I Form the Light and Create Darkness
Watercolors, coffee, flower pigment, gold leaf
8" x 9 1/4"
Two of the most intriguing and challenging excerpts in the Bible for me:
I am the Lord, and there is none else; I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am the Lord, that doeth all these things.
— Isaiah 45: 6-7
What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?
— Job 2:10
Yetzer — Yetzirah
Drive, impulse, creation
Gouache on Paper
22 1/8” x 30”
Background excerpts and quotes, partially written on the painting:
“Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life.”
— Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents chapter 3
“Every person who is greater than the other, [their]impulse (drive, urge) is greater than [theirs].”
— Sukkah, 52 Sefer Ha’agadah, p. 662
“Rabbi Akiva used to scoff at [sexual] transgressors. Once, Satan, disguised as a woman, appeared to him on top of a palm tree. Akiva took hold of the tree and started to climb it. But when he reached halfway, his impulse let go of him. It said to him: Had it not been proclaimed of you in the firmament ‘Take heed of Rabbi Akiva and his learning’ I would have made your life worth no more than two ma’ot (pennies).”
— Kiddushin, 81a (The Book of Legends [Sefer Ha’agadah] p. 237)
“…this is no art in you to speak well about Homer; no, some divine power is moving you, such as there is in that stone which Euripides called the Magnesian…so the Muse not only inspires people herself, but through these inspired ones others are inspired…In fact, all the good poets who make epic poems use no art at all, but they are inspired and possessed when they utter all these beautiful poems…God takes the mind out of the poets, and uses them as his servants…because he wishes us to know that not those we hear, who have no mind in them, are those who say such precious things, but God himself is the speaker, and through them he shows his meaning to us.”
— Plato, Ion, 533—535
“In this Man, […] the soul, which longs and desires to be joined with G-d […] and, on the other hand, the body, which pulls Man downwards, to material and beastly things, and to the vanities of this world, have met…But Man, by seeing and pondering the greatness of the creator and the superiority and preciousness of the divine, is able to influence and persuade his beastly soul that the true goodness lies only in clinging to the living G-d and by that, his beastly soul too is awakened to love G-d and to strip itself of the mean clothes and pictures it had been clothed in.”
— Lessons on Tanya, the Chabad book, by Rabbi Nachum Goldschmidt
There is only one joy in the world, the joy of creating […] all other joys are nothing but shadows.
— Romain Rolland
In Hebrew, if you add the letters Yod and Hei (which together make Yah – one of the names of G-d) to the word Yetzer (drive, instinct, urge) you get the word Yetzirah (creation, creating).*
When I noticed this, I started thinking about the role of our drives and instincts in the process of creating, which until then I had thought of as coming from a more spiritual source. I’ve always been puzzled by the story of Rabbi Akiva who was tempted by Satan in the shape of a woman, and by the saying that a person whose drive is greater than another’s is a greater person.
Then I thought of the Greek mythology creatures that are part animal part gods (or god-like), like Pan, Cheron the Centaur, and the Sirens. Like the Chabad Chassidic division of a person into an animal soul, which pulls the person towards the bodily pleasures, and a G-dly soul, which pulls towards G-d and the control of the urges, or their transformation into more spiritual expression, these creatures are divided into an animal part and a godly part, and they all have a gift of music, dance, or healing. This reminded me of Plato’s proposition (in Ion) that the great poets and actors are not in their right mind when they recite poetry, but are a vehicle, or a “channel”, for the gods’ or muses’ spirit.
That led me to Freud’s concept of Sublimation, and to the idea that animal instincts, when harnessed or elevated by a spiritual power, can create great art.
*The more famous such word-play is from Lekach Tov Bereshit: Eesh--Eesha: Man–Woman: if they are lucky, G-d (Yah, made of the Yod of Eesh and the Hei of Eesha) is present with them, but if not, if Yah (the Yod and Hei) leaves them, what is left of the two words is Esh, fire, and the two fires of each of them stick together to one fire, which consumes both of them.
Rechem — Rachamim
Womb - Mercy
Gouache on paper
22 1/8” x 30”
In Hebrew, the root R-CH-M is the same for both the word ‘Rechem’ (womb) and for ‘Rachamim’ (mercy, pity).
Why did the Hebrew language create these two different words from the same root?
To try answering this question, I used the image of an 8th-6th century BCE Phoenician figurine of a pregnant woman (found in Achziv, Israel), which I put inside a womblike space. Surrounding this “womb” are the footsteps and remains of Lucy, or Eve, as anthropologists call the “first woman”, the mother of us all.
On the “womb walls” I wrote in calligraphy some quotes (see below) from different cultures about the oneness of humanity, which is a very good reason for having mercy and love for one another. We are all born out of a mother’s womb. A mother of a newborn baby is a universal symbol of compassion, mercy, and love. We all have very similar experience being born and cared for by a mother, and in turn, bringing children to the world ourselves. In addition, we all came out of the same prehistoric womb (“Lucy”, “Eve”), therefore we are all not only similar but actually related to each other, and therefore it makes sense for us to have mercy and love for one another.
Background excerpts and quotes, partially written on the painting:
“And the man called his wife’s name Eve (chavah), for she was the mother of all living (em kol chay).”
— Genesis 3,20
“Footprints left on the sandy shore of a South African lagoon […] about 117,000 years ago […] have been identified as the oldest fossilized tracks of an anatomically modern human ever found […] the smallish individual […] was probably a woman about 5 foot 4 […] lived in roughly the same time and place as the hypothetical female known to paleoanthropologists as “Eve”, the common genetic ancestor of every person alive today […] The hypothetical Eve carried a particular type of mitochondrial DNA, genetic material that is passed only through females. Scientists who measured the range of variation in that genetic material in different populations have concluded that we all descend from a common ancestor of that period.”
— Kathy Sawyer, SF Chronicle, 1997
“Since the Creator Ohrmazd created creation, being of one substance, he caused man to be born of one father, so that creation, being of one substance, one thing should sustain, provide for and help another, and men, being born of one father should esteem each other as their own selves. Like affectionate brothers they should do good to each other and ward off evil from each other.”
— ZDT – R.C. Zachner The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism NY 1961; The Iranian Component in the Bible p. 213 Appendix 1
“Why was man created alone? To teach you that if one destroys but one soul, it is as if he destroyed an entire world, and if one saves but one soul, it is as if he saved an entire world.”
— Mishnah, Sanhedrin 35, a bit modified to include all humanity rather than Jews only (Sefer Ha’agada, p. 14 in English; p.11 in Hebrew)
“For in every one there is actually one part of his fellow man, and when one man sins he injures not only himself but also that part of his fellow man which is in him […] and therefore a man should want his fellow man’s happiness and honor as much as his own, because he really is himself, and that is why we were commanded “love thy neighbor as thyself”.
— Moshe Cordovero, Tomer Dvorah, p. 4-5 (my translation based on Sholem’s)
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath; it is twice blesst;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
— Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 5, 1.
A Dream Under Siege
Gouache and collage on paper
22 1/8” x 30”
In a 1990 interview with the Israeli Psychoanalyst Yehoyakim Stein (partially incorporated into the painting), in the newspaper Ha’aretz, Stein explains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in psychological terms. He believes that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is different than any other occupation in history because the Israelis, instead of seeing themselves as conquerors and occupiers, think of themselves as being themselves occupied and under siege, and therefore they are unable to end their occupation.
Stein explains that the trauma of the Israelis in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other past persecutions and pogroms against Jews throughout history, has put them in a position of fearing for their lives, fearing for their very existence as a nation, even as they themselves are threatening the lives and existence of the Palestinian people. It is their inherited suffering and fear which prevents them from seeing the suffering of the Palestinians and having compassion for them enough to allow them to have their own independent state.
As children, my friends and I used to go often to the Bustan (orchard, plantation) at the foot of the Carmel Mountain near our Kibbutz (Maagan Michael). We loved playing under the fruit trees growing there, not being aware who exactly planted them. It is only when I grew up that I realized that these beautiful fruit trees used to belong to Arab Palestinians who used to live there.
I still don’t know what exactly happened to the owners of that Bustan, and I think the Arab villages on both sides of my Kibbutz, Faradis in the north and Jesser El Zarka in the south, have prospered under the Israeli rule, and they might prove that the Arabs did not have to flee during the War of Independence. But that abandoned Bustan has become for me a symbol of the Palestinian dream of independence and dignity, which is still unfulfilled, at least partly because of my own people’s trauma and fears.