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I am working on a diptych of olive trees in Israel and Palestine. A few minutes after the image came to me, the medium followed: traditional Jewish papercuts, an art form I have loved and admired for a long time, but have never tried. I’m loving it.

According to Wikipedia, papercutting was done throughout the Jewish world, and was especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. But between the fragility of the medium and the destruction of so many Jewish possessions in the Holocaust, only a couple hundred of the pieces from that period still exist. In recent decades, artists have rediscovered and reclaimed papercut art, and one sees it often in sacred art: decorating ketubbot (religious marriage certificates) and mizrachim (signs designating the east, toward which Jews face in prayer), illustrating passages from the Tanakh or Talmud.

This piece is going to express sorrow and bitterness about an inner conflict, within me and within Judaism: the conflict between some of the most beautiful, wise teachings of Judaism and the policies of the modern state of Israel. The beauty of the art form is one ingredient of that bitterness. This half of the diptych, the happy half, is not quite half finished.

I hope you’ll check out my column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed, now in its tenth week!

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