iv
 
         
            
   
   Susan Weinberg

   Studio 409            
                                                                          
                                                     


liminachal@gmail.com

       
         




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DVORA'S STORY

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CHINA

NON-SERIES WORK

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The Jewish Artists' Lab
In 2012 the Sabes JCC began a new venture, a Jewish Artists' Lab. Originally funded by the Covenant Foundation, this salon is composed of artists  from many disciplines. Each year we select a topic and then meet twice a month with facilitators to explore it through many lens. At the end of the year we have an exhibition and performance. I joined the lab during the first year and later was asked to be its Resident Writer, writing the blog on our explorations. Below you will find my work, both visual and poetry, which addressed each topic over the past years.


P2G - Partners 2gether
In 2018 and 2019, many of the lab artists also participated in a program sponsored by a group of Jewish organizations both in Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel. You can read more about it at  p2gx.comThe project was  designed to build relationships between American artists and Israeli artists. We partnered with an Israeli artist in the creation of our work and our exploration of the topic.

Click on the images below to see the artwork, related poetry and read more about the topic.




The Jewish Artists' Lab

treetimecrop

reawakening


Year 7/8 - Muddy Waters


2018-2019 was a year of re-framing the lab concept. We met periodically  but did not do a show. We resumed in 2019-2020 and six months into it the pandemic forced us to isolate. We pivoted to meeting on-line and discussed our new topic on the environment. In isolating I began to walk regularly and found myself paying closer attention to the environment which surrounded me. I had always done figurative work focused on people. Now I found myself captivated by trees as I explored themes of deforestation and the flooding caused by it. I didn't stop at just one painting, but did a series on the environment which you will find on this site. I loved the idea of trees as messengers of global warming, much like the prophets of old.



Year 9 - Brokenness and Wholeness

2020-2021 was a very unusual year as we stayed in our homes and met over Zoom. Walking became a much more important part of my life and it was in the course of those walks that I encountered my subject matter for our theme. It all came together metaphorically as I observed burly trees and ice melting, realizing that much goes on beneath the surface of what we consider broken. In fact brokenness opens us to new pathways and is itself a pathway through life that we encounter over and over again. It is in its resolution that we move our life forward with greater understanding and insight.
dalet   
closedcocoon

Year 6 - Crossing the Threshold

   
The theme for 2017-2018 was Crossing the Threshold and grew out of our prior year theme on boundaries. I began to consider the thresholds I have crossed throughout my life and what it is to enter a new space. Creating requires us to cross thresholds as we step into the unknown.  For me moving into writing and creating a book involved many thresholds. 

This piece became a meditation on the act of crossing thresholds and how it often requires new skills than those we may have used in our career.  There is an attitude of openness, a fluidity, that I had to learn. The exhilaration of mastering something new is the reward we find by venturing into that new space.
    

Year 5 - Inside, Outside: Boundaries and Otherness

The theme for 2016-2017 was an appropriate one for the year of the wall and the travel ban. I have always believed that the way we define our community also defines the boundaries of our empathy. I anticipated doing something in that vein, but ended up doing a detour into the concept of liminality and personal boundaries.

I was intrigued with how we cross personal boundaries to find transformation. When we leave the familiar to venture into the unknown it is a difficult time. That first time we say we are an artist or a writer, it feels like a masquerade. In time it becomes who we are. I used the metaphor of a caterpillar to a butterfly and through a triptych design allowed the viewer to step into the chrysalis.

roundnessexcerpt

Year 4 - Echoes: Voices of Wisdom

The theme for 2015-2016 was one of my favorites and I knew early what my focus would be.  In the prior year my mother had died and I was now engaged in going through her home, disposing of years of memories. My mother was a wise woman who observed the world from a kind and gentle heart.

As I went through the house I was looking for traces of her essence.  What I found became the basis for my piece on wisdom.  In the lab we explored the Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, a book that offers much wisdom.  I thought of the wisdom offered by the mothers which I think is equally powerful and often neglected.



Year 3 - Water

  
In 2014-15 our theme was Water.  We explored the teachings in Judaism of Bal Tashchit, which speaks to our obligation not to be wasteful lest we damage God's creation.  We examined the role of water both in Biblical times and today and our responsibility to preserve it.
 
My interest lay in a more metaphoric approach, the linkage of water and memory as reflected in our language.  As I was working on a series   related to the loss of memory, I explored the relationship between flooding and  remembering, creation and identity.  Unable to confine myself to just one painting I did a diptych titled Flood of Memories.


              
                                                                                        
Year 1 - Text-Context-Subtext 


In 2013 I began to participate in the Jewish Artists’ Laboratory, an arts initiative through the Sabes Jewish Community Center (Sabes JCC). The first year explored the theme of Text/Context/Subtext through discussion and art. During the first year I wrote about the lab in my personal blog.

At the conclusion of the lab we had an exhibition at the Tychman Shapiro Gallery. My piece, also found in Dvora's Story, explored the story of a friend who is a survivor of the Holocaust juxtaposed with the story of the Binding of Isaac. It takes it in some unexpected directions.

As is typical of my work, my artwork  embeds story.  A poem connected the story within the artwork to the text that we discussed.


Year 2 - Light


In year 2 we addressed a new theme, Light.  We also had a new project in addition to the final exhibition,  a sketchbook exchange across the three cities.   Each artist started a sketchbook on some topic related to light, then sent it on to another artist for their contribution. 

And one more addition...I was asked to serve as Resident Writer and maintain a dedicated blog for the lab  on our discussions. 

I continued with the Holocaust stories of my friend Dvora, again incorporating poetry which spoke to both Holocaust experiences and loss of vision.  I then developed artwork around one of the poems.


P2G - Partners 2gether









click on the images to see the painting
and learn the story behind it.

The first year coincided with the 70th anniversary of the State of Israel so the theme, Israel@70: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, explored Israel through a variety of texts and conversations. We grappled with questions that forced us to examine our attitudes and understanding of Israel and one another.  Over video chat, we discussed this multi-faceted theme with our Israeli partner in Rehovot and then each created artwork. The work was shown in both Minnesota and Israel.


  





The theme of the 2018-2019 year was Judaism, Art and Science interwoven and the approach was Re-Art as we responded to our partner's work and created new work out of that response. The Twin Cities are a center for many companies grounded in science and Rehovot is home to the Weizmann Institute, a world-renown center for science.






















Six photographers and graphic designers kicked it off, but alums from the prior year also participated. We each did a piece of artwork on the theme and then responded to our partner's work with a second creation that picked up on elements from their work.





The Story
Brokenness and Wholeness

The Lab theme in 2020-2021 was brokenness and wholeness, This was a perfect topic for a time in which our world had collectively suffered a break because of Covid. For many it had tragic consequences, but all of us experienced a break in our usual routine and way of living. We felt the threat of illness and the loss of physical contact with friends and family. We had to find new ways of being and for many of us that meant a lot more walking in our neighborhood. I was no exception.

I have been finding many metaphors in nature, noticing more as walking became a much more regular part of my routine. I was drawn to imagery related to brokenness, but there was a subtext. Beneath that brokenness something was happening, a mending, an exploration. Brokenness had opened up something new. My painting The Burly Tree, along with its video, grew out of a tree I encountered covered with unusual growths, burls that I learned result from injury to the tree. It explores how when a traditional pathway fails, the response to brokenness is a winding exploration of  alternative paths.
I began to think of the path of the burl as a life path, hitting walls and redirecting, much as we do throughout our life.

I was also intrigued with an image of ice cracking as water flowed beneath it. It clearly epitomized breakage, but it also seemed to be reawakening as spring emerged from winter. I did a painting of the image, but also took a video.

Later i
n the video Reawakening - Pulsation of Life, I incorporated my painting, a photo and a video of ice breaking up into shards coupled with the pulse of that rebirth as ice shards melt and life reemerges, much as the seasons turn, so does our life. Brokenness and wholeness ebb and flow throughout our life. Often brokenness opens doorways we might not have found otherwise.

Video was a new direction that is still a bit of an experiment, still based in artwork, but exploring a new dimension. And of course it is hard for me to restrict myself to just one artwork so I created five artworks along the way as well as the videos. You can read more about my process in my blog on Unfolding
where you will see my path in artwork.



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burlytree

The Burly Tree 
30" x 30" Acrylic on Canvas
Click for Video




reawakening

Reawakening 

18" x 24" Acrylic on Canvas
Click for Video











































































































The Story
Muddy Waters


This painting is based on one of the oldest trees in the world. It is found in California and is 4700 years old. The tree is aptly called Methuselah.The biblical Methuselah was the grandfather of Noah and together with Noah acted as a messenger to the world of the impending flood, much as the current day Methuselah announces the presence of climate change. 

The bristle cone pine is a twisted and gnarly tree that grows in difficult climates.  Its age is determined through taking a core sample  from it and examining the rings under a microscope. The science is known as Dendrochronology which means tree time, hence the name of the painting. I think an awareness of different time scales, tree time vs human time,  reminds us that we bear a responsibility to the world that extends beyond our lifespan.The tree rings reveal changes in climate, rain, drought, volcanic activity and frost. When I painted this, I wanted something that would represent the role of this tree in witnessing, recording and revealing the history of our earth. I decided to paint tree rings behind it, emphasizing the linearity of both the tree and the rings.


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treetime











































































Tree Time
36"x24" Acrylic on canvas

The Story
Crossing the Threshold


This piece became a reflection on my experience in crossing thresholds. It is scary, exhilarating and surprising. I re-purposed a canvas on which I had begun a painting of eggshells. Each attempt to cross a threshold builds on past efforts, repurposing our very self to stretch into something new. Eggshells represent newness, an entry into the world, a fragility that conjures up the uncertainty that accompanies newness. Real eggshells trail behind me as I step out of my shell and into the unknown, through the Dalet.*

Each door casts a shadow, the fear and uncertainty that accompanies change, yet also a glow, the satisfaction I find each time I pass through change and am transformed. In my world of thresholds, doors jut out at odd angles and exist on multiple levels, my path anything but linear. More like a Rube Goldberg contraption, a road map I could never anticipate. I don’t always cross a threshold in a traditional way, sometimes I go over or around, finding my own path around the rules that govern entry. All of this exists in a fluid space as I must learn to let go and relax to find transformation. When I find that internal flow, I create a space for beshert, fate. Surprising opportunities and connections arise, things I cannot plan or force, only invite in. All I can do is take that first step, relax into it, welcome the unknown and hang on for the ride.

*the fourth Hebrew letter, meaning door


dalet

Entering the Dalet
24"x30" Mixed Media

Poetry

Buoyant


Eggshells trail in my wake,
Fearful and tentative,
I step
into the shadow of uncertainty.
The broad crossbeam
Of the Dalet
Juts overhead.

Air whooshes around me
Falling,
Flailing,
I land with a thud
Sliding as I cling to the edges with fingertips
Grasping for the familiar
To slow,
My descent.
Rube Goldberg my guide,
On this unpredictable journey.
 
Doors surround me
Unexpected thresholds await
Beckoning me into
Beshert
I am exhilarated at my survival
Adrift in a sea of chance,
I am buoyant with amazement.





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The Story
Inside-Outside: Boundaries and Otherness

Throughout our lifetime, we face challenges and upheaval. When change enters our life, we are forced into the discomfort of liminal space. Liminal means threshold. It is the space between boundaries where the old rules no longer apply, the new yet to be mastered. It is an anthropological term marking rites of passage. Liminal space is where we face the unknown, it is a place of change, discomfort and ultimately transformation.
 
The crossing of boundaries into liminal space is a concept found throughout Judaism, honored through ritual. A mezuzah marks our entry into a home. The Havdallah marks the end of Shabbat. Our holidays recognize the passage, not just the arrival or exit. We count the Omer between Passover and Shavuot, readying ourselves to accept the Torah, and what could be more liminal than 40 years in the desert?



One of the ultimate liminal beings, a metaphor unfolding before our eyes, is a butterfly.  But it is not an easy road. First that caterpillar must shed his skin, destroying his being to begin anew. It is through imagination that this transformation occurs, actually “imaginal discs”, the cells that house the wings of his future self. What both we and our budding butterfly need is already hidden deep within. This piece is about stepping into the chrysalis, that cauldron of change, where we strip ourselves down to become someone new, drawing on qualities hidden within us.

 
The chrysalis is a home for growth and transformation. The doors of this chrysalis open, much like an ark. Within are housed the seeds of this mysterious transformation and the hidden wings that prepare us for the future.

You can read about how this triptych evolved in my blog post titled Stepping into the Chrysalis.

related poetry



openchrysalis
closedchrysalis

openchrysalis

Poetry

Inside the Chrysalis

Did you know,
That caterpillars digest themselves?
Dissolving their very being
In this torturous act of growth.
Seeking change,
Shedding skin.
A caterpillar soup
Of which Creation comes,
But first, Destruction,
We boil ourselves down to essence,
A stew of anxiety and worry
Of what comes next,
Accompanies us
into our chrysalis,
Our private dressing chamber
Where we shed our skin,
open our being,
Tiny wings tucked within,
you would never know by looking,
Legs and wings,
Antennae yet to form,
Spun from discs of imagination,
Gold spots glimmer
On our new home,
A tiny mezuzah



A Flash of Orange

I crawl out on my liminal limb,
Testing its sturdiness
For support,
Testing my new wet wings,
Gently wobbling in the breeze,
More used to crawling than flight.
I cling to my branch tightly
With six new feet.
I used to have sixteen
To keep me firmly grounded,
The world feels more tenuous,
Less anchored,
Still wet behind the wings,
I flap them once,
Again,
away
in a flash of vibrant orange.






































































Stepping into the Chrysalis
triptych 36'X48', Acrylic on canvas and board


Five years ago, I drove to a lab retreat in Madison with two friends from the lab. The road trip became an important part of the trip as we explored along the way. We decided to continue that experience and have done a road trip in each of the years since. This year we decided to do something consistent with our theme and headed to Wisconsin to see outsider art. The following poem speaks to our experience. Click to read more on the road trip and see pictures of some of the places it references.

Road Trip

We turn in circles,
Considering
How far a day takes us,
Shielding our eyes,
As we look to the distance,
For small adventures.
We harken to our theme
Of Otherness 
To plot our course.
And aim eastward.

The Brits called them follies
Those purposeless structures,
Whimsical and useless.
Here it's Outsider art,
Growing organically out of the land,
Organically out of the people,
What is it about Wisconsin
That nurtures folly in its soil?
And in its soul.

Fountain City
Rests on the Mississippi.
the Great River Road
follows river twists and
Bluffs rise above
The town as it unfolds into the hills,
A lunch stop overlooks the river,
Old photos paper its walls,
And reveal its history.
this very building, 
Once a whorehouse.
The ladies perch in windows, 
half in, half out.

Prairie Moon,
A large orange moon
On the old dance hall,
overlooking a field
Of sculpted orange clay,

Organic growth
Of soil and soul
Studded with flecks of white rock,
I startle, 
feeling someone nearby,
In my periphery, 
Herman Rusch's clay effigy 
surveys his creations,
Through all eternity.

We step through the arch
To Wegner Grotto,
Home chirps a bird
between o and m
On its perch studded with glass 
and shell 
and china shards.
Paul and Matilda chart their
crockery studded path,
The boat on which they came
From native Germany,
And that wedding cake,
Frozen in time,
You could break a tooth.

A small chapel,
Topped by a Star of David
Above its door, 
One God,
One Brotherhood,
Jew.
I jiggle the handle 
of the locked door
Unsure what awaits
Through a door
Marked Jew.

We aim for Baraboo,
I like to say it's name,
Baraboo, 
Named after a French Canadian trader
Name of Baribeau,
Or perhaps a catfish
Of which there were many.
No one is sure.
It is a place that honors 
Otherness,
And catfish.

Ornate gold and painted stories
Adorn these treasure chests on wheels
The circus has come to town
Or rather, 
we have come to the circus.
A world designed for outsiders,
A fantasy life on the margins,
Filled with glamour and glitter
And a bit of the tawdry,
Encamped 
just outside of town,
An escape fantasy
from the humdrum life,
Let's runaway and join the circus. 

Our last stop is for the birds
Those elegant cranes
Almost extinct. 
Fifteen worldwide,
Until two students 
Made them their mission.
They enter their world
Dressed as cranes,
Lest the young imprint
A birds head Haggadah
Come to life. 

It is a journey 
into the heart of otherness,
Outsiders
Create art from soil and soul,
Ladies of the night 
perch by day,
On window sills
While crane attire
Conceals from feathered friends.
And on the edge of town, 
A world of fantasy beckons




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roundness


The Story
Wisdom



My mother was the wisest person I knew. She was a searcher with a curiosity about the world, open to wisdom from many quarters, a teacher who carried her wisdom in a kind and gentle heart. When she died, I felt the world shift.  As I went through her home disposing of belongings, I realized I was looking for something of her essence.  I found it in a file titled Notes on Books Read.  

In it she had excerpts from books on many disciplines, science, history, novels and Jewish texts such as the Talmud, and the Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers. If something spoke to her she wrote it down and many excerpts related to finding meaning in life, facing fears and making good use of our time in this world.  We had often talked about books and as I perused this file I felt as if I was having one more of our many conversations.  

I used the apple as a metaphor for seeking wisdom starting with that first bite of the apple by Eve. I soon discovered that apples often were a metaphor for preparing for God’s law. Rabbinic literature talks of how the time from the first blossoming until the ripening of the fruit is fifty days, as was the time from the Exodus to the giving of the Law on Sinai. The title of the painting is drawn from a quote from Wally Lamb that I found in my mother’s file – “The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.”

A book lies open over a branch, its pages swirling out into the world.   On its cover is the title Pirkei Imahot, Ethics of the Mothers. No such book exists in print. The wisdom of mothers is often passed down by example and as oral tradition. I believe it is one of the most powerful sources of wisdom.

Read more in my blog about the development of this piece.


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The Roundness of Things
30" x24" Mixed Media on Canvas

























































































The Story
Water

My inspiration for this diptych came from a quote by Toni Morrison. 

"You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places... Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."

Water is often used as a metaphor for memory. We speak of waves and floods of memory. Of memories submerged or bubbling up. 



In the beginning God's breath hovered over the water. Then God divides the water into sky and sea, then land from water. The creation of the world has to do with differentiation. A flood signifies a returning of water to land, a remembering of its origin. The sky offers its rains that roil the waters and overtake the land, joining firmament, ocean and land into its original whole.

This artwork examines the parallels between memory and flooding, identity and creation. My work on memory explores the persistence of identity that also develops out of differentiation, an echo of the creation story. We are this, not that. Even as memory flees, we continue to seek the familiar boundaries of our one-time identity just as does the river when it floods.

Faces became my symbol for identity.  You will note there are two faces hidden in the lower painting representing the returning to our original boundaries of identity.  The painting above created a face carved out of land floating in a sea of memories.

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Flood of Memories
48" x 30" Mixed Media on Canvas






























































































   

The Story
Light


 My friend, a survivor of the Shoah,  noted that during the Holocaust, darkness often represented safety whereas light meant exposure and danger.  She recalled the smoke from the crematorium and how it spit fire into the night sky, tingeing it red. I pictured this as thick and as heavy as the plague of darkness.  By contrast she recalled a different moment when they arrived at a camp.  It was the eve of her 21st birthday when they stepped from a boxcar into a pine forest.  She recalled the midnight blue of the night sky studded with stars and the trees dusted with snow.  That vision of beauty represented hope in a world which offered little.

I refer to the aleph of one's face in the poetry. In the painting I use the aleph to represent stars and sparks of souls escaping.  In the lab we learned of how Rabbi Naftali Horowitz looked to the letter aleph which represents the name of God and noted that it echoes the form of our face. If we disassemble it we see two yuds and a vav, two eyes and a nose, figuratively holding God before us in our own face, a divine light surrounding each of us.


My friend has since lost her sight, but tells me she sees in her mind's eye. Light juxtaposed with the literal darkness in which she now lives, became a topic that I explored through poetry.


On the Eve of Your 21st Birthday

Light was often your enemy,
Furnaces spewed fire
In the night
As souls escaped
In final release.
Darkness your friend.
You flattened yourself
against the wall
of the darkened stairwell
Safe from the probing tongues of bayonets.
And sometimes hope emerged
Hidden in the guise of darkness.
On the eve of your twenty-first birthday
You stepped from a boxcar,
A sky of midnight blue,
Stars shining against its darkness,
Evergreens dusted with snow
Bent to bestow their blessing.



More poetry


In the Guise of Darkness
48" x 24" Acrylic on canvas


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Poems
by Susan Weinberg


Beshert

A message almost missed,
Hidden neath the weight of the insignificant
Lay my muse.
Ah, but fate persists,
A second try from closer quarter
And gratefully, we connect.
An odd connection this,
A familiar persistence
and energy,
I recognize myself in different guise.
Eighty-five years ago
our families greeted,
 in the cold crisp morning
Of our ancestral town.
Now full circle
We greet each other
Beshert,
A blessing of fate.




The Aleph of Your Mother's Face

I had known you six months
when we returned
to the Polish streets
of your childhood.
Your inner eye
charted our course.
Unerringly you guided us
Around the town you left
Seventy years before.
It was there
Your vision of your life
upended,
Not sure if there was even life to vision,
As German soldiers
Took your town.
You never looked them in the face,
Like a child you looked away
Hoping to hide from their view.


Through those darkest of times,
A light shone.
Through the aleph
of your mother's face,
You found hope.
She held
an unwavering vision
of you,
Your face,
Always before her,
A persistent flame of hope.
Her child would survive.
You sustained her
And she you.
Shielding
each other's light
From those
who would douse it.


After the war,
A once warm community
destroyed
Return impossible,
And so
a revision,
A life re-imagined.
In a new country
Brother, father, husband
Gather round the kitchen table,
Planning a future.
So much more than many,
Yet so many lost.
Ten cousins
 for whom you now speak.
A life re-imagined
A new vision
Built on memories and hope.


Surprising Sight

Shrouded in darkness,
Never seeing what lies in front,
The aleph of a face
Closed to you.
You find your light elsewhere,
That of an enlightened mind
Burning brightly.
No mere flicker,
It is an insistent flame.
You are forced to find your sight
in the peripheral,
The sideways glance,
Surprising unsuspecting Sight.
Often surprising me, as well.
You can use those? you ask,
As I grasp the chopsticks.
You can see those?
 I reply.


What do you see? I ask.
What does it look like?
SQUINT,
Squint until you can barely see.
I close my eyes,
eyelashes flutter.
Graying the world into flickers
Like an old celluloid film.
Can you see my face?
No, I have never seen your face.
I move to your side.
Now, can you see me?
Not clearly,
And yet,
you see me better than most,
who I am,
You recognize
the core of me.

Thirty years ago you knew that
Sight was fleeting,
A gradual loss,
Each year worse
Than the one before.
The year you stopped driving,
A watershed.
An independent woman
In need of others.
You despaired,
Unable to re-imagine
yet one more time,
Chaffing at the losses.
How does one live when your world changes
in every conceivable way.
Where is the light
when there is only darkness?


But after despair came light,
A new vision
Of life without vision.
Your inner light burns brightly,
A tape player
 like a cornerstone
On which you build this new edifice.
Reading regained
Through ears, not eyes.
You take it all in,
Stoking your light
Til it roars like a furnace,
Talmud by telephone,
Translation by magnification
Embraced by family
And friends,
drawn
to your light.



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                                                                         We Walk Together
                                                                         Acrylic on Canvas
                                                                               24" x 30"
The Story
Text-Context-Subtext



In the Artists' Lab we talked of the Binding of Isaac and found little resolution in this story where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his child.  We talked of the negative space, the sparseness of the story that offers little as to the emotional state of our protagonists.  That space allows each of us to project our emotion from our own experience, everyone once a child, perhaps a parent.
 
The following week I got together with my friend  who is a survivor of the Shoah and has told me many of her stories of that time.  We had talked of me painting some of her stories and she reminded me of that  discussion.  I began to paint one of the most vivid of her stories, the death march from Auschwitz towards Bergen-Belsen, a march that she did with her mother who was by her side throughout the war and in the camps.

They were given three things at the outset, a blanket, a can with a picture of a chicken and bread.  The cans soon littered the road as they had no way to open them.  The blankets hung like nooses around their necks. If you sat down to rest, you received a bullet in the back of the head. After two ten hour days of walking, Dvora asked a guard when they were going to stop.  He motioned to a village ahead.  When they continued forward after reaching the village, Dvora exhausted, prepared to sit down despite the consequence. 

Her mother tried to dissuade her unsuccessfully and finally responded, "All right, we'll sit down together" to which Dvora replied, "Not you!!"   In that moment came the realization that their lives were bound together and they continued on.

As I painted, I realized the many parallels with the story we had discussed in the Lab.  Each contains a parent-child relationship, a journey, the threat of impending death, a sacrifice proposed, but not enacted and three things which they carried.  I found myself thinking of the Binding of Isaac as representing the inextricable  bond between a parent and child.

Perhaps I have merely recast a story which is difficult to understand into one which while still one of high drama, is more comprehensible.  Or perhaps one story sheds light on aspects of the other in a more metaphorical sense, to sacrifice one is in fact to sacrifice the other, to give oneself fully, for Abraham and Isaac as well as for Dvora and her mother.

     
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The Poem

The accompanying poem began with a series of questions to my friend Dvora.  What was the weather  like?
Where did you sleep? What did you feel?  I began to craft the story from her responses and then refined it into
 an alternating and often parallel structure between Isaac and Abraham and Dvora and her mother told in the
voices of Isaac and Dvora. When juxtaposed, the two stories present different views of sacrifice and the bond
between a parent and child
.

We Walk Together
by Susan Weinberg

We walk together,                    
My mother and I.
We always walked together,
In the labor camp,
In Auschwitz,
Always my mother by my side,
My protector,
My sustenance
And I, hers.

We walk together.                  
My father and I,
I, the child of his old age,
I know his love well.
But now his heart seems heavy.
Silence drapes us.
Mt Moriah, our destination.
Three things we carry,
The wood,
 the flint
and the knife.

We left Auschwitz yesterday.
They gave us three things,
A blanket,
A can
with a picture of a chicken,
And bread.
Cans soon littered the road,
A cruel joke,
Contents locked within
With no means to escape,
The blanket, a noose around the neck,
First on one shoulder, then the other.
To falter or pause is deadly,
Greeted by a bullet
in the back of the head.
Soon bodies litter the road.
We hold the bread tightly,
Grasping life,
A slim chance of survival
amongst a world of death.

We walk together,
My father and I,
To the foot of the mountain.
Wait for us he says
To our two men.
We will go to pray
And return to you.
A man of faith my father,
A man of faith.

We walk together
My mother and I,
A day we walked,
for ten hours.
At night we slept in a barn.
Our heads rested on our wet shoes
Lest they disappear in the night.
Sharing a blanket between us,
As snow coated the ground
And cold froze our limbs.
Today we walk again.
Now dusk settles over our tracks
And exhaustion weighs heavy.

(continued in next column)



                                  

(continued)


My father binds me

And places me on the wood.
My father
who always protects me from harm.
He looks at me tenderly
And I see his hand tremble
As he lifts the knife.
And his eyes inquire to the heavens

I venture to ask
When will we stop?
The guard motions ahead
The lights of a village beckon,
Relief as the distance closes.
But Anguish seizes me
as we continue past
"He lied to me," I cry out.
All my weariness descends
in that moment of betrayal
"I want to sit down
I want to sit down"
A bullet unseen
This misery ended
I hold that thought in my hands
And my grasp on life loosens.

They try to dissuade me
My mother and the women
They still cling to life
Even now, even now
"I want to sit down,
 I want to sit down"
 Quietly my mother replies,
"All right,
 We'll sit down together."
'Not you," I cry,
 "Me!"
Even as I say the words
I know the impossibility


He releases me to life
My father.
Rubs my wrists
between his large hands

Until feeling returns,
Takes a ram caught in the thicket
And makes a sacrifice to God.

She releases me to life
My mother
In sacrifice proposed
She nurtures life
Gives me strength and
Warms me with her love
Always by my side.

And we walk on together
Bound together
Inextricably bound
we walk on together.











































   Walking on Eggshells 2018
     Acrylic on Canvas with eggshells
     30" x 24"
The Story

My partner and I agreed to represent the significance of the passage "Loving peace, but knowing how to defend," from the Declaration of the State of Israel. This captures the delicate balance between vision and reality. In this work the vision of peace is expressed through a strand of DNA enclosing a quote from Isaiah 2:4 (nation shall not lift up sword against nation) and speaking to God's call for us to "choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). The flying bird is drawn from the first postage stamp with the name of Israel and represents the birth of the new nation. Contrasted with the vision of church, synagogue and mosque, all peacefully co-existing is the line at the checkpoint, awaiting passage. The checkpoint sits atop a rocky promontory constructed of crushed egg shells, representing the lives lost in the Shoah and the rebuilding upon that base of a new life in the State of Israel, albeit, an ever-vigilant existence focused on security.









In Our Image 2019
Acrylic on canvas
30" x 24"


The Story

I often begin a project with research. In my explorations I ran across a book called Judaism, Physics and God by Rabbi David Nelson in which he explored scientific concepts as metaphors for Judaism. It was there that I learned about fractals, a discovery by the Jewish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractals can be defined by mathematical equations and explain things that have complexity and variation that can’t be captured by the simplified forms of Euclidean geometry. They are reflected in nature and in the human body. One fractal formula addresses branching found in lightening, rivers and trees. In the human body you find them in the bronchi of the lungs, the blood vessels and nervous system. Fractals allow for the study of such diverse ideas as the growth of bacteria, traffic patterns and the stock market, concepts that often appear irregular and unpredictable, but have an order and logic of their own.

To capture this idea, I explored the idea of fractals in clouds, rivers and trees. In the clouds you will find a passage from Genesis that reads "Let us make man in our image after our likeness." I am intrigued with the way the universe has an internal logic that is repeating and reflected throughout many forms, from trees and clouds to the human body. I am also drawn to the idea that what appears random and chaotic many not actually be.










 

Heartbeat 2019
Acrylic and Mixed Media
30" x 24"


The Story


I began with a Star of David angled into space, the background for this exploration. My partner’s work contained scientific discoveries, so I pulled up a lengthy list of discoveries by Jews. I collaged in images of nuclear chain reactions, quantum mechanics, computer technology, and the polio vaccine. I noted that there were many discoveries related to the heart such as defibrillators, pacemakers, even the application of electrocardiography.  Jews expended a lot of energy on keeping the heart beating. The Torah looks to the heart as the seat of wisdom with over 900 mentions. I placed a heart in the middle of the star with defibrillators on either side, the beating heart of Judaism, ready for a jolt if necessary.

In my partner’s work, two tall figures pointed smaller figures in opposite directions. I had once read The Great Escape by Kati Marton about nine Budapest Jews, many of them scientists, who carried their scientific knowledge with them as they escaped Hungary during WWII. The figures reminded me of those Jewish refugee scientists. I multiplied them and collaged them moving out from the star in opposite directions, imagining them carrying their knowledge around the world. Jews are often the canary in the coal mine, so I perched a canary on the star. The heartbeat of Judaism represents the safety of otherness in our world. The EKG beats a path at the bottom of the painting, blank at the end, the future. Where does it lead us?


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