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The nice thing about having my sketchbook with me everywhere is that when we’re waiting for the food to arrive at a restaurant, I can draw what’s on the table. When we were in Solvang, we went to dinner at a place that had these nice oil lamps on the tables, with their irresistible patterns of shadow and light.
California’s oak trees always say “draw me,” and I am usually too intimidated to heed them. I like this drawing, though. It’s an exercise in not being too specific–just following the general patterns of the tree. That’s really difficult for me for a variety of reasons. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, but I’ve returned to it for the past few days, having gotten a start on it at the winery where it grows while we were still in SoCal.
We went south for a few days after Christmas to meet up with friends and hike in the beautiful Santa Ynez Mountains. The route took us down through the Salinas Valley. At one point a patch of sun on the otherwise clouded hills was so striking that I considered stopping to take a picture, or asking Joy to take one out the window as I drove, because I knew I’d want to draw it later. The moment passed, unrecorded except in my mind, and when we got to our destination, I went looking on the internet for a reference photo. I really wanted it to be of these same hills. Nothing quite captured the quiet drama of that illumination–moral: take the photo when it strikes you–but this one was pretty. Thank you, Shutterstock (photo 1055815059).
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In Judaism, there’s a concept called hiddur mitzvah: the beautification of a mitzvah or commandment. It means that while one can discharge one’s duty to fulfill a commandment in a very plain way, adding beauty to it is praiseworthy. There is a commandment to light the Shabbat candles; Jews could mutter the prayer and light two candles that stayed lit for the minimal amount of time and weren’t blown out, and that would fulfill the responsibility. But hiddur mitzvah encourages us to do more: for example, use beautiful candlesticks, preferably ones that are used for no other purpose; use new candles that burn longer than is required; set the prayer to music; gather with our loved ones and hold hands around the candles as we sing together.
Naturally, as I grew up as a Jewish child who loved everything artsy and craftsy, this concept suited me down to the ground. It meant that there was a rich folk art tradition of decorating everything: calligraphed ketubot (marriage certificates), embroidered tallit (prayer shawls), silver filigree spice boxes used at the close of Shabbat, even illustrations from the Book of Esther on graggers, the noisemakers used to drown out Haman’s name whenever the cantor sings it during the Purim services. I made a tallis for my dad, a ketubah for my parents, and more Hebrew school art projects than I can remember. To this day, I remember the exact color and pattern on the contact paper we used to decorate the pushke (charity box) we made in Hebrew school and then kept on a household shelf and filled with our spare change for the rest of my childhood. (Hiddur mitzvah and the many ritual objects are a gift to Hebrew school teachers. So many crafts opportunities!)
Papercuts emerged as part of this tradition. One is supposed to pray facing east if possible,* but there is absolutely no requirement to hang a little sign on the eastern wall inside one’s home. But it became a tradition not only to create such a sign (called a mizrach, which means “east”), but to make it beautiful with calligraphy or, in the 18th-20th centuries in Western Europe, a papercut. This beautification was more than decorative; it had the power to change a person’s awareness of the very meanings of the mitzvah, the same way setting a prayer to music does much more than make the prayer pretty and easy to remember. Imagine someone opening their prayerbook and situate themselves facing east, and as they look up, their eyes fall on an intricate work of art, perhaps portraying the Old City of Jerusalem, or the Western Wall, or the words of a verse from the Torah. Their prayer is now accompanied by visions of places that their people gathered again and again on every holy day. It is witnessed to by the hands of an artist who dedicated her creativity and many hours of her craft to the faith they share. The art invites them into a world of beauty and contemplation during their time of prayer.
This tradition keeps coming to my mind as I work on the papercut I’m making grieving the destruction of millions of olive trees that Israeli “settlers” and the Israeli army have committed over the years in a bitterly self-destructive, anti-halakhic (halakhah is Jewish religious law) attempt to deprive Palestinians of their livelihood. If I were making a mizrach or ketubah, papercutting is the art form I might use. Instead, I’m making a political, largely secular statement–and it occurs to me that art in general is a kind of hiddur mitzvah.
I will eventually write a post here about how my connection to Israel and my conception of what it means to be Jewish in the world after 1948 have changed in response to crimes like the destruction of Palestinians’ trees. Its approach will be logical and discursive, a statement of facts and feelings, and I imagine it will accomplish the basic task of clarifying and expressing my opinion. That would be the equivalent of the unadorned mitzvah. But making this piece, like hiddur mitzvah, does more than that. A work of art, whether a painting, an operetta, a poem, a dance, whatever it may be, isn’t just a statement. It can create an entire microcosm for the viewer to enter and dwell in awhile. It can take us to new depths of understanding that plain words seldom convey. That’s certainly what it is doing for me as the maker.
*All the ones I’ve seen are mizrachim because I grew up in the western Diaspora. Of course, Jews in Asia pray facing west, Jews in Israel pray facing Jerusalem, and Jews in Jerusalem pray facing the ruins of the ancient Temple. The same holds true for Muslims vis-a-vis Mecca, and as far as I know, for all religions that have a tradition of praying toward a particular revered location.
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.
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That’s the tentative title for what might end up being a painting. I envision this writing scratched in paint or ink so that an under-layer of paint or ink shows through, but some kind of dry medium might also work, or maybe colored pencil over an ink wash–the layers are important. I have tried it in pencil before, when I first got the idea seven years ago. I know it was that long ago because we were living in Oaxaca then. I didn’t have the idea of making a portrait out of scribbled-out, obscured words at that time. I know I have that sketch somewhere and I’m curious what my earlier idea was.
The legible text tells a story. The most important points are here, but it will be longer and go into more detail in the next version. There’s more I want to write, but as this is quite small, the size of my sketchbook, I ran out of paper before I ran out of things to say.
This whole project makes me think a lot about my friend Karen Schiff, who is also an artist (check out her great drawings and writing about art here).
I didn’t realize until after I’d drawn this that the location has a name very similar to a name in our family, the branch that came to the US from Lebanon.
There’s no avoiding it: as soon as I start posting drawings like this and the previous one, some people will evaluate them politically. Am I showing too many images of ___ and not enough of ___? What do I mean by giving attention to ___ instead of ___? Etc.
I can’t say these aren’t political. All I can say is that allowing my heart to spend time with people who have suffered because of this conflict feels like it is the right thing to do. And if anyone is counting beans, they should be aware that I’m not posting everything I’m drawing. Some feel too raw and some are just crappy drawings, but they’re helping my heart stay with the suffering.
With this drawing, I was trying to make every mark a meditation and a reminder to myself that within these white plastic bags are parts of the bodies of people who were recently alive and who died by violence. Every mark a breath, taking in the reality of things we can’t see.
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Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
This is as done as it’s going to get–I think I’m better off starting from scratch if I want to improve it. But the making of it has been painful and beneficial. I am trying, over and over, to embrace my art as a spiritual practice and only secondarily concern myself with the physical artifact that results.
The subject is a child whose name I don’t know, who came to this Gaza hospital a couple of weeks ago when the refugee camp that is her home was bombed. Next to her gaze, and the so-adult expressiveness of her hands, it’s the little details of normal life that wring my heart (as normal as life in a refugee camp can be said to be). Someone helped pull that Minnie Mouse shirt over her head. Someone pulled her hair into a ponytail with that white elastic. Is that person’s blood on her shirt now? Is that person alive? Is she alive?–an ambulance just outside the hospital has been bombed since, and the lack of fuel is turning Al-Shifa into a “mass grave,” although a rumor that a group of Israeli doctors actually called for the hospital to be bombed seems to be sheer invention. (I found reports about it, but searching for the “Israeli news site” they claim to be citing, and the name of the group they claim is doing this, turns up nothing. “The truth is the first casualty of war”; read with care.) 11/7/23, ETA: I saw the same story with full citations here, thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace. At this writing, over 90 doctors have signed the letter. Utterly sickening.
I will never know her story. I just know that I hope neither I nor anyone I love ever has to look upon whatever horror her eyes are seeing.
Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
It’s so hard to give my heart’s attention to what’s happening in Gaza and Israel: not to intellectualize, avoid, or take any of the other escape routes away from grief and despair, but just to be there with all of the feelings. I thought drawing some of the images that have haunted me might help. Like my brother-in-law John, on whose social media I saw it, I’ve been unable to forget this little girl, who was photographed at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, after Israel bombed the refugee camp where she lived. The photo is by Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times (“As Warnings of Crisis in Gaza Mount, Palestinians Struggle to Find Room for the Dead,” October 12, 2023). Drawing her feels like a prayer. I’m holding her in my heart the whole time, wishing her well, as if the point of the pencil were a hand gently touching her hand, smoothing back her hair. I wish it could be. I hope someone is caring for her that way.
This drawing is far from finished, but I wanted to share what I’m doing.
Expect to see more of these as I try to be fully present with the people whose images are passing before our eyes daily: parents carrying the wrapped bodies of their children, the horrifyingly small packages of body parts awaiting identification at a morgue, people wailing at funerals. I don’t expect to show anything gory, but they are emotionally grueling, so I’ll give content warnings.
Sermons in Stones 
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