In a March 3 webinar, Rabbi Dr. Nachshon Siritsky reflected on understandings of the Divine and gender, exploring some of the ways that Judaism’s most ancient teachings can be relevant in current discussions. Their Zoom talk was part of this season’s L’dor V’dor: From Generation to Generation lecture series hosted by Victoria’s Kolot Mayim Reform Temple.
Rabbi Dr. Nachshon Siritsky spoke on March 13 as part Kolot Mayim Reform Temple’s L’dor V’dor lecture series. (photo from Kolot Mayim)
Siritsky discussed the kabbalistic understanding of creation and humanity, which, they said, describes a process of progressive emanation, revelation, incarnation and embodiment. Whereas the standard concept of history, in the Western mind, is as a straight line of evolution, Jewish time is circular and cyclical, Siritsky explained, returning to the same points again and again, whether they be holidays or the weekly Torah portion.
More deeply, this is manifested in restorative practices such as teshuvah, which can be seen as forgiveness or returning to oneself. In other words, God works with people in completing the work of creation, and this happens through how we channel that light and energy into this world. “I firmly believe that the more we can reconnect with our ancestral wisdom that is contained in kabbalah, Jewish mysticism and tradition, the more we can work to liberate ourselves and realign with the larger rhythms of the universe,” Siritsky said.
Kabbalah, they explained, describes how there are two different ways that God’s energy flows through humans. It can flow through masculine and feminine aspects and each of us contains elements of both. Thus, our goal is to be in alignment with all the different ways in which God flows through us.
“The reason we were put on this planet was to complete the work of creation. When we do that, then we build within ourselves. The act of building is holy, but God dwells inside of us, not inside of our buildings,” Siritsky said. “The goal of our traditions, according to the rabbis, is this notion of making a place within our bodies for God to be present and to be expressed and to able to be articulated and shine forth back into the universe.”
Siritsky spoke about the notion of gender fluidity in Judaic texts. According to the rabbi, the Talmud identifies eight genders. “All eight of these are just the ways in which humans exist on this planet,” said Siritsky. “So, anyone who says that non-binary, agender or intersex doesn’t exist or is not Jewish is not fully speaking from the ancestral traditions of the Talmud and of our rabbis through the generations.”
Citing other theologians, Siritsky said we are always evolving in our understanding of who we are and what we know, and that we must make space to acknowledge that our spiritual understandings are also on that same path.
“Each of us, as we grow into ourselves and this world, we are always having to discard beliefs or understand them in new ways in that cyclical way that promotes healing and God’s progressive emanation into the universe and into ourselves,” they said.
Siritsky next addressed the use of they/them pronouns, arguing that, since the Talmud states that God speaks in human language, then we have to be constantly reinterpreting, re-translating and re-understanding what that language is in each generation – what is true in one generation may not be true in another.
“Ultimately, it leads us to this: we are created in the divine image and, when we see God in one another, we will know God,” Siritsky said, adding that the topic of gender diversity is not a new one in Judaism or other spiritual practices, and that binary thinking is not a Jewish way of thinking.
Siritsky pointed out that our understanding of God and gender is continually evolving, reflecting the ever-changing landscape of society and culture. “By exploring this evolution, we can better appreciate the richness and complexity of Jewish spirituality,” they said.
Siritsky is spiritual leader of the Reform Jewish Community of Atlantic Canada, serving all four Maritime provinces. Ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, they are also a board-certified chaplain with Neshama: Association of Jewish Chaplains, a social worker with advanced training from the Postgraduate Centre of Mental Health, and a doctorate in ministry and pastoral counseling with a focus on burnout in healthcare workers.
The final talk in the 2023/24 L’dor V’dor series will take place April 7, 11 a.m., on Zoom. Cookbook author and food writer Bonnie Stern will, together with her daughter, Anna Rupert, present a talk titled Don’t Worry Just Cook: A Delicious Dialogue on Intergenerational Jewish Cuisine. Register for the free webinar at kolotmayimreformtemple.com.
For more information about Rabbi Siritsky, visit rabbinadia.com.
Sam Margolishas written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.
Rabbi Matthew Ponak recently released his latest book, Embodied Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism for All People. (photo by Marilyn Wolovick)
Rabbi Matthew Ponak introduced his new book, Embodied Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism for All People, this month both in a Zoom event and in-person at the Victoria Jewish Community Centre.
According to the book’s description, the objective of Jewish mysticism is to “touch infinity with your feet planted in everyday, ordinary reality.” The book contains universal teachings that Ponak believes are necessary to the world at this time.
Delving into a millennium of Jewish writings, Ponak hopes his approach will serve as a counterweight to the focus in modern spirituality on bliss and transcendence. Throughout the centuries, Ponak argues, Judaism – including Jewish mysticism – has held “being a good person” as the ideal.
Embodied Kabbalah, written in the talmudic style, in which commentary surrounds the original texts, looks to the mystic teachings for finding a healthy balance between one’s spiritual life and external commitments to family, work and community. Many of the book’s sources have been translated intoEnglish for the first time.
During the launch at the Victoria JCC, Ponak spoke of the personal journey that led to the creation of the book. In his initial studies, he observed two different paths. “One was a path of transcendence,” he said, “a path of bliss, that all is well in the world and we should be celebrating all day. On one level that appealed to me, but I felt there was something missing in it.”
The other path, he said, is one of transformation. “This is one of deep self-knowledge: that I could get to know who I was inside, and new parts of me would start to come forward. There is a deep, radical honesty that can liberate parts of who we are. Those parts can enter into our outer lives as we become more whole.”
Upon further exploration, he discovered there was a way to incorporate both paths into one’s life.
“I found a particular teaching that says there is a time to transform – the work week – and a time to rejoice – Shabbat. One day a week, it is time to celebrate all that we have and focus on the positive, to not get weighed down by the negativity,” Ponak said. “There is a time for the deep personal transformation of working on ourselves, the spiritual work week. On Shabbat, however, everything is whole and we are, too. We feed ourselves delicious food and take an extra nap to help our bodies know the world is complete.”
Ponak emphasized that it is not necessary to choose between the paths of rejoicing and of transformation. There is a time for working and a time for celebrating. If all one has is work, then there is the risk of missing out on the beauty of life, he said. Alternatively, if one is in a prolonged state of transcendent joy, then a spiritual leader, for example, might become unable to help others grow because they have “left the world, so to speak, unable to relate to people.”
He said, “It is good to come off the mountain. It took me a long time to understand the value of that. If I had a trauma or a difficulty in my earlier years as a seeker, it was with the bliss. The transformation stuff was hard, but I was able to get it once it was taught to me in an accessible way.”
Ponak retraced various aspects of his spiritual journey. He studied transpersonal psychology (or spiritual psychology) and other religions. Through this, he found he could be both a spiritual person and grounded.“But there was a deeper part of me that knew there was something else,” he said. “There must be something in Judaism.”
After several years of study at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, he was able to decode the texts on his own. He discovered the hidden treasure of grounded Jewish spirituality that had been there all along in lesser-known mystical writings.
“If I had access to Embodied Kabbalah as a teenager, it could have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches, to say nothing of my family’s stress,” he said. “This is why this book is so close to my heart.”
Among those who would benefit from the book, Ponak pointed to those interested in Jewish mysticism, those who have Jewish ancestry but feel alienated from Judaism, and those who want to learn about universal Jewish teachings as part of the global spiritual landscape.
Yet, for him, “the call to action that feels most urgent is to help people who are ‘ungrounded,’ who are finding mystical writings or going to spiritual retreats but are not connected to the earth: to the body or to their emotions. It’s time to open up the gates of Jewish wisdom to all who can benefit from it,” he said. “I hope this effort will help spiritual seekers to be responsible, relatable, whole and healthy – along with spiritually connected – so that we can be of our greatest service to humanity.”
For more information or to order the book, visit matthewponak.com.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.
Marty Katzoff’s The Light Within the Shell was created specifically for the Zack Gallery. (photo by Lauren Zbarsky)
The Light Within the Shell exhibit opened at the Zack Gallery on July 4. There is a sign beside the door: “This space is meant to be explored. Wander, sit, experience, enjoy.” The show was created specifically for the gallery.
Created by artist Marty Katzoff, it doesn’t involve traditional paintings hanging on the walls. Instead, it looks like a huge folding screen comprised of a dozen panels. They encircle the room, leaving only a narrow passageway along the walls. Each panel has a colourful abstract painting on its inside surface and a black and white image on its outside. A few small copper sculptures scattered outside the enclosed space complete the installation. Viewers are invited to sit down and meditate on the benches inside the vibrant shell of the exhibit or wander along the outer passageway.
Born in Rhode Island, Katzoff grew up playing sports. “I didn’t do much art until my teenage years,” he told the Independent. “I was going through difficult times in high school. My friend was an artist. She introduced me to the arts. I started making collages and found it therapeutic.”
He never completed high school and worked a variety of jobs. “For the next 10 years, I worked in construction, in restaurants,” he recalled. “And, all that time, I made art. I taught myself to paint. Then I went back to school and completed my BA at Bard College in New York.”
For years, Katzoff worked as an artist in New York, created large murals in indoor and outdoor spaces. He graduated from the University of British Columbia’s master of fine arts program in 2021.
Artist Marty Katzoff at work. (photo by Lauren Zbarsky)
His artistic education vaguely coincided with his newly found fascination with kabbalah, specifically the Tanya, which he has been studying for the past few years. “Before, I had separate ideas about art and spirituality. Now, I’m exploring how Jewish learning is connected to my art, how mythology and tradition transform my spiritual life into my paintings,” he said.
As a child, Katzoff went to a Jewish day school, but kabbalah offered him a different perspective. “I started with a book by Gershom Sholem. Before, I always painted with music in the background. This project is the first I’ve ever done without listening to music. I listened to kabbalah lectures online while I painted. I wanted to discover what I could create while listening to something complex and different … [by the late] Rabbi Yehoshua B. Gordon.”
The idea for the current installation came to him when he was finishing his graduate program at UBC. “One of our family friends lives in Vancouver,” Katzoff explained. “She is Jewish and she told me about the Zack Gallery. I submitted the proposal, and it was accepted. I wanted to create an installation specifically for the gallery, an interactive space, a visualization of light. This show took me 11 months to complete.”
Katzoff sees this exhibit as an amalgam of dreams, painting, architecture, Jewish learning and personal symbolism. Vancouver artist Rosamunde Bordos’s essay about the show, which is available in the gallery, expresses her visual composition in words.
Katzoff’s media, the plywood panels, are all recycled materials. “I have a friend who works in art shipping,” he said. “They ship large pieces in plywood crates. That was where the panels came from. Some of them have holes, so customs could look inside the crates to see the art. I painted around the holes. It was like a collaboration with someone else.”
The size of the panels, some of them taller than a person, left him undaunted. “I always liked to work on a large scale,” he said. “That’s why I did murals in New York.”
His oil paints are also recycled. “I use lots of recycled materials in my art,” he said. “My grandmother was an artist. She gave me her entire collection of pigments for the oil paints I use. I’ll probably work with her paints for the next decade.”
In addition to painting, Katzoff also works as a printmaker. Currently, he teaches printmaking at UBC as a sessional instructor. “For me, printmaking provides the connection with literature, with storytelling and history,” he said. “My brain seems to process that connection better while I’m drawing and etching. My drawings are illustrations, while my painting remains more like a therapeutic activity.”
His abstract copper sculptures, several of which are included in the exhibit, grew organically out of his printmaking. “I make my sculptures reusing the copperplates from my prints,” he said. “I have lots of copper plates. Copper was an important part of Judaism and, after I use the plates for prints, I want to share the metal, recycle it. I make sculptures from it. I also make bracelets and amulets. You can see the remains of the etching if you look closely.”
To learn more, check out martinkatzoff.com. The Light Within the Shell is on display until Aug. 22.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
National Hebrew Book Week has taken place every year in June. Its fate for this year, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, is unclear. (photo from gojerusalem.com)
In Israel, you know Shavuot is approaching when you see the grocery stores setting up displays of pasta and spaghetti sauce. The pandemic shouldn’t change that.
Israelis are obsessed with the thought of eating non-meat meals on Shavuot. I suspect that at the heart of this obsession is the feeling that, even today, many people still consider eating a non-meat meal equivalent to eating less than a full meal. Hence, the worry that there really will be a satisfying meal to appropriately celebrate the holiday.
While there are many lovely explanations about why we eat dairy on Shavuot, they seem to be secondary to some practical considerations. As Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin points out, in the late spring, young calves, lambs and kids are weaned. Thus, historically at this time in Europe, there was an abundance of milk. Bear in mind that refrigeration is a fairly new process and that, prior to refrigeration, farmers needed to move fast with perishable milk. They made cheese and butter, which, likewise, needed to be consumed relatively fast. This dairy excess may have motivated some Jews to eat dairy on Shavuot. (See the article “Why do Jews Eat Milk and Dairy Products on Shavuot?” on the Schechter Institutes’ website, schechter.edu.)
But, eating a non-meat meal on Shavuot is not restricted to the customs of European Jewry. As Jewish food expert Claudia Roden notes in The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York, Sephardi Jews in Syria made cheese pies called sambousak bi jibn, Tunisian Jews had a special dairy couscous recipe and, in places like Turkey and the Balkans, Jews prepared a milk pudding called sutlage for Shavuot. (If you don’t want to eat animal-based foods, you don’t need to feel left out. The United Kingdom’s Jewish Vegetarian Society helps you enjoy a variety of traditional, but vegan, cheesecake recipes.)
So from where did all this dairy focus originate? One appealing explanation reminds us of what was supposed to have happened on Shavuot, namely that the Jewish people received the Torah. In Gematria, the Hebrew word for milk (chalav) adds up to 40, the number of days on which Moses stayed on Mount Sinai in order to receive the Torah.
Significantly, studying the Torah and other Jewish texts on Shavuot eve has become a major trend in Israel, as well as in the Diaspora. The big Israeli cities offer any number of options for participating in a tikkun leil Shavuot. These free learning sessions welcome the participation of all of Israeli society, from the religious to the secular, and everyone in between. Those living in smaller towns and on kibbutzim and moshavim likewise hold study sessions on the night of the holiday.
The idea of all-night studying originates with the kabbalists. The earliest members of this group apparently studied with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar, who lived in the second-century CE. It was this scholar (also known by his initials, as Rashbi) who stated: “G-d forbid that the Torah shall ever be forgotten!” (See the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbat 138b.) By the Middle Ages, the kabbalistic all-night Shavuot study had really picked up steam in places such as Safed.
Studying the Torah and other Jewish texts on Shavuot eve has become a major trend in Israel, as well as in the Diaspora. (photo from pexels.com)
Some claim the reason for studying during the night is found in the midrash stating that it was a way to correct for the Children of Israel’s mistake of oversleeping on the morning they were meant to receive the Torah. Others claim, however, that the Hebrew word tikkun should not be translated as correction, but rather as adorning or decorating the bride. The bride in this instance is the people of Israel and the groom is either G-d and/or the Torah.
According to a late 17th-century Libyan tradition, Shavuot symbolizes the wedding day between the people of Israel and the Torah. According to this tradition, the Torah is the bride, which explains the title of the Libyan Shavuot text entitled Tikkun Kallah. Accordingly, those who read this tikkun are likened to bridal attendants.
The importance of studying on Shavuot is bolstered by the fact that Israel’s Hebrew Book Week (or, in some places, Book Month) begins right after Shavuot. I do not believe this occurrence is coincidental, but rather links us to the idea that we are still the People of the Book and a people of books.
The Israeli book fair has been running for many years. This year, 2020, would mark the 59th annual celebration of Hebrew Book Week and the fair’s age is all the more impressive when you recall how shaky was the Israeli state’s start as an independent entity. Recent years’ events have included Israeli authors appearing in coffee houses, story hours and plays for children, guided walks in Israel’s National Library, the more traditional book signings and, of course, the possibility of thumbing through thousands of Hebrew books.
In brief, our spring holiday offers opportunities for both spiritual and physical nourishment.
Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
The Zohar, that classic mystical text from the 13th century, describes the High Holidays as a developmental process of female empowerment, which culminates in Yom Kippur.
According to the Zohar, the place we return to when we repent is our supreme mother, the Sephira, and we receive understanding from the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Returning to our mother means to be gathered to the mother’s womb, a sort of death in order to be reborn, a self-nullification for gaining a new life.
This inversion has to do with the complex relationship between a mother and her children: she gives them life and they establish her motherly essence; she gives them life and they mark the beginning of her end, as “one generation passes and another generation comes.” Children return to their mother to understand their origin, and thus reveal their future.
Thanks to these paradoxical relationships between the generations, the mother has the power to heal, to sweeten and to explain every question and shattering in our lives.
“Returning to the mother” is not always an absolute, unequivocal and affixed teshuvah (repentance). It is a teshuvah that is coming into being, the same way that the world to come is coming into being, and the status of which is always (a world) “to come.”
According to Shaarei Orah by Rabbi Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla, “the world to come” is also another name of the sephira (kabbalistic attribute) Understanding. Understanding is constantly giving birth to souls and, thanks to her, we are renewed and recreated every day, especially at the beginning of the year, at Rosh Hashanah.
At Rosh Hashanah, the new moon is revealed. The year begins with coverage and concealment, due to a cloud that covers the sun. In the kabbalah, the sun is the male. The moon, which is usually identified as the Shechinah (divine presence) and is also the lowest sephira, called Malchut (kingship), gets her light from him. When the sun is not shining, the Shechinah is hidden as well, and our world is in darkness. How can the light of Genesis be lit? The Zohar says:
“… Through teshuvah and the sound of the shofar, as it is written: Happy the people who know the blast. Then, O YHVH, they will walk in the light of Your presence (Psalms 89:16).
“Come and see: on this day, the moon is covered and does not shine until the 10th day, when Israel turns back in complete teshuvah and Supernal Mother returns, illumining Her. On this day, Mother embarks on Her journey and joy prevails everywhere.
“Thus it is written, Yom ha-kippurim hu, it is the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 23:27) … the verse should read Yamim Kippurim, Days of Atonements … because two radiances shine as one, Upper Lamp illumining Lower Lamp. This day, She shines from the upper light, not from light of the sun; so it is written, ba-keseh le-yom haggenu, on the covering until our festival day.”
The Zohar emphasizes that the only way to cleave the cloud is with the sound of shofar and teshuvah – both mental and supernatural ways to reach the supreme source and attract new life out of it. The Zohar teaches, symbolically, that this task is assigned on every New Year: to cleave the cloud with repentance, to cancel the decree by the voice of the shofar.
Only then, after the 10 days of repentance, will the light illumine Yom ha-Kippurim. It is a double light: that of the supernal mother (Understanding) which illumines her daughter (Shechinah), and the two will reunite into one. That is why this day is called Yom ha-Kippurim, the day of two feminine lights illumining together, without the aid of any masculine light from the outside.
According to another commentary in the Zohar, unlike at Rosh Hashanah, when the masculine God appears, exposing and lifting His left hand in a gesture of sentence and vengeance, on Yom ha-Kippurim, we realize that this same hand is meant to support Shechinah and lift her from the dust, as is written in the first part of Song of Songs: “Let His left hand be under my head.” (2:6) On this day, Shechinah, the female hero, appears as a bride and we all are her bridesmaids, accompanying her to “Mother river” of the sephira Understanding, to immerse in it and clean her from our sins.
Finally, after being atoned, the dance of sephirot culminates in Sukkot, and the celestial couple is united. The second part of the verse – “and His right hand embrace me” – is implemented, and light and happiness fill the world. At Rosh Hashanah and Yom ha-Kippurim, we pray facing Shechinah and Understanding, and their light envelops and shields us after the cloud is cleaved.
***
The Book of Zohar sees King David as “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”: the archetypal sinner, the court jester and, eventually, also the partner of teshuvah herself. In Psalms 130, King David says: “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord / Lord, hear my voice / Let your ears be attentive / to my cry for mercy / If you, Lord, kept a record of sins / Lord, who could stand? / But with you there is forgiveness / so that we can, with reverence, serve you / I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits / and in his word I put my hope / I wait for the Lord / more than watchmen wait for the morning / Yea, more than watchmen wait for the morning / Israel, put your hope in the Lord / for with the Lord is unfailing love / and with him is full redemption / He himself will redeem Israel / from all its sins.”
This psalm begins with calling to God out of the depth, continues with asking God’s forgiveness, ends with yearning and anticipation that grow out of God’s absolution, and reaches the point of redemption and salvation. There are hidden words of praise to God and, as in other psalms, David’s ability to turn his supplications into poetry and to converse with his soul, so bound up with the divine soul, is outstanding.
According to King David, forgiveness is possible only when we are “with God,” and the mercy and redemption are in Him and “with Him” and, therefore, are in us, when we are attached to Him. The space that enables us to undergo the process of “making teshuvah” is created, and we are able to “return to the place” that is our origin and the root of our soul.
King David is not only a great poet, but also the archetypal sinner who, according to our sages, was born to set up “the yoke of repentance.” The sages deal a lot with David’s sins, justify him and even declare radically: “Whoever says that David sinned is merely erring.” (BT Shabbat 56a)
At one point, a scene is described in which David enters the Beit Midrash during a dispute about the world to come, the scholars taunt him about Batsheva and he reproaches them about a flaw in their morality: “… when they are engaged in studying the four deaths inflicted by beit din [court], they interrupt their studies and taunt me [saying], ‘David, what is the death penalty for he who seduces a married woman?’ I reply to them, ‘He who commits adultery with a married woman is executed by strangulation, yet he has a portion in the world to come. But he who publicly puts his neighbour to shame has no portion in the world to come.’” (BT Sanhedrin 107a)
It is evident that our sages were deeply engaged with questions of evil inclination, reward and punishment and, mostly, they identified with King David’s image. This colourful hero – the fighter, the fallen, the worldly, the dancer, the poet – seems to them the most likely to repent and to be fully pardoned either by men or by God. In fact, it might be said that each generation has its own King David. They see him in a different light and cast upon him their own personal traits, their fractures and their hopes to be redeemed.
The Zohar regards David as the hero with a thousand faces. David of the Zohar is poor and deficient, empty and, therefore, filling up and being a penitent (ba’al teshuvah). He knows how a man’s bruised and low soul can be elevated from the depths to a level of joy and thankfulness.
According to the Zohar, the place we return to when we repent is our Supreme Mother, the Sephira, and we receive understanding from the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Returning to our mother means to be gathered to the mother’s womb, a sort of death in order to be reborn, a self-nullification for gaining a new life.
And what has King David to do with this feminine process? Surprisingly, the Zohar identifies King David as the Shechinah, the same Shechinah that seemingly has nothing of her own, even though the other sephirot depend on her, and she is the most concentrated and colourful of them all. David is like a hero returning from a voyage, radiating myriad lights collected from all his sins and fractures. Had they remained in the form of fractures alone, darkness would have prevailed in the world. Thanks to Understanding – the mother and the wife – they have turned into a spectacular kaleidoscope of lights.
David refuses to hide his sins. After having confessed, acknowledging his deeds and admitting them, the sin loses its form, returns into its raw essence and finally turns into praise to the Lord. God, on his part, forgives our sin and gathers us to Him. Thus, David turns his soul into a lever of teshuvah out of love. Precisely these factors – his feminine side, his majestic quality and his skill to turn a confession into praise – enable David to ascend to mother Understanding and immerse us in the river of forgiveness.
Dr. Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kanielis a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and was ordained as a rabba by the Hartman-HaMidrasha at Oranim Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis in 2016. These articles are based on her originals in Hebrew and are meant to be read together. For more articles from the SHI, visit hartman.org.il.
Dr. Daniel Matt will speak in Vancouver at Or Shalom over Selichot, Sept. 20-21. (photo from Or Shalom)
Even one of the world’s leading authorities on kabbalah has felt lost in the study of Jewish mysticism.
Dr. Daniel Matt began studying the Zohar, the central text of kabbalah, on a one-year exchange at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Knowing that I had just one year there, I decided to take both Beginning Zohar and Advanced Zohar simultaneously,” he recalled. “I felt somewhat lost in Advanced Zohar, but that didn’t really matter, because I also felt somewhat lost in Beginning Zohar!”
His first book, his PhD dissertation, was a scholarly edition of the first translation of the Zohar: The Book of Mirrors by Rabbi David ben Yehudah he-Hasid, composed in the 14th century. He then taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., for two decades and spent as many years translating the most authoritative English translation of the Zohar. Matt, who will be in Vancouver Sept. 19-21, has become a preeminent scholar of the text.
In the mid-1990s, Matt was approached by Margot Pritzker – of the family who owns the Hyatt hotel chain – to produce a comprehensive English translation of the 700-year-old Zohar from the original Aramaic manuscripts.
Knowing the importance of the project, Matt agreed. “The Zohar was the only Jewish classic that had never been adequately translated,” he said.
The Zohar: Pritzker Edition was published in its completion in 2018. The 12-volume set, of which Matt translated and annotated the first nine, took 18 years to complete. For the feat, he received the National Jewish Book Award and the Koret Jewish Book Award, the latter calling his translation “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.”
The honour “was thrilling,” Matt said. The actual process of completing the translation, however, was at times grueling. “I basically restructured my life so that I could stay focused on this immense project without burning out,” he explained. “I started each day with a walk in the Berkeley Hills, then worked for five hours, then went for a swim, then rested and did some prep for the next day’s adventure.”
A major challenge was that, over the centuries, scribes who copied out Zohar manuscripts made changes to the text, meaning that an accurate version of the original was hard to find. “They added explanations, simplified the unruly Aramaic, deleted erotic descriptions or difficult – or invented – words and phrases,” Matt said.
Previous English translations of the Zohar were based on printed versions that, in Matt’s view, did not reflect the original writings. But, early in his process, he came upon manuscripts from the 14th to 16th centuries that he considered superior to the printed ones. To produce a “more authentic and poetic version,” he first reconstructed an Aramaic text from those manuscripts so he could build his English translation with it and, ultimately, share that artistry with a new audience.
“It is a treasure not just of Jewish literature, but of world literature, hidden away in an Aramaic vault for 700 years,” he said.
For the past year, Matt has taught an online Zohar course and has had more than 500 students, both Jewish and otherwise, from all over the world. He has found it gratifying to see “how eager people are to find personal meaning within Judaism, to explore and challenge the traditional understanding of God and Torah.
“I find that many folks are amazed to see that what they believe most deeply has been expressed by the mystics hundreds of years ago, or what they have stumbled across in Buddhism or other spiritual teachings is right there in our own tradition, hidden for too long.”
What Matt impresses on his students, both beginner and advanced, about the Zohar is how it goes beyond the literal meaning of the Torah. “It challenges our normal ways of making sense and reveals a radically new conception of God,” he said. “God is not a bearded man up in heaven who runs the show. God is infinity. At the same time, God is equally female and male, and the feminine half of God (Shekhinah) is perhaps the greatest contribution of the Zohar.
“All of Western religion is dominated by the masculine description of God, which has influenced our culture tremendously and left us with an imbalanced view of our own human nature.” Shekhinah, he said, “helps us realize that God embraces both the feminine and the masculine realms, though ultimately God is beyond gender.”
Matt’s Vancouver visit will include a vegetarian potluck at Or Shalom on Sept. 20, after which he will talk on Shekhinah. On Sept. 21, he will present the talk How Kabbalah Can Stimulate Us to Renew Our Lives, which will include songs on the theme of yearning to join with the One and meditation led by the synagogue’s Rabbi Hannah Dresner. Program details and registration are available via orshalom.ca/selichot.
Shelley Stein-Wotten is a freelance journalist and comedy writer. She has won awards for her creative non-fiction and screenwriting and enjoys writing about the arts and environmental issues. She is based on Vancouver Island.
Almost half of Adeena Karasick’s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book’s description notes, “to our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.”
“It was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,” Karasick told the Independent about the faux updates’ origins. “And, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.
“Sometimes, it was just that I couldn’t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,” she said, giving as examples, “Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify”; “Gustave Klimt is listening to KISS”; and “Salvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.”
Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, “E & G are saying F off” and “Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.” Or, “it was just pure, silly fun” to create updates like “William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,” “Edvard Munch is watching Scream 3,” “Google is mapping the territory” and “Narcissus is using his selfie stick.”
“It was so obsessive,” said Karasick, “that even now that the book’s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: ‘Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,’ ‘Fatwa is doing a cleanse,’ ‘The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,’ ‘The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.’”
Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.
“I think I’ve always had a really dark sense of humour,” she said, “and there’s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it – by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.
“A lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9/11 in The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004).… ‘There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane … How Insane to Swallow a Plane….’ A sense of jouissance (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It’s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.
“I see this ‘play’ as operating with an ‘assimilationist’ brand of Jewish humour,” she explained, “not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability – impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time – in a post-Woody Allen/Jon Stewart/ Sarah Silverman/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it’s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of ‘irony,’ explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the ‘homeyness’ of our world. That is the role of art.”
Adeena Karasick’s newest collection of poetry is Checking In. (photo by Safia Karasick Southey/talonbooks.com)
And one cannot separate Karasick’s art from her Jewish heritage – it’s “part of my DNA,” she said – and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia’s Science of the Combination of Letters, in which, she said, “we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic ‘skips’ and ‘jumps’ slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.
“According to kabbalistic thinking,” she said, “we are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls…. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected – reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns – generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.”
She connected this type of play to “the actual conversation habits of Yiddish.”
“According to etymologist Michael Wex – in his Just Say Nu (Harper: New York, 2007) – Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be ‘clear’ but to ‘seduce and lead astray,’ to say the reverse of whatever’s been said. For example, as we know, to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ ‘Shalom aleichem,’ the answer is ‘Aleichem shalom.’ Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.”
As for her own existence, Karasick said, “All my life, I’ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.”
While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches “a lot of trashy TV,” she said. “I like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.
“It’s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.”
Karasick writes “on the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,” she said. “I write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I’m really busy is when I’m most inspired. I’m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.”
Approaching the poetry
“Contour XLV: With Asura,” “Lorem Ipsum” and “In Cold Hollers” are all “homophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,” said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.
She explained, “Each of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I’ve translated them. I’ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it’s completely different. It’s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it’s translating it, moving through and across different modes.”
“In Cold Hollers” is a translation of Charles Olson’s 1953 poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket”; “Contour XLV: With Asura” is based on “Canto 45 with Usura,” a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a “famously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem”; and “Lorem Ipsum,” which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero’s “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the Ends of Goods and Evils”). “Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,” writes Karasick elsewhere. “I am interested in exploring how the notion of ‘place holding’ gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.”
As to how to approach a poem that you’ve never read before, Karasick said, “On one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather … in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I’m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.”
Turning to the poem “Lorem Ipsum,” she said the words mean “pain itself.” She has translated Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics into a “passionate love poem” about the “difficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn’t something that’s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that…. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.”
Karasick similarly takes Pound’s “Canto 45” and, playing with the Yiddish word asura, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that’s both a scathing commentary on Pound’s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.
About “In Cold Hollers,” Karasick said she used the word “hollers” because it’s “homophonically related to hell, but it’s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson’s original ’53 piece; and his original title, ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket,’ refers to the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.”
The title of Olson’s poem refers particularly to “selva oscura,” she said, “which is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life … so Olson’s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding … from his own midlife … putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it’s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, ‘I Ain’t No Hollaback Girl’? – I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.”
In talking about Olson’s work and hers, Karasick said, “I sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references – in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly … highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.”
And it’s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick’s “In Cold Hollers” not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson’s poem, but also mirrors its typography. “I wanted to keep it very much as he had it,” she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.
“The notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We’re so often used to looking at the left margin … but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.”
What strange quirk brought it about that what may be one of the greatest and most Jewish of Jewish novels should be written not by a Diaspora Jew, nor an Israeli Jew, nor a Diaspora Jew who had made aliyah, but rather an Israeli who relocated to New York?
Further stymying expectations, Ruby Namdar did not write this novel in English, but in Hebrew (it was recently translated by Hillel Halkin). “For who?” asked an audience member at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival event on Nov. 26, when I had the pleasure of interviewing Namdar in front of a small gathering. If Namdar wanted his novel, which he acknowledged to be soundly in the lineage of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, to be read by New Yorkers, why write it in Hebrew? If he wanted the novel to make sense to Israelis, why write it about a rootless Diaspora Jew with no connection to Israel?
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Namdar, “I don’t know who I was writing for, I just wrote.”
The Ruined House is not just a great Jewish novel or a great novel in modern Hebrew. It possesses a structure that is at once talmudic and kabbalistic, a structure that is deep and intricate yet carried off with such a sense of understatement and naturalness, effortlessly unfolding within Namdar’s lucid, lyrical and vivid prose, that most English-language reviewers thus far have not fully noticed it. This structure is what gives the novel its profoundly Jewish resonance, which is at once modern and ancient, rootless and anchored in the archetypal depths of Jewish experience and textuality.
Talmudic structure
The Ruined House is divided into seven books, with its seventh book being the culmination of an obviously Jewish numerical pattern. Each book follows the anti-hero, Andrew P. Cohen, over the course of one year of his life, as he enters what seems to be a midlife crisis from hell (or perhaps from heaven).
Cohen is a successful and wealthy professor of comparative culture, who lives in an idyllic Manhattan high-rise with a view of the river, a pristine Apollonian realm in the skies. He has a beautiful young lover, Ann Lee, and an adoring group of followers and acolytes. He cherishes his controlled, harmonious and detached existence, which he has gained through leaving his wife and two daughters years before.
At the end of the first six sections of the novel are a few pages of text designed to look like a blat Gemara, a page of Talmud. The central text in these inserts tells the story of a high priest preparing and executing the Yom Kippur sacrifices. While he does so, he is watched by Obadiah, a humble Levite who wonders whether the priest is truly pious or just a functionary in league with the elite. Encircling the narrative are passages from the Talmud, Mishnah and Tanakh, which describe the laws, folklore and spiritual significance of the high priest’s duty. They also feature key excerpts from Shaarei Gilgulim (The Gate of Reincarnation), a kabbalist text written by Chaim Vital (1542-1620) to expound the cosmology of his master, the Ari HaKodesh, Isaac Luria (1534-1572).
The insertion of these texts is deliberate and precise. Just as the narrative in the inserts is flanked by canonical Jewish sources, the narrative of the novel is surrounded by ancient Jewish forces. As the hidden, broken nature of Cohen’s life begins to surface, he begins to have intense, waking visions of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. His dreams turn nightmarish, alternating between repressed guilt at his betrayal of his family and dreadful tableaus of the rape of Jerusalem by the Romans and the murder of Jews by the Nazis.
The structure of the story and the inserts are not the only mirrors in the book: Cohen’s life is cast as priest-like. His elite status; the pure harmonious realm in which he lives; his having separated from his wife like Moses to live in the skies; even the elaborate meat dinners he cooks up for his dinner guests alone in his perfect kitchen all point to it. His name, of course, highlights both the substance and the irony of his life as priestly metaphor. At one point, his daughter, Rachel, disgustedly mocks people who think that Jews named Cohen are descended from the priestly lineage: “Everyone knows they just gave out those names randomly at Ellis Island.”
As Cohen descends into apparent madness, a grotesque version of the priestly sensibility gets stronger in him. He becomes morbidly obsessed with the impure and averse to the physical, the decaying and the dead. He finds himself horrified by menstrual blood and semen. The explanation of this growing claustrophobic sensibility lies in the paragraphs of Shaarei Gilgulim, which are included in Namdar’s inserts.
Kabbalist elements
Shaarei Gilgulim describes the way that some souls, during the process of reincarnation, unite with other souls in order to complete their own tikkun (repair). In the first pages of The Ruined House, “one shining soul, the figure of a high priest” is suddenly visible above New York among the celestial machinations momentarily revealed as the veil is briefly sundered. The key to the priest’s identity lies in the kabbalist doctrine of ibbur, or impregnation, where a soul from beyond enters into an earthly person in order to help them, to complete their own mission, or some combination of the two. In Cohen’s case, as suggested in a last talmudic insert, he has been “impregnated” by the soul of the high priest in need of tikkun for feeling himself superior to Obadiah, the humble Levite. The high priest and Cohen share a sin in common: arrogance. Their collective confrontation and reckoning with it will be psychically violent and cathartic and come close to doing Cohen in.
Critique of Diaspora?
Some reviewers have read The Ruined House as a critique of the Diaspora Jew, viewing the narrative as a kind of punishment of Cohen, enacted on him by the rising tide of archaic Jewish intrusions into his life. Namdar said this is a moralistic distortion of his ambivalent, questioning text. Instead, Namdar pointed to the shatterings of the illusion of wholeness and perfection that happen in the book. “Where things are broken, there, seeds can take root and grow,” he said.
For example, Cohen’s harmonious life is an illusion that is shattered in the course of the book, leaving a “ruined house.” Yet the figure of the ruined house (bayit asher necharev in the original Hebrew, a phrase that comes from a poem by Yehuda Amichai) is also an allusion to another ruined house, that of the Beit Hamikdash, the Jerusalem Temple, whose pristine world of order and control, Namdar suggests, also was illusory.
The third ruined house is suggested by the timing of the events in the novel. The story begins in the Hebrew month of Elul (signifying its theme of repentance), on Sept. 6, 2000. After the narrative comes to a head on Tisha b’Av, the date of the destruction of the Temple, it jumps from Aug. 1, 2001, to Sept. 18, 2001, leaving a lacuna where Sept. 11, 2001, and the destruction of the Twin Towers, resides.
“I did not want Sept. 11 to appear in the narrative, thus making the novel reducible to being about that event,” said Namdar when I asked him about this. “Rather, I wanted the trajectory to point to its occurrence outside the frame.”
There is much more to talk about in this remarkable novel, which manages at once to be so Jewish, so Israeli, so American and so human. I did not touch here on the attention Namdar lavishes on the details of Cohen’s daily life or Namdar’s subversion of the lineage of Malamud, Bellow and Roth in his intense empathy with the female characters of the novel, and his unsparing deconstruction of Cohen’s narcissistic masculinity. I did not examine his vivid and hilarious slow-motion evocation of a grossly excessive bar mitzvah, or his brilliant parody of the Zionist clichés of a Birthright-like propaganda tour of Israel, and many other delights. I hope this introduction is enough to invite you to step into Namdar’s mesmerizing fusion of a talmudic-esoteric structure with an incandescent evocation of life in Manhattan, and discover what else he has hidden there, of which, I promise you on good authority, there is much.
Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
Israel’s Victoria Hanna is coming to Vancouver for the Chutzpah! Festival (photo from Chutzpah!)
Victoria Hanna is unique. There is no doubt that her concert at the Chutzaph! Festival on Feb. 23 will be one of the most uplifting and intriguing performances you’ve ever seen.
A longtime vocalist and performer, Hanna’s mainstream popularity skyrocketed last year when the video of her song “Aleph-Bet (Hosha’ana)” went viral. She describes herself as a voice artist, and the phrase does best describe her work. Though music is a large part of it, Hanna explores the sounds that we make when we speak, the physical mechanics required to form letters, diacritics (the nekudot in Hebrew) and words, their meanings and those of the space into which they travel. She uses her whole body as an instrument, singing, voicing beats, gesturing with her arms, tapping her chest, stamping her foot. She is mesmerizing to watch and hear.
“I am very curious about voice and speech,” Hanna told the Independent. “I had a stuttering problem and it made me enter deeply into the act of voice.”
When Forbes Israel chose the Jerusalem-based artist as one of the 50 most influential women in 2015, it noted as one of her most important messages: “If you have a disadvantage you can turn it into a kind of gift.”
Hanna grew up in Jerusalem in a religious family, “in which the language and elocution of prayer were valued, above all other arts,” notes her bio. Hence, her source material: texts such as Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation, traditionally ascribed to Abraham) and the writings of 13th-century kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia.
“I grew up hearing both Iraqi-Persian and Egyptian liturgy,” she said, “and it influenced my art in the sense that I am completely intrigued by the scales and accents.”
The way in which Hanna presents the melodies and the rhythms of the texts gives listeners a sense of meaning even if they don’t understand the words.
“When I sing in ancient Hebrew for audiences who do not speak Hebrew,” she explained, it provides “a better understanding that language is sound, and music crosses boundaries.”
She also crosses boundaries between the seen and the unseen, making tangible the intangible. She uses letters, nekudot (or vowels), syllables and her whole body to create choreography in the space sound inhabits. She refers to it as “voicing space.”
“The concept,” she said, “means ‘to fill the space with voice,’ giving the voice action. Voice in action has to react to space. When you intend to put the voice into space, then it is called ‘voicing space.’”
Her art includes song and spoken word.
“Singing has to do with the purity of voice and speaking has the intention to deliver information,” she explained. “These two levels are mentioned in the kabbalistic scripts as two different dimensions.”
Her performances also include theatre, music, of course, and video or some form of visual. In a 2015 lecture-performance at Tel Aviv University (TAU), which she has posted on her website, she uses a dry-erase board to illustrate various concepts.
A graduate of Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, Hanna has performed around the world – in Mumbai, Berlin, Sao Paolo and Boston, to name only a handful of the diverse places she has been. Her Chutzpah! show in Vancouver marks her first visit to Canada.
Hanna recently released her second single, “22 Letters,” a “kabbalistic rap from Sefer Yetzirah.” In the TAU lecture, she explains that there are 22 letters (in Hebrew). These foundation letters are engraved by the voice, carved with breath set in the mouth in five places: in the throat, in the palate, in the tongue, in the teeth, in the lips. With these 22 letters, God depicted what would be formed and all that would be formed; He made nonexistence into existence. She connects the creation of letters, writing, to human conception, birth. Therefore, our souls are full of letters, from head to foot, and the letters combine with the nekudot, alternating sounds, back and forth, in many melodies.
Her work is thought-provoking as well as entertaining, but is there some specific understanding that she is seeking, or that listeners are supposed to glean? “The exploration is the purpose,” she said, examining the “meeting point between voiced language and space.”
And it’s a journey that many are now following her on. As to what about her personal search speaks to so many people, she said, “I think that voice is a universal code, the basis of everything. The word was created by sound.”
For more on Hanna, visit victoriahanna.net. Her Feb. 23 performance at Rothstein Theatre starts at 8 p.m. For tickets ($29/$25/$21), call 604-257-5145 or visit chutzpahfestival.com, where the entire festival schedule can be found.
The current exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Tales of Light and Dark, features two artists from opposite sides of the continent. Alina Smolyansky is a local artist; Judith Joseph lives and works in Chicago. Their paintings hang side by side on the gallery walls as if they belong together. Their similar small size, bright color and propensity to tell stories balance the differences in technique and visual effects, as well as the two artists’ distinct creative auras.
Both artists explore Judaic themes. In the case of Joseph, her paintings relate her family’s history through the medium of Jewish symbolism. Almost every piece of hers includes birds as their most important element. Peacocks, firebirds and owls populate Joseph’s work.
“I love birds because they can fly. I wish I could fly,” Joseph said in an interview with the Independent. “A bird stands in for a person but it doesn’t have age or gender, it isn’t poor or rich. It represents everyone.”
In a way, in her art, she does fly, free of the restrictions of reality. Using the bird metaphor and the mysticism of the Torah, she spins tales of courage and suffering. Several of her paintings are dedicated to her grandmother who came to America from Ukraine after the First World War. In one image, a girl travels across the ocean on a menorah. Her vessel is wobbly, but she hangs stubbornly for her life, and the menorah glows with triumphant light, illuminating pain and sorrow but also victories and achievements.
Many pieces incorporate metal-foil embossing into the paintings. The process used for the embellishment is called repoussé. “I learned repoussé in high school,” Joseph recalled. “I like working with metal.” Her owls’ feathers and floral borders of her paintings glint with intricate copper patterns, infusing the pictures with a sophisticated and funky ambience.
Her paintings always start with an emotion and an idea, she said. “I always have a sketch book with me and, whenever an idea appears, I make a sketch. Most paintings in this show come from my sketches practically unchanged. I know that if the emotion that inspired it is genuine, unfiltered, then people respond to it.”
Like any art show, this one only highlights a small segment of the artist’s output. The majority of her art is beyond the scope of the show. “I paint ketubahs,” she said. “Most of my commissions are ketubahs. I started making them in high school and still love them. By now, I have done hundreds of them. Recently, I also do digital ketubahs. I would paint by hand, then have the image photographed professionally, and then play with it on the computer: add calligraphy, change colors, customize. I had to learn new software to do that, and my skills are still limited, but I’m learning.”
The courage to combine old materials, ancient art form and new computer skills is what makes Joseph a 21st-century artist. The same modern streak also made her collaborate with an online seller of ketubahs, the Canadian company ketubah.com. “Three of their bestsellers are mine,” she said with a smile.
Alina Smolyansky (photo by Olga Livshin)
She works predominantly in egg tempera, the type of paint that was exclusively used until about 1500, when it was largely replaced by oil paints. Few artists still use egg tempera, but its brightness attracted not only Joseph but also her partner in this show, Smolyansky.
The credit for bringing them together belongs to the gallery director, Linda Lando. “I put them together because I thought that their work has a similar sensibility,” Lando said. The artists didn’t know each other before the show.
Unlike Joseph with her art degree, Smolyansky arrived at this point in her life by a vastly different route. She started her professional life as an engineer in Kiev. Like many Jews during the Perestroika era, she immigrated to Israel and, after four years there, she came to Canada in 1995. She kept working as an engineer, but wasn’t satisfied with her professional life. She felt the need for a change.
“I was searching for myself,” she explained. “I’ve been a dreamer all my life. I liked making up and writing stories and painting watercolors. When I was a child, I attended an art school. I always liked learning, always was an A student. If I could, I would be a permanent student,” she admitted.
To satisfy her craving for knowledge, she studied writing at Douglas College, and then enrolled in the professional communications program at Royal Roads University. She was thinking of a technical writing career, but felt she couldn’t settle.
At about the same time, around 2006, she began studying yoga, and discovered a spiritual path. “I’m not religious,” she said, “but I need to form my own connection to the Creator. I need to understand where we are coming from and where we are going.”
She quit her engineering position and spent some time in Thailand at a yoga school, but an unknown force was still pushing her towards a different goal.
“I was on Granville Island,” she recalled. “It was 2008, and I was looking for some classes to take when I saw this ad for an icon painting class. It was absolutely unexpected. I didn’t know anything about icons, but it seemed I was driven to this class. I took it and I was good from the beginning.”
The class introduced her to egg tempera and to icon paintings, both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. “I was fascinated by egg tempera. I haven’t painted watercolors since.”
She stayed with her icon teacher for three years, until he moved out of the city. She still paints icons on commission and she teaches icon painting, occupying a small but exclusive artistic niche in Vancouver. But she didn’t abandon her quest for knowledge. In search of more spiritual learning, she began her studies with Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Research and Education Institute, based in Israel.
The mysticism of kabbalah appeals to her. “My art in this show is influenced by my kabbalah studies, especially the … Zohar,” she said. Her Tree of Life gladdens the eyes, her old scholar contemplates the Jewish destiny and her menorah shines for all.
