomon to be seen and acknowledged.

I invite everyone to visit this exhibition. Come discover Charlotte for yourself. You won’t be disappointed. You will hopefully be as moved and as touched as I have been.

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? opens at the Contemporary Jewish Museum March 31. Find out more about the exhibition here.

Q & A with Gil Gershoni and Ken Goldberg Artists of the CJM’s Installation, Are We There Yet?

2011-03-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

Bay Area artists Gil Gershoni and Ken Goldberg present a contemporary take on the inquisitive impulse with an installation opening at the CJM on March 31. Are We There Yet?: 5,000 Years of Answering Questions with Questions combines the latest in intelligent cameras and acoustics to create a reactive sound environment that encourages visitors to reconsider the history and future of curiosity. In preparation for the installation’s opening, Gershoni and Goldberg recently sat answered a few questions about their project.

How did you come up with the idea?

It started with a phone call from [Contemporary Jewish Museum Director and CEO] Connie Wolf who began the conversation with a question: Any interest in creating a new installation in the CJM’s Yud Gallery that would engage the broader community?

The possibilities seemed endless, yet it was immediately clear to us that we could combine technology, art, and Jewish ideas to create something completely new and responsive to the space. Together we applied to the Creative Work Fund and were fortunate to receive their support.

We both admired the new CJM building designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. The Yud is the museum’s signature space with no parallel walls and a myriad of interesting restrictions.

Next we assembled an extraordinary team of colleagues and students to design a responsive sound installation that presents rhetorical questions collected via social media. It’s a combination of audio and architecture that's uniquely activated by the physical body of each visitor.

What's the role of questioning in Jewish culture and in your lives?

You had to ask that didn’t you? As Jewish kids, we were both encouraged to ask questions, starting with the Four Questions at the Seder Table. It's a hard habit to break.

You've said that "it's important for all of us to keep asking questions. Like friction, they provide the resistance that pushes us forward." Where do answers fit into that?

James Baldwin suggested that “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” By combining tradition with technology, we’re hoping that visitors encounter familiar questions in new ways and discover their own questions in a metaphor for the process of exploration that shapes identity for both Jews and non-Jews.

How does art inform your work, and your work inform your art?

It’s like a magnet. Art pushes us to think about design and technology in the broader contexts of history and culture. Then it pulls tools out of our labs and studios to solve unorthodox problems.

How are you using Social Media?

We invite the community to participate by proposing questions for the installation via a special Internet interface, Facebook, and Twitter. The project is also inspired by the Talmud’s representation of multi-layered Jewish intellectual discourse. The Talmud is a surprisingly contemporary model for communal conversation in the digital age. Rather than resolving each issue with an authoritative unified “answer,” each page of the Talmud reflects the spiraling layers of debate and celebrates the dissent at the heart of Jewish thought and tradition. Open inquiry is fundamental to electronic connectivity and social media: the culture of new media encourages participation and a natural skepticism about the authenticity and authority of information.

Can you tell us more about the voice recordings?

They're by a mix of amateurs and professionals. Some, like Michael Krasny, Susan Stamberg, and Laura Sydell of NPR, and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, are recognizable though most are not. We’ve included our own kids, who are pretty good at asking questions. We'll continue to add recordings through July based on the questions people propose.

How do the website, app, and installation work together?

The exhibition website, Are-we-there-yet.org, and the free iPhone and iPad app offer different ways for people to participate. Anyone around the world can read and propose questions. We’re receiving questions from all kinds of sources: history, the Talmud, songs and literature, pop culture. The installation is the focal point where your body activates the space to evoke questions in a way that’s never been done before.

What's special about the technology?

Picasso said: "Computers are useless; All they can do is ‘answer’ questions." The custom website interface and iPad app will remain online throughout the exhibit. We also developed a state-of-the-art computer vision system for the installation based on emerging research in robotics. It uses statistical machine learning to predict the motion of visitors in the space to activate the audio. To address the challenges of constantly changing lighting conditions, the system maintains an evolving statistical model of each pixel and uses Kalman filtering to minimize false positives. The D-MITRI sound system from Meyer Labs takes inputs from both the vision and audio systems to index audio from a database of thousands of vocalized questions. We designed custom space maps, trajectories and audio workflow to create a fluid auditory user experience.

Where can we expect to see this sort of technology? And, what are some real-world applications of it?

The Meyer digital sound system is being used by Cirque du Soleil and in concert halls around the world. Statistical machine learning is mostly in research labs but it played a key role in IBM's Jeopardy Challenge and is being used at Google and Amazon to predict user interests and to steer driverless vehicles. These systems constantly revise their own confidence in their predictions which is not to say they’re infallible.

What about the title?

It can be funny or philosophical. We want visitors to consider their own questions about what is and what is not being questioned today. It might be related to the many promises being made about the future, to Gertrude Stein's quote about Oakland ("There's no there there"), or just a reference to the joys of family vacations.

Tell us more about the Yud.

Libeskind created a space inspired by the 2nd Commandment: Thou shall have no graven images. The space forbids representational images. That's an interesting challenge for an art museum.

Are the projection and website moderated?

Yes. We're interested in new structures for social media that represent the wisdom of crowds rather than anarchy. Not that we're against anarchy.

Are We There Yet: 5000 Years of Answering Questions with Questions is at the CJM March 31–July 31. Check it out at: are-we-there-yet.org

Scribe Stares at Wall

2011-01-10T12:12:00.001-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Sometimes I like to stop and just stare at the wall.

A really great wall to stare at is the one that leads into the Torah exhibition. Many visitors pass by without more than a glance, unable to decipher the Hebrew-laced barcode symbols that plaster the hall on either side, to the right and to the left. It’s actually my favorite part of the exhibition, this piece by Israeli artist Dov Abramson. The wall is patterned in the 613 mitzvot (commandments), with little icons symbolizing to whom and where the mitzvot apply, and what scary form of punishment will follow if they are transgressed.

The 613 mitzvot are probably not what many of us imagine they are. For one thing, not everyone agrees on what the 613 mitzvot even are. The wallpaper goes according to the list compiled by the Rambam (Maimonides), which includes hundreds that pertain to the Temple (not your local one; the ancient one); many that apply only in Israel; as well as simple and seemingly insignificant ones, such as salting bread.

On the holiday of Shavuot a few years ago, I found myself reading this very list with some others from 1 AM til dawn. There is a tradition of staying up all night studying Torah, and what could bring us back to the source better than learning the 613 mitzvot? We went around in a circle and read each one out loud. I’ll never forget two of the mitzvot that landed on me:

1) To take challah

2) To write a sefer Torah

Taking challah is one of the only mitzvot that applies specifically to women (represented by a skirt on Abramson’s wallpaper labels). I was working at the time as a baker, and fulfilled this mitzvah almost daily. The word “challah” came to mean the special braided Shabbat bread, but the word comes from a torah law to set aside a portion of our bread for God. In Temple times, this portion went to the priests. Post-Temple times, we say a blessing and symbolically burn a small piece of the dough.

As for writing a sefer Torah, I’d already begun to learn scribal arts, so the idea that I might someday write a Torah was not totally inconceivable, though it certainly seemed far-fetched. Of course, this mitzvah doesn’t apply to skirts, only to pants. If I wore pants, maybe the mitzvah of writing a sefer Torah could apply to me as well.

A girl can dream can’t she?

Writing a sefer Torah is mitzvah #613, the very last. The order of the list of mitzvot is chronological, based on where the mitzvah’s source is found in the Torah. For example, the mitzvah of “Pru U’Rvu,” to be fruitful and multiply, is mitzvah #1, derived from God’s command to Adam and Eve at the beginning of Genesis. As an interesting side note, this mitzvah of “be fruitful and multiply” doesn’t apply to skirts either. It’s not totally clear to me how pants can fulfill this mitzvah without the help of skirts, but where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halachic way.

Anyway, back to the wallpaper. It’s an impressive feat to poke fun at a tradition while still revering it. Stark little symbols indicating whether you will get hanged, burned, or stoned for transgressing a mitzvah is pretty funny (only because we don‘t fulfill them!), but it’s also deeply engaged with the details of the system. The system, represented in bar-codes, is indeed an authentic and complete one. But once you step outside and stare at it in its two-dimensionality, you have to at least chuckle at the absurdity of it all, even if you are a part of it -- perhaps especially if you are a part of it. It’s our ability to not take ourselves too seriously that we (both us and the system) will have enough breathing room to stay in good relationship with each other, through the thick and the thin, til mashiach do us part.

---

Based on Six Hundred and Thirteen by Dov Abramson (a variation on the Ner Mitzvah project, 2009). Digitally printed wallpaper. Courtesy of the Artist.

Photos by Bruce Damonte, courtesy of the Contemporary Jewish Museum (top-bottom: a detail of one of the commandments, a section of the wall in the gallery, and a view of the wall leading in to the exhibition As It Is Written: Project 304,805).

The Four Questions with Johnny "Hei'z" Heywood

2010-12-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

Before jetting off to New York to defend the Major League Dreidel title, the reigning champ, Johnny Hei'z Heywood, sat down with us to answer The Four Questions.

How Jewish are you?

Very minimally. But, I have many friends that are Jewish. I just went to a traditional wedding and was really intrigued by how community-based the religion is. I hadn't realized how strong a part of the faith community is.

What would your Jewish wrestler or Jewish gangster name be?

Johhny Hei'z is my moniker (in Major League Dreidel) right now, but I'll go with the "Gentile Crocodile." If that even counts, as it's gentile based.

What do you think belongs in a Contemporary Jewish Museum?

I've seen the exhibits in Washington D. C. at the Holocaust Memorial Museum so I sort of assumed that if it's a Jewish museum, that's what's going to be in there. But, I was refreshed to hear that it's not really like that, and that the CJM is more holistically about the religion and contemporary things. I think we can all relate to that, particularly in the diverse world we're living in.

Favorite Yiddish word?

Schmutz (e.d. meaning dirt, mud, or the like)

Heywood goes for all the gelt (and glory) this Thursday, December 9, at the Knitting Factory in New York City. Tickets are still available via majorleaguedreidel.com.

Any Excuse To Get Chocolate

2010-11-30T16:54:00.001-08:00

Champion Dreideler Goes for the Gelt at RitLab this Thursday, December 2

The San Francisco Giants aren't the city's only champion this year. San Francisco is also home to Johnny "Hei'z" Heywood, the reigning Major League Dreidel champion, who this Thursday, December 2, will be at the Contemporary Jewish Museum for RitLab.

Last December, the 27-year-old Heywood knocked off competitors like Spincent Van Gogh, Spinny the Pooh, and Spindianna Jones on his way to becoming the first gentile champion of Major League Dreidel.

Started by New Yorker Eric Pavony, Major League Dreidel (MLD) is a knockout-style tournament in which competitors see who can spin a dreidel the longest within a six-sided arena (shaped like the Star of David), that gets smaller as rounds progress. At a family Hanukkah party in 2006, Pavony decided to give the traditional game a modern spin, and started a mini-tournament with family and friends competing in an arena built out of his mother's cookbooks. Everyone got into it, and with experience gleamed from beginning the first-ever competitive Skee-Ball league, Pavony began MLD. Today Pavony is MLD’s Knishioner, and the league boasts hundreds of participants from all over the country and additional competitions in Miami and Denver with plans to expand in 2011. MLD also sells the Spinagogue, the first-ever dreidel spinning stadium, nationwide at Bed Bath and Beyond.

Heywood, who grew up in the East Bay, was introduced to the dreidel as a kid and, looking for any excuse to get chocolate, quickly took to it. In 2009, he was living in New York, when he heard about the MLD tournament from friends. Thinking he had a shot, Heywood registered, got his own dreidel, and began practicing on his living room table.

Round after round, under what he described as a surprising amount of pressure, Heywood kept spinning. In the final he faced off against the "Virtual Dreidel," Howard Pavony, the father of Eric. A quiet, intense man with huge forearms that produce a big spin, the senior Pavony was the defending champion and the fiercest competitor Heywood had ever faced. In his signature style that marries control with clean, sweat-free hands, Heywood hit the center of the arena with smooth, tight spins. Somehow, he won.

"I had no idea I was going to do as well as I did. But, every round I kept advancing, and ended up winning," said Heywood. "It turned out that I kind of got the hang of it right in time."

Now known as the "Gentile Crocodile," Heywood will return to New York next week to defend his crown. Though he harbors no illusions of making a career out of dreideling, Heywood has enjoyed his time at the top and the opportunity it has brought to show non-Jews and Jews, who often see the dreidel as decorative, how much fun spinning a dreidel can be.

At RitLab this Thursday, he’ll be judging a tournament and coaching spin. For those just starting out Heywood offered what led him to victory.

“Don’t do too much,” he said. “Go for a controlled, smooth spin, and get your form down.”

Think you’ve got a good spin? Come out Thursday to RitLab and find out.

Find out more about Major League Dreidel and the Spinagogue.

Find out more about RitLab on Thursday, December 2.

A Year Later

2010-10-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Last year, b’etzem hayom hazeh, on this self-same day, As It Is Written: Project 304,805 opened. Another important event in my life happened on this day as well: sixty-one years ago, on October 8th, 1949, my mother, z”l, was born.

While this convergence may seem a mere interesting coincidence, there is precedent in our tradition for the notion that related events occur on the same date. Perhaps the initial event creates a vortex that pulls the next event under its energetic wing. A classic example of this is the destruction of the first and second temples; according to tradition, both occurred on the 9th of Av. The concept extends to location as well – the binding of Isaac, God’s test of Abraham’s faith, took place at the same spot from which the world was created, and the same spot on which the temples would be built.

Exactly one year ago, dressed in my mother’s lavender shirt, I stared at my notes from behind the podium, dedicated the talk to the memory of my mother, and spoke softly of the Ramban, black fire on white fire, and secret meanings beneath the surface of a seemingly misogynist torah verse.

My mother always wanted the best for me. She wanted me to be a normal child who would grow into a normal young woman with a career and a direction and a home (if not a husband and a baby). But God did not lead me by the most direct path. At age 18, I went to a kibbutz and hung out with sheep. In college I made theatre and stopped shaving those body parts that women in our culture are supposed to shave. My clothing didn’t match and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Then I enrolled in yeshiva to learn Talmud and other completely impractical and irrelevant ancient texts. To top it all off, at age 31, I left my job in New York City for the secure title of “Seasonal Housekeeping Volunteer” at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in rural Connecticut.

It was during the last few months of my mother’s life, winter of 2008, that I began exploring the art of the Hebrew letters. So while she could not be at opening night for the birth of this Torah project, she did witness its birth inside of me right at the juncture of her death. Soon thereafter is when I first met my scribe teacher Jen Taylor Friedman, and year later, Jen wrote the first words of her Torah project, “Torat Imeinu: The Torah of Our Mothers” on the evening of my mom’s first yortzeit. She writes about it here (in the blog I am referred to as RHS, an acronym for my Hebrew name, רחמה חיי שרה).

Reflecting on this past year and the process of writing Torah, I’d say it’s much like any other process, including the grieving process: it’s not linear, you think you know what’s in front of you but you’re usually wrong, sometimes you feel close and sometimes far from the "Source of Life", and time moves you forward as you try to stay present.

On October 8th one year ago, for her birthday, my mom’s spirit was at opening night to hear about the Torah I’d be writing. She was celebrating in her lavender shirt, which almost kind-of-sort-of matched my two-tone purple skirt, proud of me like no one else ever could be. She’s here today too, quietly watching as I write in Deuteronomy about the mountain and the fire and the tablets that Moshe brought. Happy birthday, mom.

Jaron Lanier, Wild Thing

2010-10-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

by James G. Leventhal

Jaron Lanier came to speak at the Contemporary Jewish Museum as part of the Museum's LINK program,, a Jewish, Art, and Technology initiative at the CJM.

Jaron Lanier purposefully positions himself as archaistic. He wants you to read a book. He wants you to think before you "tweet." He is also sometimes credited with inventing virtual reality. That's right, inventing virtual reality. And he has helped to craft some of the finest future visioning in a Philip K. Dick film, yet, as a creative consultant on Minority Report. He has jammed with "Q," Ornette Coleman, and been on tour with Yoko Ono.

Jaron Lanier, Wild Thing, originally uploaded by levenj.

Hearing Jaron Lanier speak at the CJM was a thrill for me. I'd been reading Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson, and was all excited about the 'wisdom of the crowds' and the potential of mass collaboration and social media's power to build networks and layers of meaning.

So I was excited to dig into You Are Not a Gadget, figuring it would be an apt counterpoint; but, instead found something of an indictment of this Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody way of thinking:

The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people -- very influential people -- believe they are hearing algorithms and crowds and other internet-supported non-human entities speak for themselves. I don't hear those voices, though -- and I believe those who do are fooling themselves.

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget p. 39

Wow. it stopped me in my tracks and made me question a lot that had informed my now-and-future world view. Lanier's not really throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak; but he is encouraging a consistent "turning off" or "tuning out." Go for the individuated longplay.

There's another important layer that has to do with ownership of knowledge and the fact that "the corporation" owns all this "sharing." Lanier is keenly attuned to this, even invested in it, as he points out. There is something chilling about who owns what we are creating and sharing so openly. A question, I think, as yet unresolved in its implications; especially as, in my opinion, these new sharing spaces being driven by corporations have added such tremendous good in the world so far. And it may be only in our quietest of moments that we truly own our own thoughts. Isn't value defined in exchange? How then do we determine value outside of those known channels? This blogging space is run by Google, for example.

And when it's all said and done, Lanier's really speaking about moderation. He's a champion of technology and it's sort of like the new book Hamlet's Blackberry, where the author reminds us that these are in fact age-old questions, finding the balance from the natural distraction from humanity that technology can offer.

Sit back, relax with your laptop, or smart phone. Play the video. And dig the opening instrumentation.

There's a lot up in there -- what do you think?

LINK, a Jewish, Art, and Technology initiative, opens the CJM as a laboratory to explore practical applications for forging new paths in Jewish education. LINK is a multidimensional initiative which brings together a monthly speaker series exploring the intersection of Judaism and new technologies, a year-long educator fellowship, and an innovative exhibition with web, gallery, and classroom components.

LINK is made possible by a generous grant from the Covenant Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Koret Foundation and The David B. Gold Foundation.

Education and Youth Programs at the CJM are supported by Koret and Taube Foundations; Jim Joseph Foundation; Alexander M. and June L. Maisin Foundation; The Wallace Foundation; Bank of America; The Skirball Foundation; Target; The James Irvine Foundation; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; Pacific Gas and Electric Company; Wells Fargo Foundation; Citibank; The David B. Gold Foundation; Macy’s Foundation; Morris Stulsaft Foundation; and Union Bank of California Foundation.

Sukkot

2010-09-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

by Dara Solomon, Associate Curator

Allan Wexler (American, b. 1949), Gardening Sukkah , 2000, wood, gardening implements, eating utensils. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Come see our exhibition Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life which looks at artists exploring Jewish ritual through art and design. The exhibition opened in April 2010 with Passover and closes on October 3, around the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. This exhibition is a great way to contemplate and better understand the High Holy Days.

There is a wonderful piece in the exhibition by Alan Wexler that is a Gardening Shed/Sukkah (pictured above)! With this being Sukkot, listen to Alan Wexler, one of the artists of the exhibition, speak with JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen about the meaning of Sukkot and Sukkah building. This video with other artists from the exhibition are also available in the gallery. You can look at the art and then listen to the artist talking about the work on our “video labels.”
(The video above is from the set of videos that The Jewish Museum, New York has contributed to the amazing multi-media repository created by our friends at the Indianapolis Museum of Art called artbabble.)

We would love to hear how these works help you better think about Sukkot and the other ways we all reinvent ritual. Reinventing Ritual closes next weekend, so be sure to see it before it’s gone.

During Sukkot, we eat a meal and even sleep in the Sukkah, the wooden structure you build that commemorates the type of temporary structures that the Israelites set up in the dessert while wandering for 40 years after leaving Egypt. There is a great Sukkah competition going on in New York this year during Sukkot: http://www.sukkahcity.com. The winners were just announced and their proposals are stunning. There was an impressive jury for the competition including Maira Kalman, whose retrospective is on view until the end of October at the CJM.

Chag Sameach...

Not So Frequently Asked Questions

2010-09-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

In the gallery, visitors can leave me questions. Many of the questions are about how to deal with mistakes, or about the letters, or offers to help with proofreading (thank you!). Some of the questions are more unusual, and I thought I’d answer a few here.

Are you related to Stephanie Seltzer?
I doubt it. I’m often the second Seltzer people meet. It’s the kind of name that’s unusual enough that people think we’re all related, but common enough that we’re not.
Sidenote: Someone else asked me this again over Rosh Hashanah. I’m curious to know, who is this Stephanie Seltzer?

What is your favorite toy?
One toy that I really enjoy is that wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached to it with a string that you bounce up and down. Another toy that I have enjoyed playing with is the remote car, the kind that you operate from afar. Do these still exist? Also, kitchen toys.

In Kabbalah, is Metatron a teacher of Moses?
Excellent and deep question! I don’t know how much the person who asked this question knew just how interesting this connection between Metatron and Moses is.

First, some background. While many of us have heard of Moses, Metatron is a bit more obscure. Metatron is an angel, and while he does not appear anywhere in the Torah, I did read about Metatron back when I was writing Genesis, in connection to a person named Hanoch, who does appear in the torah.

In a genealogical section (Genesis, Chapter 5), the Torah uses curious language regarding this man called Hanoch. Whereas all the other characters simply die, Hanoch is reported as “no longer, for God took him.” I was curious about this language, and learned that kabbalistically, Hanoch is associated with the angel Metatron, who was – get this – the celestial scribe!
Metatron is named as the celestial scribe in the Talmud, because he was sitting down (whereas the other angels must stand in the presence of God). The explanation for his “rude” behavior is that he was writing; as I can testify, it’s hard to write while standing up.

Moses is most well-known for taking the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, but he was also the very first (human) scribe: tradition tells us that he copied down the first Torah, which he received directly from God. Since Metatron was the heavenly scribe, and Moses was an earthly scribe with an inside connection, it stands to reason that the two may have connected on one plane of existence or another. I like the suggestion that Metatron was the scribe teacher of Moses. Someone had to show him how to write the letters!

Is a son to always carry the sins of his father?
Wow, that’s an intense one. The Torah does say that God visits “the sin of the fathers upon the children.” But the Torah also says that “fathers shall not be put to death for children, neither shall the children be put to death for fathers; every man…for his own sin.” Maybe it means that children inherit some unsavory traits from their parents, and it’s each generation’s responsibility to transform these traits, little by little making the world a better and better place.

Can you use a green pencell instead of a fedder to wrote Hebrew?
While you can write Hebrew with the pen of your choice, the Torah can only be written with black ink. However, I don’t have to use a "fedder". I could use a reed, or even a plastic nib. I find "fedders" to be quite good though. I think I know where you got the idea of the green "pencell". It’s in the display case. I use the green "pencell" to mark where I’ve made errors. I make a green mark on the copy of torah that I’m copying from, so that I can easily find the errors later when I go back to correct them.

The woman is man future?
Not me, no, I don’t think so.

People of the Book, People of the Link

2010-08-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

by Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs

In the second Museum LINK talk, Estee Solomon Gray threw down the gauntlet early: “The link, not the book, is (and always has been) the core of Judaism.” Mashing together educational theory, Talmudic dialogue and social technology, Estee spun out an integrated vision of Jewish community innovation evolving rapidly from a focus on “covenant and commandedness” to one of “community, commentary and conversation.” But even in olden times, she reminded us, Jews “evolved radically linked architectures” of text and community. Crossing the Talmud and the Internet is an inevitability, not a joke. Web 2.0 is an opportunity to experience the next generation of Jewish creativity in real time.

Is the Torah a Snoozer?

2010-07-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

“Is it ever boring, writing all day?”

boring:

“Dull, tiresome, tedious.”
“Mind-numbing, monotonous."

[also: “The act or process of making or enlarging a hole.”]

When I was training with Jen Taylor Friedman, I happened to be working at her studio when a local reporter visited. He asked what her favorite and least favorite sections of Torah were. At the time, I was writing a certain extremely repetitive panel of torah. When I say repetitive, I mean, repetitive. I mean when I say repetitive, I mean, repetitive. The section is Numbers 7:12-7:83. It consists of the same paragraph repeated twelve times over, but with the names of different people inserted at the beginning and end of each paragraph.

Given that this was the panel I was currently writing, I immediately knew how I’d answer the question (I can’t remember how Jen responded. Jen?). I would say that my favorite–that’s right, my favorite–section was possibly the most tiresome, dull, mind-numbing, monotonous section of the Torah. Save for the intro and conclusion, a passage that repeats twelve times in a row.

What on earth was I thinking?? Well, at the time I thought, "what better opportunity to practice the letters than to write the same thing over and over again?" With each subsequent paragraph, my writing got faster and more consistent. By the end, my spacing was verging on acceptable. And my mind was surprisingly intact, perhaps in some kind of meditative state. And I experienced a little flitter of excitement as each new name was revealed. Sometimes it’s the little things in life that bring so much joy.

But jump ahead about a year, and I find myself writing that very same section for a second time. This time around, things are a little different. With over half a Torah under my belt, and having just come out of writing another beautifully repetitive section of Torah that describes in painstaking detail the making of the mishkan*, I was looking forward to some exciting narrative. Or at least, some narrative. Just a little bit of a story. Instead, I find myself in that previously all-time-favorite, The Twelve.

Ah, life.
The ups, the downs.
But mostly, I gather, the steady. The every day. The same-old, same-old. Kind of like the weather in the Bay Area.

So, to answer the question: No, I’m not bored. However, I am in the desert. Word has it I’ll be here for a while…like forty years or so. But that’s ok, life is all about the journey, including those long stretches with nothing remarkable in sight. And Torah, as I’ve heard, is a tree of life…

*God’s desert dwelling-place

EEEEEEEEWW, BLOOOOOOOOD!!!

2010-06-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

When I first started this Torah project, the question shocked me each and every time. At one point I was keeping track of how often it was asked, as well as what percentage of the questioners were women and what percentage were men. When the count was high but about evenly-split between men and women, I stopped caring and simply lost track.

The question: "Can you write the Torah when you’re menstruating?”

I have a question, too. What is up with everyone’s obsession with blood?! And when did my bleeding cycle become public interest law?

Maybe that’s unfair. The Torah itself is a little obsessed with blood. Recently, I was writing a section of Leviticus that deals with a woman’s state of impurity following birth and the associative blood. She is considered in a state of tum’ah (generally translated as “impurity,” though Everett Fox in his infinite wisdom refuses to go this route and translates tum’ah as “tum’ah”). The new mother’s state is likened to that of her niddah, her menstrual state.

Blood comes up quite a bit in the Torah, and not just women’s blood. Moses turns the water of the Nile into blood. The priests sprinkle blood on the altar. Someone with a skin disease gets sacrificial blood placed on his ear, thumb, and toe.

Powerful substance!

So what about blood in connection with the Torah scroll? Well, we certainly wouldn’t want any blood to get on the Torah. Beyond problematic, that would just be yucky. But what about this holy object being touched–and perhaps even worse, written–by a woman in an “impure” state? There seems to be a widespread but mistaken belief that women are not permitted to touch the Torah because they might be bleeding. And perhaps in some communities this is the case. However, the shulchan aruch is clear on the issue:

Any impure person, even [a woman in] a niddah state…may hold a Torah scroll and read it. The words of Torah do not contract ritual impurity. (282:8)

The Torah is immune from my blood! Yay!

I calculated how long the Torah would take me to write if I did take a menstruation vacation every month. About 19 months instead of 14. And if I needed to wait seven white days following my period,* the Torah would take about two years. I can envision the gallery sign: “Scribe will be away from the gallery from Monday, June 21, until further notice. She will likely return Friday, June 25, but she’ll let us know that morning if she’s spotting. Thank you for visiting!”

* Couples that abstain from sexual relations during a women’s menstrual cycle wait anadditional week before the woman goes to the mikvah, at which point relations are resumed.

People of the Book–People of the Link

2010-06-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

In the second Museum LINK talk, Estee Solomon Gray threw down the gauntlet early: “The link, not the book, is (and always has been) the core of Judaism.” Mashing together educational theory, Talmudic dialogue and social technology, Estee spun out an integrated vision of Jewish community innovation evolving rapidly from a focus on “covenant and commandedness” to one of “community, commentary and conversation.” But even in olden times, she reminded us, Jews “evolved radically linked architectures” of text and community. Crossing the Talmud and the Internet is an inevitability, not a joke. Web 2.0 is an opportunity to experience the next generation of Jewish creativity in real time.

Halfway There

2010-06-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Well, folks – I have reached the halfway mark.

Since I’m not writing the Torah entirely in order, I actually wrote the “halfway mark” some time ago. Of course, there are multiple ways of counting “half.” By the verse. By the words. The letters. By time. Effort. While a computer count would give us different halfway points, the Talmud names דרש דרש “And Moses did inquire” (Lev. 10:16) as the Torah’s middle words, and the letter “vav” in the word גחון “belly” (Lev. 11:42) as the middle letter. This middle “vav” is enlarged in the torah, depicted here in the form of matzah. Both are beautiful mythic midway points. The two middle words are the same word, meaning “interpret.” And the “vav” is a connector letter, meaning “and.”

“Halfway” is a way of marking time and space. In some ways, marking “half” is mechanical, like the way * we mark time according to our clocks. In what way am I halfway finished the Torah? The same way as the “day” is “half” over?

I learned something interesting over the holiday of Shavuot. Our tradition explains that we are obligated to study, splitting our study into thirds: 1/3 Written Law, 1/3 Oral Law, and 1/3 Gemara (interpretive methods of study). But this does not necessarily mean an equal time split. It might take 99% of one’s study time to begin to understand just one mystical concept.

Similarly, the relative power of our experiences does not necessarily correlate to time or distance. One moment in time might contain within it 99% of meaning in one’s life. Perhaps this is a way to understand revelation at Mt. Sinai.

So, am I halfway complete with the Torah, or do I have halfway to go? Depends how you look at it!

*this star represents the halfway point of the blog entry, by number of characters, not including this footnote. And while we’re counting halves, find out the halfway point between your location and the museum on this website: meetways.com. Don't Let Zeno's Paradox stop you from visiting!

Program Rewind: Difficult Books

2010-05-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

Stanford’s Steven Zipperstein put Mein Kampf in its place during the May 6th program Difficult Books, describing it as a phenomenally boring book despite its outsized impact on world history. Surprisingly, he explained that Hitler’s autobiography–the central text of the Museum’s exhibition Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf–is dramatically less popular worldwide than it’s elder cousin, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian manifesto describing a plan for world Jewish domination.

His prediction: In an age dominated by talk radio and Internet sound bites, The Protocols, which is written in repetitive chunks, and coyly presented as if it were a transcript of secret Jewish meetings, would continue to speak to people looking in the wrong places for answers to global complexities and chaos.

"Get Out of My Airspace!" And Other Tales From the Torah Letters…

2010-05-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

When I read the article in the J Weekly entitled “Leave me Alone! And Other Tales from the Torah Scribe,” I was pretty taken aback. Were my work habits so interesting to people that this reporter wanted to give them the “inside “scoop”? And where was everything I said about loving the opportunity to share Torah with people in such an unusual way? Hmmm. But, like everything else, I realized there must be some Torah here. And that’s when it hit me: "Scribe Realizes She is a Final Chaf.”

Fair enough: that title probably isn’t catchy enough for the newspaper, but that’s what blogs are for.

Allow me to explain. All letters in the Torah must be whole and unbroken (except for one purposely broken letter), and they cannot be touching each other. They must be entirely surrounded by parchment, separating them as individual letters. Letters combine with each other to form words and sentences and eventually an entire Torah, but first, each letter must be its own person, so to speak. They must be whole and complete in order to serve the larger function of integrating harmoniously with the adjacent letters.

Sometimes, a letter is defined not only by the ink strokes that form it, but by the air space it occupies. In the case of a final chaf (ך) for example, we know that a lamed (ל) cannot shoot up from the line underneath and ram into the leg of the final chaf, but what is not as well-known is that the lamed cannot shoot into the empty air space of the inner leg of the final chaf. This airspace is considered the final chaf’s personal space.

When I encountered this exact scenario of a lamed potentially shooting up in the airspace of a final chaf, I immediately thought of the article. This explains it! I am not a misanthrope; I am simply a final chaf! Like the final chaf, I desire to connect with the other letters. I want to share my unique role, and have them share their unique role with me. But as a final chaf, my boundaries were not as clearly or obviously delineated. So I had to mark the airspace with a more tangible barrier, to help me be whole and complete in order to share of myself. It doesn’t mean I want the other letters to leave me alone. Especially as a final letter, I wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t other letters looking towards me…

"What do you do when you make a mistake?"

2010-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

One of the fascinating rules of sacred writing is the principle that a letter cannot be formed by an erasure. How could a letter be formed by erasure? Funny you should ask! I ran into the very possibility just today.

Here is a picture of (what is supposed to be) the Hebrew word עד, meaning “until.” As you can see, there is an ink drip to the left of the letter dalet. Of course, I want to remove this ink drip, but I can’t just scratch it off. Here’s why. The ink drip, located as it is in relation to the dalet, resembles the left leg of the letter hey. So, what we have here is not actually a dalet with an ink drop next to it, but an accidental hey. If I simply scratch off the ink drip, I form the letter dalet by carving out part of the letter hey. This would make not only the letter, but the Torah invalid. Follow the steps below to find out what I did instead:

First, I scratch off the ink blob. Look, now it looks like a dalet! But, I can’t leave it this way, or else the newly-formed dalet – while accurate in appearance – is not kosher underneath, so to speak. Sort of like a pig, an animal that looks kosher from the outside, but is not kosher on the inside (the pig has split hooves but doesn’t chew its cud).

Now I scratch off the right leg of the dalet, leaving me with a simple “roof.”

Next, I create the dalet anew by forming the right leg. Yes, this leg looks exactly the same as the one I just erased. But, as in many other Jewish practices, intention and order make a difference. I have now positively formed, kosher dalet. Voila!

“That’s Julie Seltzer! I Invented Her Too!”

2010-03-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

As I walked from the exhibit hall to the museum lobby, I stopped in my tracks when I saw the man walking up the stairs in the opposite direction. Rav Landes?!

Rabbi Daniel Landes is the director of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, the yeshiva¹ I attended in Jerusalem ten years ago. I have seen him a few times since then, on visits to Israel, but he was one of the last people I thought I’d run into in San Francisco, and at the museum no less!

It turns out that he was just as surprised to see me. Over coffee, he reported on his experience taking a museum tour. The docent pointed out the Hebrew word פרדס (Pardes), which is written out in very large structural letters on the entrance wall of the museum. Pardes means orchard, and represents four different levels of understanding the Torah, from the surface level to the most hidden level. The tour guide asked, “Does anyone know what Pardes is? Rav Landes showed his bag which featured that very word, since the institution he runs is named after this concept of Pardes! The visitors were impressed. Apparently, they thought that he actually invented the term, or at least the concept. Then, when the group then continued on to the Torah exhibit, and Rav Landes exclaimed in surprise, “That’s Julie Seltzer! I invented her too!”

He was joking, of course, though at this point the other people in the tour became suspicious that he was connected to every aspect of the museum, but I later told him that he was right. Learning at Pardes and being part of that community has influenced the direction of my life more than any other experience. In that sense, he did “invent” me. By taking a “break from normal life" to learn in Jerusalem for a year, a world of Jewish life and learning was opened to me. I did not know why I wanted to learn, but felt in my heart that it was where I should be. It was this opening that eventually led to my desire to write a Torah, and to experience Torah on all levels–from the black letters resting on the surface of the parchment, to the hidden meanings represented by the white space in-between. It was a good reminder that following our hearts (or our noses, or our kishkes²) can lead to totally unexpected, beautiful opportunities for growth and change.

¹yeshiva: place of Jewish study
²kishke: Yiddish and Hebrew word meaning "the gut"

The Whole Megillah

2010-03-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

What does a scribe dress as for Purim? Why, a megillah, of course!

This past weekend was Purim, when, among other less holy activities, we read Megillat Esther – The Scroll of Esther. Megillat Esther must be read from a parchment scroll, making it a favorite holiday for scribes!

Writing Megillat Esther is often the first big undertaking for a scribe. For the most part, the same rules apply as apply to Torah, though some authorities allow for more leniencies, such as permitting decorations in the margins, and special flourishes with the crowns (called taggin). Additionally, Megillat Esther contains no names of God – so the newbie scribe does not have to worry about all of the rules and weightiness associated with writing a Name.

We talked about this and more, as we shaped Hamantashen – the traditional Purim cookie – at last week’s baking class [the next class is Matzah making].

For Purim I went dressed as, what else – the Whole Megillah.

The entire megillah is on my clothing (though laden, I am sure, with many mistakes). However, I wrote it in scratchy cursive writing, not Ashurit (the script used in sacred writings). It begins on my skirt, continues on my shirt, and finishes on my headband. The tights require some explanation. The ten sons of Haman, traditionally read by the reader in a single breadth, must occupy their own column. What this means is that often (depending on the size of the megillah scroll*) the names of Haman’s sons must be written VERY LARGE in order to occupy an entire column [See photo]. There is also empty parchment space on each line between the name of the son, and the Hebrew direct object indicator (the word ואת). You see this on my tights. On one leg is the name of Haman’s sons, and on the other leg is the word ואת. And they are stretched out/enlarged, just like in a megillah!

Happy belated Purim!

Flickr Gallery of Costume Images

*although most megillot have these enlarged names of Haman’s sons, the preferred method in the halachic literature is to use an 11-line column (the shortest scroll size), so that the names of Haman’s sons do not have to be enlarged at all in order to occupy an entire column.

Travels in Torah, and Other Scribal Adventures

2010-02-19T14:44:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

I hail from the east coast, and moved to the Bay Area for the amazing opportunity to write a sefer Torah¹. Last weekend, I visited New York and Toronto for a friend’s wedding, and thought some aspects of my travel were relevant enough to share.It started before my flight, back when I was writing the end of Genesis. The Torah, chronicling the end of Joseph’s life, states: “And Joseph lived in Egypt…”At the daily Q & A sessions I lead with the public in the Museum, one of the most frequently asked questions is, “What do you think about when you’re writing?”

I explain that I generally have two tracks going. One track is focused on the meaning of the words. I’m “in” the story, so to speak. For example:

Wait a minute. Didn’t this whole narrative with Avimelech happen already with Avraham?
I wonder how Joseph can keep it together in front of his brothers.
Esau’s line is an untapped goldmine of baby names.

The second track is focused on the more technical elements of the writing, for example:

Good quill! Please last another few lines.
I think I need to stretch that lamed to reach the end of the line.
Oops, are those letters touching [not permitted], or are they just a hairsbreadth apart [required]? This might be a case for a magnifying glass.

Last week someone challenged my response, asking, “You never have thoughts of mundane things, like your shopping list?” This person probably had some experience meditating. In my cursory experience with meditation, I learned the principal that when a thought comes in, let it go. Don’t hang on to it. Since my mind is a human mind, “outside” thoughts do come in. I try to apply this principal, and instead of going through my shopping list, I just let the thought of the shopping list pass through, to be returned to at another time.

A funny thing happened right before my trip. I’d like to categorize it as somewhere between experiencing the Genesis narrative and thinking about my shopping list. As I wrote the line “And Joseph lived in Egypt…” and as I completed the word “Egypt,” the following thought appeared: “Julie, you need to bring your passport to travel to Canada!” This “shopping list” thought emerged directly from the meaning of the text! Joseph lived most of his life in a foreign land. His brothers also leave their home for Egypt. I too was headed to a foreign land (if you want to call Canada foreign).

My scribal adventures continued on the trip, as I had the amazing opportunity not only to visit friends, but to visit two mezuzot² that I wrote.

The friends that I stayed with in NYC waited for my visit to put up their new mezuzah, in their new apartment. The necessary components were collected: mezuzah scroll, case, hammer, nails, two-sided tape. The friends collected themselves [delete]. We said the blessing for putting up a mezuzah*, followed by the shehechiyanu. I have to admit that through the writing of their protective scroll that now hangs on their doorpost, I feel intimately linked to their day-to-day lives.

Bizarrely, I also got to “see” (not really, since it was scrolled up and protected by a beautiful hand-made wooden case) another scroll of mine in Canada. As I entered my friends’ home, kissing the mezuzah, I recalled that I’d written it!

So much for “getting away” for a few days!

*The blessing for putting up a mezuzah
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשַׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָנוּ לִקְבּוֹעַ מְזוּזָה
Baruch atta Adonai Eloheinu melech ha‘olam, asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu likboa‘ mezuza.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, ruler of the Universe, who sanctifies us with commandments and commands us to set a mezuzah.

1Sefer Torah: A handwritten copy of the Torah.
²Mezuzot: Plural of mezuzah, religious texts from Deuteronomy inscribed on parchment and rolled up in a case that is attached to the doorframe of many Jewish households.

Can I Ask You a Personal Question?

2010-02-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

I have a personal question for you that I didn’t want to ask in front of the group during the Q&A session. Would it be alright to email you?
Ah, the familiar “personal question.” This is generally a polite way of saying, “Tell me about your menstrual cycle and how it affects Torah writing.” At least she didn’t ask it in front of everyone. And at least she prefaced it by acknowledging the personal aspect of it. Not everyone does.

When her email arrived a few days later, it was not what I expected:

My understanding is that some communities - especially Orthodox ones - would not accept and make use of a Torah scroll written by a woman. Are you part of a community that would and, if not, how do you reconcile that tension?
The range of what people consider “personal” is astounding! And, after being on display for a few months, I appreciate that this visitor recognized the personal nature of these types of questions. Here is part of my answer to her:

It's true that Orthodox and some other traditional communities would not accept this torah as valid. The reason is because the halacha¹, or Jewish law, states that a Torah written by a woman would not be valid for use. It is based on a series of extrapolations, beginning with tefilin²: because women are not obligated to wear tefilin, they don't write tefilin. And since a line from the Torah about tefilin is right next to a line about the obligation to have a mezuzah³, it was determined that likewise, a mezuzah written by a woman would be invalid. The Talmud basically goes on from there to create a category of "writing" as something that men do. Some female scribes who have obligated themselves to wear tefilin argue that since they are obligated in tefilin, their writing is valid the same as a man’s. Others simply say "I'm egalitarian" or, "I'm not Orthodox," and therefore this sexist law is no longer applicable.

I probably fall somewhere in between. I am still in the process of figuring out my relationship with tefilin -- it certainly doesn't feel natural, at least in part because of social norms and expectations. Also, while I don't consider myself Orthodox, I am traditionally observant (observe shabbat⁴ and kashrut⁵, etc.) Here in the Bay area I most frequently attend either a modern Orthodox synagogue, or a traditional yet progressive halachic minyan⁶ (the former would not chant from a Torah written by a woman; and as far as I know, neither would the latter).

Sometimes, the best way to get my head around religion is to think of it as one big paradox – most of it does not make sense in any kind of logical way. What brings me to these communities is their spirit, the desire to be in a place where others who attend care about Jewish tradition in a similar way as I do, and simply but less logically, the “feel” of them. Also, these communities are progressive, meaning that they are pushing boundaries within their stated parameters, and it’s important for me to be part of that. Still, the bottom line is that the Torah I am writing would not be read from at these places. Somehow, it sits right with me. I'm not sure why. Again, it really shouldn't if I were operating with my brain. But hearts and souls have less ego.

--

¹Halakha is the collective body of Jewish religious law.

²Tefillin are a set of small cubic leather boxes painted black, containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, with black leather straps that are wrapped around the arm, hand and fingers.

³A mezuzah is a piece of parchment (often contained in a decorative case) inscribed with specified Hebrew verses from the Torah, which is affixed to the doorframe of Jewish homes.

⁴Shabbat is the seventh day of the Jewish week and a day of rest.

⁵Kashrut is the set of Jewish dietary laws, termed "kosher" in English

⁶A minyan refers to the quorum required for certain religious obligations in Judaism.

Scribe/baker Julie Seltzer's Challah Recipe

2010-02-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

Kathy here, from Communications at the CJM. I had the pleasure of taking current scribe and former baker Julie Seltzer's challah-making workshop last Thursday. Julie used to be a baker, and currently creates a weekly challah inspired by the current Torah portion. You can see these tasty pieces at My Jewish Learning. Despite the surprise of learning that bread dough wasn't exactly as responsive to my will as clay or even play dough, I managed to make an unrecognizable but nonetheless delicious little number. Julie was kind enough to share her recipe, which I am relaying here with some photos from the event. If you give it a try, be sure to let us know how it goes!

Mix together:
1 tbsp. dry yeast
1 tbsp. sugar
1/4 cup warm water

Mix together:
1/2 - 3/4 cup sweetener (sugar, honey)
1/2 - 3/4 cup oil (canola or other non-flavored)
1 tbsp. salt
2 cups very hot/boiling water

Add 3 eggs (beaten) to the above mixture, then add in the yeast mixture.
Add 1/4–1/2 cup oats
Add whole wheat until it's the consistency of a thick soup
Add white flour until it reaches a doughy consistency ready for kneading (Julie says that a friend calls this "earlobe" texture, which isn't appetizing but I know immediately what she means!)
Knead!
Allow the dough to rise a few of times, which depending on the temperature will take about 2–4 hours.

Then you are ready to shape the dough, which is where we picked up at her workshop.

1) Portion dough 2) Knead dough 3) Sculpt dough 4) Brush completed shapes with egg 5) Arrange on baking sheet 6) Sprinkle with poppy seeds 7) Place in oven and bake at 350 degrees until it is golden brown 8) Allow to cool on rack 9) Enjoy!

Julie is teaching two more workshops, one on making hamentashen for Purim, and another on making matzoh for Passover, so you have a few more chances to roll up your sleeves in our Museum kitchen.

Brought to You by the Letter "Peh"

2010-01-25T18:18:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she is writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

One of the questions I am often asked is, “Do you have a favorite letter?” The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (or 27, if you count the five letters that take a different form when they appear at the end of a word) feel in some ways like children. How can one have a favorite? But even with children the Torah reports to us certain leanings at certain times (“Now Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game; and Rebekah loved Jacob.” Genesis 25:28). Similarly, different letters bring unique joy, new connection, and insight at different times. Past “favorites” have included the Bet, the Gimmel, and the Chet. My current leanings are toward the letter Peh, and I’ll explain why. [These Hebrew letters spelled out, by the way, are all valid Scrabble words, FYI.]

The Torah is written in a special script called Ashurit. Even as script styles vary from community to community, as well as across time periods, they all fall under the umbrella script of Ashurit. An Ashurit “Peh” is very special. When you look at it – if you are looking at the black letter drawn – you see a Peh. And when you look at it – if you are looking at the negative space of the white parchment – you see a Bet (ב), the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Tradition tells us that the Torah is black fire on white fire. At the most basic level, this represents the black letters on the white parchment. The black words are the revealed Torah, and the space in between and around the letters are interpretations; secrets; the Torah’s inner soul. I wrote earlier about black fire on white fire. The white fire, the inner soul of the Peh, is another letter, the Bet. What does this mean? I’m not sure. But, like an M.C. Esher painting, it definitely forces a shift in perception.

Here are some thoughts about this perception play. Peh means mouth. You can perhaps see from the shape of the letter that it is like the opening of the lips, of a mouth. Other letters represent body parts as well, and were at one point pictographic. Examples include Yud (hand), and Ayin (eye). I like to think of the Peh as having an outside and an inside. Bet (the inner aspect of the Peh) means “in.” So, the inner letter of the Peh is literally that: in. It represents what does not escape the mouth. The mouth, being the place of transition between thoughts and speech, is the organ of creation. Similar to the concept of black fire on white fire, the black ink of the Peh represents what is manifest in the world; the inner space of the Bet represents everything behind and beyond–in our hearts, minds, and souls.

Public Prayer

2010-01-15T13:50:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Imagine you’re in a room, praying. You’re not the only one there – in fact, at times there are many others in the room too. They’re not praying. They’re watching you pray. As you pray (or do your very best), you have an awareness of their presence. You wonder: What are they looking at? Do they want to learn something specific? Are they looking with a critical eye? Do they want you to stop what you’re doing and pay attention to them? Then they begin talking about you: Look at how she sways back and forth. Can you see which prayer book she’s using? Look at her outfit – I wonder if she always wears such bright colors. They speak in soft voices, thinking you’re so engrossed in your activity that you can’t hear them talking about you. But the heightened level of awareness that you’ve reached bleeds into an awareness of them, too.

At times, this is what it feels like to write Torah in public. I use the prayer metaphor not only because it’s an activity that requires some level of spiritual awareness, or presence, but also because it traverses the public and private spheres. On the one hand, prayer is extremely personal – what could be more private than talking to God? Rabbi Nachman of Bretzlov recommended isolation for personal prayer, called hitbodedut. The idea is to get alone with yourself, usually in nature, in order to commune with God. But Jewish prayer also has a public aspect: certain elements of the service are only done when there is a group of ten, called a minyan. This includes the mourner’s prayer, something so seemingly personal. A person in mourning is exposed – and ideally, supported – within the larger community. The Torah service also requires a minyan. But what about Torah writing?

Generally speaking, scribes work from the privacy of their studios or homes. The idea to have a scribe write a sefer Torah in public view at a museum is a new one. It makes sense that scribes generally write in a private space. The process requires focus, concentration, and some amount of control over the surrounding environment. It also makes sense that there is a desire to see the process of Torah writing – not only is the Torah chanted only within a group setting, there is also a tradition that we were all present at Mount Sinai when God revealed the Torah. “Everyone” includes everyone living at that time, and everyone yet to be born, to this very day and into the future.

I think that the blend of public and private writing for this project is representative of how Torah is experienced. People connect with Torah on an individual level, and no two people will understand it in exactly the same way. Different parts will speak more to different people. And yet, the very same text joins a community as one. It can only be shared in its traditional manner in a group context. It is this joining, this unification – represented by the public writing hours – that is the heart of Torah, but it’s the individual voices percolating within that make that heart beat.

Not Kosher

2010-01-06T10:26:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Question: Have you encountered any obstacles in this work because you’re a woman?

Answer: No. The inverse seems to be true. While it is the case that my work will not be accepted by all sectors of the Jewish community, in some cases it is specifically sought after, simply because I am a woman. Feminists of the previous generation paved the way, and I just stepped into that opening.

And while this is definitely true, I am now becoming more and more aware of subtle sexism – the kind that impacts everyone, not just women who are working in traditionally male fields. And it has nothing to do with halacha (Jewish law). According to traditional halacha, the Torah that I write will not be valid for ritual use. Sometimes people harp on this at the sessions, looking down at those who won’t accept it. But the fact that this Torah will not be kosher according to halacha is a matter of halacha. I get it. And it’s much less bothersome to me than the sexism that impacts my day-to-day experience. What I’m talking about is more ubiquitous and harder to detect. I’ll give two examples.

The first example might be blown off as simple inappropriateness, but it’s more than that.
The scenario: It’s a Q&A session. A kind gentleman asked,

Can you still write the Torah if you’ve been a naughty girl?

For a split second, I simply stared – did he really just ask that question? At that point another person in the group came to my rescue by reframing the question,

Do you mean, for example, does her prayer practice affect her writing?

Afterwards, an interesting response was proposed as perfectly appropriate: “I’m wondering if you would be asking that question if I was a man.” And then the picture became even more clear, and absurd. I tried to envision it --- a male scribe, with all of the outer signifiers, a kippah, a beard, maybe even a tallis that he wears while writing. I’m trying to imagine someone ever daring to ask, “Can you still write the Torah if you’ve been a naughty boy?” Can you imagine?!

The next example is even more subtle. It is connected to the questions I categorize as “legitimacy” questions:

So, not everyone will accept your Torah as kosher, right?
You have to sanctify all of God’s names, but how can we know that you have done so?
Are you sure it’s OK to fix a mistake?
Do you have any official certification for this?

Even though all of these questions are all perfectly legitimate (speaking of legitimacy…), together they form a picture of what it means to be a woman in this society. It means being questioned, all the time, as to our worth, our legitimacy, our knowledge, and our ability to do something properly. Often it means not being trusted to handle a project – the same project that a man is trusted with without question.

I had not made this connection until a friend suggested it, and told me of the following account:
A female writer was having difficulty finding work. When she did write a piece, it was often criticized. Editors would question her facts. They called to check up on her. They didn’t trust her with the job. This writer got fed up, and thinking she knew what the problem was, took a male pseudonym. Suddenly, everything shifted. She started to get a lot more work. The editors gave “him” fantastic feedback. They trusted the sources and the claims. And to add icing to the cake, she started getting paid more – by a lot.

This is kind of shocking. But on the other hand, maybe not such a surprise.

Thanks for the Giving

2009-12-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

Thanksgiving is here again!
And Thanksgiving means turkey.
And turkey means feathers.
And it goes without saying, of course, that feathers means quills.

Last year at this time, a friend went to a local farm where they kept turkeys. This friend knew I was learning scribing, having observed my collection of stray Canadian goose feathers from the grounds where we lived. He brought me back a whole bunch of feathers.

“Might you use these?” he asked.

Thank you. I very well might.

One year later, I’m about to christen a Thanksgiving feather for use on the Torah.

There is an interesting custom that I heard from Linda Motzkin, attributed to scribe Eric Ray, of waiting a full year after a bird has been killed to use its feathers for sacred writing. It is not permitted to kill an animal in order to use its feathers or its skin for writing, and the year-long wait time verifies that the purpose of the killing was not for feathers.

I like this tradition. Plus, the added personal challenge: could I keep track of these feathers for an entire year?

Full disclosure, just one feather of the bunch remains–it’s a long story, involving a rubber band and a twice-stolen vehicle–but the important thing is that there is one left. It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving has come back around again. It’s also hard to believe that I’m writing a Torah, one year after this casual gifting. My thanks of giving to the bird and feather deliverer, for assisting in carving words of Torah…

Covenant of the Word

2009-11-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

“Is this something men do as well, or are there only female scribes?”

Wow. This question, asked at one of the Q&A sessions I lead on breaks from writing, is on one level so charming. It’s not too hard to imagine that ritual calligraphy would be situated primarily in the realm of the feminine; I could see scribing lumped in the same category as baking and weaving–“women’s art.” But on another level I found the question disturbing, not having anything to do with gender at all.

You can probably see how it’s charming as well as amusing. After all, there are only about ten women in the world doing this work, and with some possible historical exceptions, it’s a very, very new thing for women. The question is usually inverted: “Are there any female scribes?”

So, what about this question would I find disturbing? It’s a stark reminder that we as human beings come to broad conclusions based on our narrow experiences. I can imagine a parallel question coming from a visitor, “Are all Torahs written for museums, or are some of them for use in synagogues?” (as a side note, this Torah will not stay at the museum; once complete, communities in need will be able to apply to have the torah for a few years at a time). Based on what we see and experience, we often infer something radically inaccurate.

Recently, I was writing the section in the Torah describing the covenantal relationship between God and Abraham. To be perfectly honest, I felt just a teeny bit left out. The covenant, or ברית Brit in Hebrew, is a pact between God and Abraham, the first Jew. The sign of the covenant for all future generations is “in the flesh” – ie, circumcision. The word Bris (the circumcision ceremony for baby boys at eight days old) is a pronunciation of this same Hebrew word for covenant, “Brit.” In full it is called Brit Milah, a Covenant of Circumcision. Now most of me is VERY grateful not to be part of this physical covenant. But, where does this leave me and all women? Are we part of the covenant or not? And if we are, what is the sign of this covenant?

Another way of translating the phrase Brit Milah is "Covenant of the Word". The word מילה milah means both “circumcision” and “word.” And as if that wasn’t enough of a hint, the circumcision is also referred to as “אות ברית Ot Brit, or “Covenental Sign.” But the word for “sign” (אות Ot) is also the word for “letter.” So now the covenant is connected very clearly to words and letters. Maybe scribing (and reading and learning and engaging with the letters and the words of Torah) is a manner in which women are brought into the covenant with God. The feminine is generally associated symbolically with that which is more hidden. In this case, this more hidden understanding of the covenant is its connection to “words” and “letters,” compared to the more obvious and outward “circumcision” or physical covenant.

The words and the letters in the Torah have meaning that is beyond our understanding; in and of themselves and not just based on what they represent. We often cling to the simplest level of meaning, the literal. Like the person who assumed that all scribes are women because the scribe she saw is a woman, our understanding of the meaning of Torah is also based on assumptions from a very narrow human experience. Perhaps the letters and the words of the Torah, beyond all possible meaning we might attribute to them, are somehow a connection with God in and of themselves. I can only speak to my narrow experience, but in reading and saying and writing these words – despite their “meaning” -- I felt part of the covenant.

Baffling Babel

2009-11-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

“You began learning scribing just two years ago. Is this, perhaps, hubris?” asked the reporter.
“I’m not sure what hubris means.”
“Arrogance. Over-reaching.”

Ah.

So I’m writing the story of the Tower of Babble: the people were of “one language, of unified speech,” and they aim to build a city that reaches the heavens. Ambitious indeed! In the Torah narrative, this qualifies as hubris, and God makes sure they fail by confounding their language, losing their collective power. And as I’m writing the story, I get a bit confounded myself. Let me explain:

The Torah text states: “Therefore its name was called Babel (בבל Hebrew root BBL), because there God Baffled (בלל Hebrew root BLL) the language…” The two Hebrew words are related, hence the city’s namesake, but they are not the same word. In my baffled state, however, I wrote the word “Babeled” (בבל) instead of “Baffled.” (בלל)
I shook my head. Was this a joke? Some kind of divine humor? Or irony if you will, that my language gets baffled just as I write about language getting baffled? But as this error has sat with me for a week or two, I’m thinking there is more at play here.

One of the questions I routinely get asked at “Q&A with the scribe” is:
Q: “What happens if you make a mistake?”
A: “I correct it [I then explain how].”
Q: “Are you sure it’s kosher to fix a mistake?”

This is such an interesting myth. The myth seems to be that scribes can’t make errors, and if they do, they have to start over from the beginning. As in, start writing the torah all over again! I wonder if a Torah would ever get completed if this were the case…

A Torah must be written by hand. Computers could easily generate a Torah with no worry as to mistakes, but that’s not the direction our tradition went in with the advent of computers, nor of the printing press for that matter. Writing a Torah is a human endeavor, purposefully so. And a human hand is…well, human. And humans err. If we didn’t err, we might start to think we were all-powerful or god-like, just like the people of Babel. We also might start to think that the Torah is God, instead of a human reflection of divine revelation.

So is my endeavor hubris? I hope not. Writing a Torah is one of the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, that our tradition sets before us. And I’m trying to fulfill this commandment as best as I humanly can.

Opening Talk: Project 304,805

2009-11-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

This is a transcript of the talk delivered by Scribe Julie Seltzer at the opening of the exhibition, As It Is Written: Project 304,805. Julie will be periodically be sharing her thoughts on what she is writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view.

These words were offered in memory of my mother, Chaya bat Pinchas v'Batsheva.

This weekend is Simchat Torah, the Celebration of Torah, which marks the end of the yearly Torah reading cycle. It feels like a particularly auspicious time to begin writing a Torah. On Simchat Torah we read the very end of the Torah, and then immediately read the beginning, making the Torah more like a circular document than a linear one.

The last Torah portion, called v’zot habracha has a mysterious word at its start. The word is אשדת “eshdat,” meaning, well, not clear. It’s the only time the word appears in the entire Torah. Even more strange, is that eshdat is written as one word: “eshdat”; however, it is read as two words: “esh” “dat,” often translated as “fiery law.” The verse reads:
“And Moshe said: God came from Sinai, and rose from Seir unto them; God shined forth from mount Paran, and came from the myriads holy, at God’s right hand was a fiery law unto them.” (Deuteronomy 33:2)

The medieval commentator Rashi describes this “eshdat” as Torah: black fire on white fire. On the simple level at least, this means black letters on white parchment. (Actually, parchment isn’t totally white; often it’s spotted, just like the cow it came from).

Another commentator, Ramban, addresses this black fire on white fire in his introduction to Bereishit (Genesis). He speaks of Moshe as a scribe, and says that when Moshe received the Torah on Mount Sinai, he did just as all scribes must: he copied from another Torah. But wasn’t this the first torah? No, says Ramban. There was an original that Moshe copied from. And there was one difference between this primordial Torah and the Torah that Moshe wrote down; the original black fire was one long stream of letters.

If you look inside a Torah today, it looks a lot like one long stream of letters! There are no vowels, no cantillation marks¹, no breaks between sentences or verse; if there were, the Torah would be invalid. However, there are word breaks. In the primordial Torah, not even word breaks were indicated; rather, oral tradition brought us the word breaks we have today, broken down to convey the mitzvot², the commandments. However, says Ramban, there is another way to divide the words, which reads not as understandable laws, but as a series of Divine names. What he is hinting at here that there are in fact an infinite number of ways to divide the black fire. The fact that there is ambiguity as to how and if to divide the word “eshdat,” the fiery law itself, hints that the Torah, the black fire on white fire, has infinite meaning.

Let me offer a very timely example. On Monday I will begin to write a sefer Torah, and I’ll be starting with the second panel, not the first. This approach is in sync with what is done on Simchat Torah – when I write the last page, God willing, I’ll circle back immediately to write the first. If the original Torah was one long stream of letters, it makes sense that it was circular, with no beginning and no ending.

So, in my preparations this week, I took a peek at that second sheet of Torah – I’m curious – what are the first words on that panel? What words will I begin with? I open up my tikkun, my copy of Torah text that will be my guide for writing. I look at the top of page two and what do I see? In Hebrew, והוא ימשל בך “and he will rule over you.” The context is the Garden of Eden. God curses both Adam and Eve for eating from the forbidden fruit, and Eve’s curse reads as follows:

To the woman God said, "I shall surely increase your sorrow and your pregnancy; in pain you will bear children. And towards your man will be your desire, and he will rule over you." (Genesis 3:16)

An interesting place for a female scribe to start writing a Torah! At first I laughed out loud, just at the irony, but there was something more than that – for me, it’s the parts of the Torah don’t make sense, the concepts that challenge my sensibilities that beg for deeper digging.

If we go back to Ramban’s idea that the primordial Torah was one long stream of letters, perhaps our phrase והוא ימשל בך “and he will rule over you” could be broken down differently? Indeed! The letters can also divide to והוא ימש לבך"” “and it/he will touch your heart.” When I write these words on Monday – with their proper spacing – it will be with the awareness that another meaning, and in fact infinite meanings, lay just beneath the surface.
--
¹cantillation marks: Symbols that tell the reader how to chant a Hebrew text. ² mitzvot: Commandments.

Jews on Vinyl Revue Wrap-Up

2009-05-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

Roger Bennett, co-curator of the exhibition Jews on Vinyl and author of the book that inspired it, was kind enough to pen our inaugural guest blog entry about his experiences with the work leading up to the Jews on Vinyl Revue which took place at the Museum last month. Seeing as how the blog is called "Voices", we hope this will be one contribution to a growing chorus from the Contemporary Jewish Museum community.

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Part of the reason we formed the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation (www.idelsounds.com) was to change the legacy of the performers we meet. Over the past five years we have uncovered a lost world of Jewish Music replete with performers whose careers have been in danger of being written out of history. Our efforts have been focused on recording their stories, documenting their career arcs, and in many cases, giving them the opportunity to take the stage again, so a young audience can rock out to their sound and appreciate their legacy. Thanks to Connie Wolf and the board and staff at CJM, we were able to do this in fine style -- and in perhaps the highlight of our work so far, Idelsohn co-founder David Katznelson was able to present Irving "Fabulous Fingers" Fields with a proclamation from Mayor Gavin Newsom, declaring that it was officially Irving Fields Day throughout the city. For this reason alone, the Idelsohn Society backs Newsom for governor.

--Roger Bennett
trailofourvinyl.com

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Photos from the Event

Audience members took a trip down memory lane with the featured performers through slides of them in the heyday of their craft. Pictured are the Burton sisters, the group to which surprise guest Lynn Burton belonged.

Irving Fields, in his element once again on stage at the CJM.

Johnny Yune pulled out all the stops with his finely-honed shtick and song sharing catskills-style tales from his conversion, and ending with sonorous selections from his landmark album "Ose Shalom".

What is the Future of Memory?

2009-04-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

By Dan Schifrin
Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence

When Brenda Way, Artistic Director of the ODC Dance Company, spoke at the Museum in March about her new work “In the Memory of the Forest,” she was careful to note that the dance, based on an oral history of her Polish mother-in-law, was not created as a work “on the Holocaust.” Instead, the multi-media production, which explores Iza Ehrlich’s hiding in the forests outside of Warsaw during Word War II, was designed to explore the unique character of one brave and complex person, who was neither defined nor destroyed by the Holocaust.
The individuality of Iza Erlich’s narrative, along with Brenda Way’s unique ability to listen to it, suggest that the transmission of one person’s story to another is perhaps the most powerful and humane way of keeping alive not just the memory of one person, but a context to mourn those whose memories and stories were forever silenced in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

On Thursday, April 23, during the Museum’s commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah), the Contemporary Jewish Museum will host a discussion with survivor Perry Scheinock, and oral historians Susan Rothenberg and Anne Grenn Saldinger, to discuss what happens when fewer and fewer survivors are around to tell their stories. The conversation is presented in conjunction with StoryCorps and the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
A longer piece about the issues of the Holocaust and storytelling can be found here.

Museum as Forum

2008-12-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

"What has happened to the human voice?"

-Studs Turkel, the late oral historian, from a 2005 interview recorded when a StoryCorps MobileBooth visited his home.

I'm Ari Rinzler and I'm standing in for Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs and Writer-in-Residence, who normally writes here. I've been interning in Public Programs with Dan for the past six months and have had a lot of time to mull over the success of our St oryCorps Storybooth -- for the Museum, and for the Bay Area.

The Jewish tradition of storytelling has spanned from the Bible and Talmud, to Jewish folktales, to our own mothers and grandmothers, and to us. "Everyone has a story," anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff said, which "...told to oneself and others can transform the world." With StoryCorps, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in partnership with everyone who participates, is doing the important work of documenting the personal, sometimes secret, and almost always touching and profound parts of our collective narrative.

I've often wondered if other people feel the way I do about "other people's stories." Perhaps it's my background in anthropology that gets me uncommonly excited when I hear stories, whether of loved ones or of strangers, in their gloriously mundane details. Or maybe it's how I grew up. I was the lucky one my dad turned to when he needed someone to compile life stories of his high school classmates from New Jersey for their 50th class reunion a few years ago.

I've noticed recenly that StoryCorps has done something, in the tradition of Studs Turkel, that has touched people in ways that extend beyond my esoteric geekiness. There is a certain vulnerability and openness that is required when sharing a personal story, and this openness is something that is a special part of the Contemporary Jewish Museum's mission to explore identity, Jewish and otherwise. The success of StoryCorps makes it clear that the entire Museum is a forum for asking questions, and finding answers -- multiple and overlapping, as Jewish tradition teaches -- in both art, and in ourselves.

I like the idea of any forum, like a blog, or public radio or a museum that gives voice to those who are generally not heard. So come, participate. If you haven't been able to snag yourself a slot in the booth for the winter there are still ways to be a part of StoryCorps in the coming months. This past Sunday, the facilitators hosted a very cool introduction to StoryCorps at the museum, including some demystification of what actually happens "in-the-booth." They also played some rare clips that have not yet been heard on National Public Radio. They'll be hosting another evening like this on February 12 and I hear the theme for the samples that day will be love.

If you want to record a story, mark your calendars for March 1, when the next round of slots opens up online (at www.storycorps.net)

Signing out,
Ari

The Art is YOU

2008-10-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

By Dan Schifrin
Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence

At the far end of the Museum’s Sala Webb Education Center, past the collage of faces and objects comprising the exhibition “Being Jewish”: A Bay Area Portrait, a small steel cottage sits. There are no works of art inside. Rather, the works of art are YOU – visitors whose life stories are as precious as the paintings in the galleries.

Starting on October 12, the Contemporary Jewish Museum will host a StoryCorps StoryBooth, part of its yearlong collaboration with the famed oral history program, selections of which are presented on National Public Radio on Friday mornings. These interviews – one person talking with another, with CD’s given to the participants, the Library of Congress, and StoryCorps for possible broadcast – are a unique opportunity to record the voices and stories of loved ones. (Slots are limited, so make your reservation soon).

To celebrate the beginning of this project, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay will speak at the Museum on Sunday, October 26. He will play excerpts from celebrated StoryCorps interviews, read from his book Listening Is an Act of Love, and talk about his work.

On Thursday, Octobe r 30, McSweeney’s editors Dave Eggers, Peter Orner, and Craig Walzer will discuss their “Voice of Witness” literary series, including the new books: Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, and Out of Exile: The Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan. This program emphasizes one of the moral imperatives of StoryCorps, which seeks, in part, to amplify the marginal voices in our society.

Despite the industrial feel of the StoryCorps booth, its modest size and shape recalls the sukkah – the special outdoor hut Jews build each fall for the holiday of Sukkot, which symbolizes both the autumnal cycle of life, and the temporary nature of our lives. Sitting there each evening sans TV and Internet, its thatched roof designed to make the stars visible, the sukkah reminds us of the importance of conversation, and the ancient tradition of family and friends sitting around the table, their stories the glue that has long kept communities together.

The StoryCorps booth, although fitted with a solid, soundproof roof, beckons us to remember how precious and temporary our stories are – unless we preserve them.

Changing the World, One Mirror at a Time

2008-08-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

By Dan Schifrin
Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence

It’s not often that one visits a contemporary art installation, opens up the comment book, and reads the following: “First of all, I am a broken vessel, a victim of abuse, and I am in the process of healing.” Or: “Today, June 8, makes 7 years since I lost my wife.” Other entries include promises to help the environment, or work with local schools to improve the quality of education.

If anyone has doubts that contemporary art has relevance to people outside certain cultural circles, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ piece “Birthing Tikkun Olam,” part of the Museum’s exhibition In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, puts them to rest.

Ukeles’ installation is a unique combination of Biblical interpretation, public participation and social action. Her gallery space contains two walls of small, hand-held mirrors, surrounded by biblical texts and the artist’s kabbalistically-inspired poetry. Visitors are invited to take seriously the idea that people are made “in the image” of God, and collaborate with Ukeles to make the world a better place. More specifically, Ukeles asks visitors to fill out a public agreement to do something concrete to improve the world.

Is this too much to ask? Apparently not. Since the Museum opened in early June, thousands of people have carefully considered the request, and written out (and in some cases drawn) their commitments.

On July 31, Phase II of the installation began. On this “Day of Transfer and Exchange” (the first of three), a few dozen visitors sat in a Museum classroom downstairs and wrote out a comprehensive “covenant” with Ukeles, in which they agreed to undertake an act of tikkun olam – Hebrew for holy social work. Then they took the covenants upstairs, replacing the mirrors with their piece of paper, fulfilling the artist’s goal of making her art a full collaboration. After two more events like this, all the mirrors will have been given away to visitors, replaced with personalized agreements.

Visitors were clearly moved by the experience. “I’ve never been so fulfilled in front of a piece of art,” explained Zachary Teutsch, who works with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, and was in town from Washington D.C. for a conference. Echoing the artist’s mystical language, he continued: “We have power, and can create justice in the world, when we can all work together like this. When workers come together we can send sparks up to heaven, as well as send them to each other here on earth.”

Jennifer Leigh, a Palo Alto psychologist and life coach for teens, was equally moved. “I made a covenant with God when I was 12. No one has asked me to make a covenant since then,” said Leigh, the author of the forthcoming book Girls, You Just Don’t Get it! What Guys Want You to Know about Love and Respect. “I am so grateful for this invitation to dig so deeply into my heart.”Leslie Stone, from Sausalito, said that the event “gave me an opportunity to do something about the world other than complain. Having the artist include us like this is a gift.”

We at the Museum are curious to know how visitors feel about the installation as the mirrors are replaced with personal covenants. Tell us what you think

Jews, Cartooning and The New Yorker

2008-07-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

By Dan Schifrin
Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence

Not every boy dreams of growing up to write cartoons for The New Yorker, or books for children. But I did. In high school I often brought one-panel cartoons into my English class, hoping that my witty reference to Kafka and Shakespeare would boost my popularity (sadly, I only got extra credit, which at 16 seemed quite the booby prize).

Growing up with a younger sister, for whom I often improvised stories, songs and sometimes entire musicals, I felt it was theoretically possible to invent stories as strangely rich as those written by Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shel Silverstein.

It was later in life when I realized that one man, William Steig, had managed to create both canonical cartoons and children’s books, as well as a museum full of drawings evoking the absurdity and pathos of life.

William Steig: "I got my first haircut..."
William Steig, "I got my first haircut at Ditchick's Barbershop," final illustration for When Everybody Wore a Hat (2003), pen and ink and watercolor on paper. Original version, in pen and ink and wash, c. 1959. Collection of the William Steig Estate. © 2003 William Steig.

This diverse virtuosity is on tap at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, with its current exhibition From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig. Apart from presenting original drawings, and exploring the genesis of books like Shrek and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the exhibition asks essential questions about the intersection of biography, imagination and art.

The presence of this exhibition in a museum with the words “contemporary” and “Jewish” in the title also provokes viewers to ask: What is the focus of contemporary art? What does Jewish culture mean? And how does the work of William Steig, an author and cartoonist who passed away in 2003, bring these pieces together?

For me, the answer is bound up with the development of the visual culture of The New Yorker, long the country’s most influential magazine. When William Steig broke into the rarefied world of The New Yorker cartoonists, the style and substance of the magazine was reflected in the work of Peter Arno, whose wealthy ne’er-do-wells had nothing to do with the poverty and immigrant striving of the Steig family up in the Bronx, battling the Great Depression with every financial and cultural tool at their disposal. Steig, by contrast, brought the dislocation, rugged determination and heightened emotionalism of his milieu into the magazine, giving it a particular Jewish slant, and making the magazine more relevant at the same time.

Another answer has to do with the increasingly visual nature of American, and therefore American Jewish, culture. As the work of literary cartoonists like Ben Katchor makes clear, cartoon strips, with their compression of story and allusiveness of line, speak to our contemporary hunger for maximum meaning, in minimum time.

On July 17, the Museum will host Robert Mankoff, Carton Editor at The New Yorker, who will explore the influence of William Steig on the culture of the magazine. As one of the magazine’s most noted cartoonists, Mankoff will also explain not just the development of cartoons at The New Yorker, but how the cartoon form so quickly draws us in, while simultaneously presenting so many layers of information and feeling. Click here to learn more about this event.

Contemporary Jewish Museum Welcomes All to its New Daniel-Libeskind Designed Home

2008-06-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

On June 8, the Contemporary Jewish Museum kicked-off its inaugural year in its new building with a community wide celebration. Here is a look back at the celebration.

Director Connie Wolf speaking at the ribbon cutting ceremony.

Mayor Gavin Newsom helped Board Chair Roselyne C. Swig and architect Daniel Libeskind cut the ribbon.

Visitors lined up to visit the Museum on opening day.

Visitors in the Sala Webb Education Center in front of the exhibition, "Being Jewish": A Bay Area Portrait.

Performers included oakland-based storyteller Mary J. Smith and children's music singing sensation Jonathan Bayer.

Youngster gathering her supplies to make a souvenir poster in the Sala Webb Education Center.

Story-time in the exhibition, From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig.

Celebrants getting down to Kol Creations on Jessie Square.

All photos by Kira Sugarman.