Sha’ar Zahav inadvertently scheduled its second annual Art Shabbaton for the same day as the rally, in which an estimated 20,000 protestors marched from the Mission District to City Hall to express their dissatisfaction with the current state of Mideast affairs. It was by far the largest demonstration to take place recently in the city.
As a result of current affairs, the Art Shabbaton came at a time when many in the Jewish community were seeking ways to reinforce a unified sense of spirituality. At Sha’ar Zahav, they managed to do so through two days of art, dance, music, and prayer, beginning last Friday at sundown.
Geared for all ages, the Shabbaton included workshops on improvisation and drama, poetry, queer Jewish cartooning, Yiddish songs, bead crafts and crocheting kippot, among other activities.
Melanie Kushnir, interim program director for Sha’ar Zahav, said that while the activity outside had hampered some attendance, the program’s success — both this year and last — lay in the significance of the Jewish community’s coming together.
For the first Art Shabbaton, she said, the community worked jointly to produce a single project, a silk banner, representing a link between community and spirituality. This year the format changed, focusing more on individual artistic expression rather than large joint projects.
Both years’ events have succeeded in bringing people together through art and performance, she said.
In different rooms, groups made up of children and adults participated in a variety of activities. The improv group worked on a writing exercise guided by meditation. Participants came up with words having to do with Judaism and sexual identity, and then built and performed skits around them.
Meanwhile, in the main sanctuary, instrumentalists on three flutes, two clarinets, a trumpet, a keyboard and an accordion rehearsed a Chassidic tune.
For some others, the focus was comic. Seated at a workshop table, congregant Ann Aptaker instructed an assemblage of comic artists to add new elements to projects they had been working on for the past hour. “I’m just making people see that even in these times, cartoons are a way to get people to laugh,” she said. “This is a safe place to express ourselves, especially on a day like this, when just getting here is heroic.”
The workshops were entirely lay-led. Throughout the weekend, participants looked at the Torah portion of the week, on rituals and sacrifices, and then interpreted the passages with artistic endeavors.
Lessons in abstract art, relating it to more abstract expression of spirituality, followed sessions on how to make tzedakah boxes as a show of commitment to community.
The Shabbaton, marked by music and singing, left Ruth Rainero, a Sha’ar Zahav congregant with renewed understanding about the importance of the annual event. She and Jose Luis Moscovich spent Saturday teaching a Yiddish songs workshop, teaching participants, among other tunes, the “Song of the Partisans,” written about the Jewish shtetl resistance against the Nazis.
With verses depicting Jews in a fight for survival, Rainero could not help but find parallels between the song, written decades ago, and the atmosphere just outside her workshop window that day.
“Music is a crucial spiritual uplifter,” she explained after the session. “At the time [that we were teaching], there was a lot of percussion coming in from outside, though.” She smiled. “It was something we just worked with.”