I was only 19 when I walked past the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem. It fascinated me because my dream as a child had been to become an artist. To this day my mother recalls that, when I was little, all she had to do to keep me occupied was to give me a piece of paper and a pencil “and I wouldn’t hear from him for hours.”
The dream of becoming an artist was smashed one day when I was 10 or 11 years old. One of my parents’ friends, a man whose face I can remember but not his name, asked me the question boys are always asked. “Well, Martin, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I answered, “A commercial artist.” I didn’t know what a commercial artist really did, but I knew I didn’t want to starve in some fourth-floor walkup on the Left Bank of Paris like the fellow in “La Boheme” my aunt and uncle had taken me to see. I knew enough to know that “commercial” implied making a living, so I imagined that a commercial artist was an artist who didn’t starve.
“Oh no you don’t!” said this nameless adult, full of authority. “Commercial art is a very anti-Semitic field.”
That’s all I remember of the conversation. But I do remember what “anti-Semitism” meant to me at that tender age. I had just learned of the Holocaust, and that my father’s family left in Europe was all wiped out, including children who would have been my age. By anti-Semitism my parents’ friend must have meant that it would be difficult to get hired or get a promotion. But to me it meant getting arrested and sent to a gas chamber! So there and then I gave up the idea of being an artist, any kind of artist.
And there I was, an American student about to enroll in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Walking through the city, near the Knesset, behind the statuesque menorah with a relief of all of Jewish history along its branches, I passed the Bezalel Art School, where Jews learned to paint, sculpt, design and who knows what else.
I should have walked in. Paints and charcoal and canvases and clay ran through my veins, and it felt to me that it was no coincidence that the word “art” was at the end of the word, “heart,” for that was what my heart throbbed for.
But I didn’t. I stared at the shiny bronze plaque on the wall near the entrance that identified the place with the man who was mentioned in the Torah as the designer of the mishkan, the menorah and everything else that was designed for our ancestors’ worship. And then I walked on. I entered the Hebrew University with a major in economics and a philosophy, and took courses in archaeology and Jewish history, and didn’t lift a brush the entire time I was there.
So you can imagine how I felt when I entered the new JCCSF on California and Presidio, and there in the lobby is an exhibit of the work of Bezalel students created over nearly 100 years! I gazed at Shabbat candlesticks, Havdallah sets, chanukiot done with tremendous ingenuity, tzedakah boxes and so much more. I couldn’t imagine myself having such talent as the artists represented in the exhibit, but who knows? One thing for sure — I was very proud of what they had accomplished, proud of their skill and proud that they chose to utilize those skills to create Jewish objects of art. I am certain that many if not most of the artists in Bezalel are secular and don’t light Shabbat candles every Friday evening or use the strange cup for washing hands before a motzi. But it is the realm of Judaism and Jewish practices that they chose to share their Divine gift.
We are soon to approach the High Holy Days, and I’m glad that the Bezalel exhibit will be there throughout. I want to look at it often, for it is filled with messages for me, and perhaps for you as well.
First, it is a reminder to follow my own path, to do what my heart rather than my head tells me I should do. How often I have made decisions based upon fear or simply what I thought was expected of me, or what others think is best. Each of us is granted uniqueness — that’s what we share with God, that there is none other like myself. Our dreams are Divine messages telling us what would make us feel fulfilled and purposeful, what would give us utmost joy and happiness. But too many of us have put our dreams aside to follow paths that others thought best, and with that decision, we squashed a good deal of who we are and what we might be here for.
Second, I want to take pride in what our people have accomplished. I constantly stand in amazement of Holocaust survivors, because they are people who persevere in life despite the horrors they have seen. I don’t know how I could have gone on after being an eyewitness to such evil. My faith not only in God but in humanity, in life, would have gone up in the smoke with my family, my friends, my people. Yet they persevered and they married, raised families, earned a living and they even laugh sometimes and tell jokes and celebrate events and join synagogues, and live life daily even though the memories are with them daily as well.
The Bezalel Art School is the Jewish people’s response to that same evil and centuries of evil before it. Instead of climbing into a hole of isolation, instead of becoming a nation of maudlin stoic people, instead of exhibiting hate and anger and resentment, we still search for beauty, and we create beauty. It is the same inner characteristic that drove our people to make the desert bloom and cities rise out of the sand and industry to flourish and tourism to blossom. Like the phoenix, we emerge out of ashes and soar. That’s what the Bezalel exhibit means to me.
And finally, it is a reminder of the human ability to imagine and design and create. What thought goes into the fashioning of a chanukiah made of parts that intersect to form other objects, to create an afikoman holder that tells the story of the Exodus, to design Shabbat candlesticks that radiate light even when they are unlit? There is no end to creativity. One can never say about art that it was done already, therefore I have nothing new to make. Art is an example of infinity that exists in the human mind, and it will never be “all done.”
So when you’re sitting in shul this Rosh Hashanah, and your mind wants to wander from the machzor, and the cantor’s voice is filling the air with pensive notes, perhaps you would like to think about these ideas — how important it is to muster the confidence to do what you know is right for yourself and keep the advice of others in perspective, for only you will have to answer to yourself.
And be inspired by the power of a people to grasp tenaciously to life, not being torn away by what human beings have done but inspired by what human beings should and can do.
And finally, to walk through the world seeing beauty, marveling at God’s creations and at ours, standing in awe of mountains and skyscrapers, giving a canvas in a museum or a sculpture on a lawn another chance at being beautiful instead of turning away, just because you haven’t seen anything like it before. Then you can say to yourself what our Scriptures say about the Almighty — “And God looked, and saw that it was Good.”
Moshe Levin is the rabbi at Congregation Ner Tamid in San Francisco.