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We are dedicated as a center, not just as a gallery space, but as a center, to feminist
arts past, obviously, present and future. Our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's
cultural contributions, and to educate a whole new generation of people about the meaning
of feminist art. To maintain in this space a very dynamic and welcoming learning center,
and to present feminism in...I think the museum likes to feel...an approachable way. I've
never quite understood the need to say that, because I think feminists and feminisms having
to do with equality is very approachable. But in any event, here we are. What it allows
us to do, and allows me to do, is to invite visitors, writers, artists, cultural and social
critics and scholars in, to provide lectures for an audience such as yourselves. It is
really wonderful that Professor Lauren Raiken has joined us today to speak on his Women
and Gender in Jewish Thought and Art. It's part of an ongoing series. This is actually
the first program of the autumn season, if you will. There is, by the way, in the back,
a brochure which has programming up through December. I think you'll be very excited by
a lot of what is going to be available here. Next weekend, Groundswell Community Mural
Project is coming to do a panel discussion. They're discussing Voices Heard. I don't know
how many of you live here in Brooklyn, but you may have seen some very beautiful large
murals on the sides of buildings. These are the product of a most incredible organization
that was begun by a young woman named Amy Sananman. It's called Groundswell Community
Mural Project. The young women who come not only learn about art and the creation of public
space and information, but actually do an enormous amount of research and discussion
of library work. It's a full educational opportunity for people who are really mostly from disadvantaged
areas. It has been enormously successful. I think they've done almost 200 murals in
Brooklyn. They will be coming here to talk to us about that on the 28th. That will be
Saturday. On the 28th, there's a panel discussion called The American Hero and the American
Dream. I like to think of it also Hero and Sheros. But it's academics, journalists, and
comedians explore the ways in which the two presidential candidates have been framed by
the media. Now, I need to add that this little blurb was written before the Republican National
Convention. So, I suspect that this is going to be a really rousing thing. Panel discussion,
it is including an Associate Professor of Culture and Communications, Charlton McIlwain
from NYU. Also, leading women's activist, bestselling author and commentator Gloria
Feldt, who also has been very involved with Planned Parenthood for a number of years.
And producer of The Daily Show, Rahim Haddiat. It is going to be...panel was assembled and
moderated by a very brilliant young woman, whom perhaps Professor Reakin knows, Courtney
Martin. She's the author, she's young, and she's overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly effective
and brilliant. I think she actually received a MacArthur. My wonderful assistant who I
consider to be quite brilliant and wonderful said to me, This can make one feel like you
haven't done anything by the time you've reached 28. She has recently written, Courtney Martin
has published a book, called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening Normalcy
of Hating Your Body. Courtney has been honored with The Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, the
Joan Cook Scholarship from the Journalism and Women Symposium. She has also been a Wood
Hole Fellow. She's part of the first class of Progressive Women's Voices, which is a
project at the Women's Media Center. This young woman has not reached ripe the old age,
yet, of 30. She has a B.A. from Barnard, but she says in her bio, It's quite lovely that
she has an M.A. from Gallatin School at NYU, which is of course the home of today's speaker.
She says, In writing and social change, and then she puts in parentheses, Yes, this really
exists!She writes that, and it's wonderful to hear her say that, and also to acknowledge
that the reason it exists is because of our wonderful Laurin Raiken. He has, over the
years, over the last decade almost, has graciously and very generously invited me every semester
to come and speak to his masters class in social transformation. It's always an honor,
but it's always a pleasure. So, it's a very happy moment for me to be able to welcome
Laurin Raiken into my home to speak to us today. I'd like to read to you a little bit
about Laurin. He's a sociologist of art, and cultural historian. He's a founding member
of the Gallatin faculty, and the founder and current chair of Gallatin interdisciplinary
arts programs. His teaching and research interests include sociology and political economy of
the arts, arts management and cultural policy, arts community and social change, Native American
studies, and the relationship between Kabbalah and art. An activist in the social world,
Professor Raiken was founder and President of the Foundation for the Community of Artists,
and he worked in various government positions in arts and cultural policy. The list is very
long and incredibly impressive. Instead of taking all the time, unless there's something
that you feel particularly strongly that I've let everybody know... He did graduate with
Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University, which maybe feels to him like a long time ago, but
I suspect when we all think about the way time is going, it feels like yesterday. Without
further ado, and a great pleasure for me to introduce to you Lauren Raiken, and to welcome
him and thank him very much for giving us some time. Thank you all so much for coming
this afternoon. I have a few introductory words. First, I would like to say good afternoon,
and to thank Elizabeth, to thank my friends and colleagues. I hope you know how much your
friendship and the dialogues over the years have guided me, and led me to the doors of
research and speculation that have brought me here today. And hopefully, to continue
this work into the future. I want to thank my teachers, especially Leo Bronstein, and
I'll be talking about Leo Bronstein a good deal this afternoon. I'll just mention, because
Elizabeth mentioned Elie Wiesel, that Elie Wiesel wrote a little critique and review
of some of the material that I am going to present today. He thought very, very highly
of Leo Bronstein during his lifetime. I want to thank my dear friend, Michael Dinwoody,
Josephine DeCarro, and all of you here today. I want to particularly thank Elizabeth Sackler
for giving me this wonderful opportunity this afternoon. I want to thank my former student,
good friend and research collaborator, who's here this afternoon helping me out, Christina
Kim Yang. I hope that you will indulge me today and be tolerant of some very controversial
things I hope to present. What I am undertaking this afternoon is a probe, an introduction,
a brief overview of a vast field of many interrelated realms, an investigation and experience of
study which deserves a lifetime, many lifetimes. I will talk about Kabbalah, art, Shekhinah,
the female image, the feminine, and the feminist in Jewish imagery and art, past and present,
its hiddenness, its emergence, its reemergence, and new evocations. Why it has been or may
have been hidden. Why it is going through a rebirth. Hopefully, these last two questions,
I will also ask for your help in beginning to answer. If I am lucky or blessed, I will
try to jump from assent to assent, from small hill to small hill, lightly, to begin to illuminate
what is already woven in reality, and to reaffirm what the scholar anthropologist Gregory Bateson
has called the pattern which connects. In this brief discussion, I cannot prove or fully
demonstrate the depth and deeply rooted longtime connections that I'll try to present. All
of these are quasispeculations. But I believe if we follow some of these leads, we will
come upon the depth, the deep rootedness, and the longterm existence of some of these
connections. For what end do I hope to show these connections? I hope that it will be
an affirmation that onedimensionality in art and gender was never necessary, should never
have been a social imposition, is being overcome given the nature of a universe that Kabbalah
had understood since at least the 1100s, in Provence in southern France. That the imposition
of a so limited view of what would be allowed in the imagery of Jewish art, and of women's
art and of feminist art, should never have been the case. That even the past, despite
its overwhelming patriarchal suppressions and subordination, always went against a longterm
view of being, and that such oppressions need not and cannot ever be the case again. I want
to explain a teeny bit about the handout that you've received. I have a few more, if someone
is here that hasn't gotten it yet. This, as I said earlier, is for you to engage in later,
because it's dark in the room. It's too complicated. I'm going to present a couple of thousand
years of enormously complicated material and go over it with enormous brevity, which is
radically unfair. But I'm trying to just touch, taste some of these possibilities and connections
for you. There's much reading and further work. There's enough material here for my
lifetime, many lifetimes. The first side of the page is of the Sefirot of Kabbalah. I'll
talk a little bit about of what the Sefirot are, with some comments from my print alongside
that you'll see. The back page is a series of definitions of the Sefirot from scholarly
text. The next page is what Leo Bronstein, one of my great teachers, calls the history
of ideas through the visual. This is something else I hope you'll look at later. On the back
of that page, more of his ideas concerning moments of seeing and certain principles.
Third page starts with Proverbs 31, An excellent wife, who can find? For her worth is far more
than jewels, with some notion of who may have written it. The last page, which I would have
loved to have time, but we won't have time to discuss, is the extraordinary revelations
of 20th century physics, into the 21st century. Even now, most recent discoveries, which in
physics parallel the story of creation told by Kabbalah since the 11th century, and particularly
since 1280 when the Zohar, the native text of Kabbalah was written. To see, as I said...
Well, you can read it later, because it has to do with the unbelievably surprising parallels
between Kabbalah's notion of creation and the Big ***. By the way, although I have
been looking at this myself, a wonderful, brilliant scholar, who has the Pritzger Prize
to translate all the works related to Kabbalah and Zohar, Daniel Matt out in San Francisco
has written this very special book called God & the Big ***. First, I want to speak
about the ubiquitous goddess. Perhaps we can have the first slide. You can see, I'll be
talking mostly about Asherah. I'll be talking mostly about the general issue of the goddess,
but you can see some examples of early Canaanite goddesses from the Middle East who were incorporated,
believe it or not, although we're not often taught this, incorporated into Jewish worship.
Goddesses are ubiquitous. This, in a nutshell, is the conclusion that one reaches from a
perusal of the voluminous and still growing literature on the history of religion. The
earliest role of the goddess, therefore, was that of the numinous mother, who endowed her
worshippers with her own mysterious qualities. It was out of the body of the primordial goddess
that the world egg emerged or that the earth was born. Alternately, it was the goddess
body itself that provided the material from which the earth was made. The workings of
the goddess archetype can be traced in rites, myths, and symbols throughout history, as
well as in the dreams, the fantasies, and creative works of both the sound and the sick
of our own day. Among the Biblical Hebrews there were powerful, attractive religious
trends in which the worship of the goddess played an important role. The female deity
of the early Judaic monarchic period did not disappear over time, but underwent many transformations
and succeeded in changed form to retain much of their old sway over religious sentiments
through a great deal of history, particularly down to the very end of the Hebrew monarchy.
The worship of the goddess played an integral role in the religion of the Hebrews. The prophetic
denunciations of these idols and we can look at the next two, which is Ashara, this is
a start date, again a start date, the next Ashara the prophetic denunciations of these
idols had very little effect on practice. The devotees of the goddesses could not be
swayed to give them up and to concentrate, instead, exclusively on the worship of a male
god. There can be no doubt that the goddess to whom the Hebrews clung with such tenacity,
down to the days of Doshiya, was a Hebrew goddess. She survived and underwent astounding
metamorphosis. She manifested herself later as the female cherub and later became the
manifestation of God's presence, the Shekhinah. She also assumed the form of a divine queen
and bride who joined the people every Friday at dusk to bring them joy and happiness on
the sacred Sabbath. I think she is strongly reemerging and reemerged in the new presence
and popularity of Kabbalah and the world of the Jewish artists, male, and particularly,
female. I would say as an underlying foundation to all of this that although I don't think
this has been much discussed or written about, but I think the reemergence of popularity
in Kabbalah only took place because of the birth of the second and third phases of the
Women's Movement and of feminist thought, experience and practice. The beginnings of
the period we are dealing with here go back to the time following the arrival of the Israelite
tribes in Kana. For about six centuries thereafter, that is to say, down to the destruction of
Jerusalem by Nebakenezer in 586 B.C., the Hebrews worshipped Ashara. Shekhinah is thus,
if not by character, then by function and position, a direct heir to such ancient Hebrew
goddesses of Kanaanite origins as Ashara and Anath. Shekhinah, the female presence of god,
who I'll discuss throughout this afternoon's talk, is a Hebrew abstract noun derived from
the Biblical verb shahan, and means literally the act of dwelling. Now, I also want to give
an example of this and briefly discuss the goddess as she made her appearance in the
Dura Europos Synagogue. Excavations conducted in northern Syria unearthed the remains of
the Town of DuraEuropos. This was, and we could move on to the next, and this is another
example of early works. Sometimes, I am going to mention this. Sometimes, this was discussed
as potentially still under debate as a column from Solomon's temple and the goddess appears
in different segments of this pillar. And next please...OK, I am going to keep this
for a while. This Town of DuraEuropos was a Roman frontier post for about a century.
And in 256 A.D., or in the Common Era it fell to the advancing Persians. Up against the
town's protective walls stood a synagogue. An inscription found in the synagogue itself
gives the date of its construction to 245 A.D. One of the largest and most elaborate
murals flanking the arc from the left and having the rescue of the infant Moses as you
see there, is centered upon the naked figure of a woman. The Dura discoveries thus occasioned
not only a correction in the traditional view of the Jewish historical attitude on representational
art, it had to be...who then is this goddess figure in to whose arms the mural is placed
the infant Moses? Our answer based upon a great deal of material which I don't have
time to go in to today, but I will mention just briefly. Our answer is that she was the
Shekhinah, and by the way, I don't if that spelling is there. It's Shekhinah. This conclusion
that the goddess is Shekhniah, startling though it may seem initially, can be supported by
numerous considerations. And one of the main ones is that the Midrash establishes a very
close connection between Moses and the Shekhinah. In fact, no other human was represented as
having such an infinite relationship with the Shekhinah as Moses. The Desert Sanctuary,
this gives you a little bit more understanding what Shekhinah means. The Desert Sanctuary
of the Israelites was called Mishkan or dwelling, because Yahweh was believed to have dwelt,
that is, Shahan, in it or over it in a cloud. It is this idea of the dwelling Shekhinah,
the dwelling of Yahweh that in time developed in to the concept of Shekhinah as the dwelling
or presence of God, as a separate feminine divine entity. The nude woman in the Moses
mural is shown raising her right arm over the arc. This is how with the kind of ingenious
simplicity, the artist illustrates the mystical concept of Shekhinah hovering over the tabernacle.
I have been working to edit down this so that I can cover a great deal of material jumping
around over time. What ultimately emerges from this, is that contrary to the generally
held view, the religion of the Hebrews and the Jews was never without at least a hint
of the feminine in this God concept, but I know that it is extraordinarily controversial.
I want to next discuss what has been called, in the recent literature, in the past decade
or so, Jewish aniconism. In other words, anti against icons and imagery. Aniconism refers
to the historical myth that certain cultures, usually monotheistic or primitively pure cultures
have no images at all, or no figurative imagery, or no images of that of the deity. Jewish
aniconism implies that the Jews are people of the book, and not a people of the image.
And proponents of Jewish aniconism deny the existence of authentic Jewish traditions and
painting, sculpture, and architecture. They claim that Jewish attitudes towards visuality
and the visual arts range from indifference to suspicion, all the way towards hostility.
Paradoxically when speaking about this hospitality, I am speaking primarily of the late 19th and
much of the 20th century, and the 20th century attitudes. Earlier, in medieval period, the
attitudes were much more open and did not over interpret the second commandment. It
appeared that Jewish aniconism's hostility toward the image, crystallized simultaneously
with the construction of modern Jewish identities. Empirical evidence indicates the existence
of authentic Jewish art throughout history. So, why would Jewish aniconism have persisted
so tenaciously throughout the 20th century or so much of it? Ironically, this Jewish
aniconism turns out to have been the partisan opinion of antiSemites who disparage Jewish
culture and certain biased foreign Jews in Western Europe and America who refuse to acknowledge
this existence. Aniconism eventually became the complete conventional wisdom for general
scholars, art critics, art historians, historians in general, who were unable to overcome the
dogmatic lessons of their education. So, I think the quite extraordinary scholar and
author of a book called The Artless Jew, a gentleman Kalman Bland correlated the modern
perception of Jewish art with antiSemitism and with the struggle for Jewish identity,
rather than the vague appeal to an externally or eternally fixed Hebraic spirit or any ancient
Biblical prohibitions against fashioning images of God. In fact, as aniconism never acknowledged
the, Prohibition against imagery in the second commandment and against iconography is really
only against one image, that is God. For instance, an example of anti antiSemitism, in the composer
Wagnas opinion, Jewish aesthetics amounted to nothing more than historic byzantine, Judaic
oriental notions of profitability. This Jewish focus on profitability, said Wagner
has ruined the free spirited art of ancient Greece and Western Europe In 1850 Wagner substituted
modern German culture for the victimized ancient Greeks and added biological inferiority to
the list of Jewish socioeconomic defects. And he issued a racist scathing attack against
Judaism and art, objecting to, and called it the Jewification of modern art. Wagner
and the anti Semites had claim that the Jews were unable to produce genuine art, steeped
in any kind of communal awareness of divine mythic beauty because Jews were forever yoked
quote in insidious commercialism.Supported by modern and postmodern philosophy that the
denial of Jewish art achieved unimpeachable status in 20th century American thought. Even
without the help of philosophy the notion was enshrined in textbooks and museum up until
today with the Elizabeth A Sackler, center of feminist art. Almost eradicable that the
denial of Jewish art was certified by countless international authorities from across disciplines,
intellectuals who denied Jewish art should have known better. For as early as 1897 the
British Author David Talfman had urged the scientific world to renounce this fable and
at last succumb to the overwhelming evidence of facts and documents, but that many succumbed
to aniconism is obvious. Jewish aniconism therefore became to the world as selfevidence
certainty. The most frivolous writers and the most conscientiousness editors at the
most demanding presses and particularly university presses took Jewish aniconism for granted.
The three little elements that I briefly introduced and now I want to go into the most complicated
and difficult part which I hope you will listen to as a poem and not as a typical discursive
presentation. I am going to introduce this with fragments from a Forward. This was actually
a Forward to Leo Bronstein's book Space in Persian Painting, an introduction to Islamic
art. Because the scholar I am going to talk about now, Leo Bronstein who I'd like to tell
you the story at the end in the question discussion period, how he came upon ultimately writing
about the relationship between Kabbalah and art. But these are a few quotes from Professor
Talat Saieed Haman, who at the time he wrote this was chairman of the Department of Middle
Eastern and Near Eastern Studies at my university, the New York University. Talat Haman was also
the Secretary of Culture on the Cabinet of the Turkish Government, the founder of a New
University today in Ankara in his retirement, and a poet and novelist. Talat Haman wrote,
Once in a while a remarkable intellect erupts on the scene to transform the substance, the
strategy, and the entire style of art history or criticism. Leo Bronstein who died in 1976
stands as a paragon of a visionary critique of the creative process. Few art historians
surveyed and wrote about a broader range of topics than Bronstein. From Greece to Japan,
from Spain to Iran, one could think of him as the Marco Polo of art history in the vast
geographic areas he roamed. The way Bronstein looked and saw and showed is unique, revolutionary,
lunarian. He viewed art poetically, and wrote about it passionately and prophetically. He
gazed, embraced, interacted, joined, took active part, coalesced. He became an integral
part of the creative act. Visually, emotionally, passionately in this he was probably the greatest
and the ultimate romantic. Perhaps the term epiphany best summarizes the impact of his
poetic wisdom on the visual arts. Significantly, Leo Bronstein himself, and I will often refer
to him as Leo, the French pronunciation of Leo, in this book calls his search for the
essence of artistic truth, calls it adventurous. In another book, which is one of my favorites
which I have republished recently, is titled, Fragments of Life, Metaphysics, and Art. Leo's
divine eyes captured its quintessence as few others have ever been able to do.
He was an extraordinary intellect and spirit dedicated to the discovery and the reinvention
of art. The Talmud says, Where there is the book, there is no sword. Imagine please, try
to feel when I offer you these fragments. This fragmented dance from Leo Bronstein's
book, the last book he wrote before he died called Kabbalah and Art. Imagine that I am
reading from a poem rather than a proof. Leo begins by telling us that ancient wisdom's
invention is that everything artily is nothing, has nothing in it, for without this nothing,
everything would not be anything. Leo wrote, And isn't it true that the way great human
historical collectives or tiny human creative individuals compose their productive and descriptive
deeds, their exchanges and changes, their life. This is the very way that they compose
their way of seeing, their way of hearing, touching, creating things their art. And in
developed, what he calls, braided cultures and arts, we find a multiple oneness, a plentitude,
a continuum, the woman via man, the man via woman. And this is true also in the tradition
of East Indian art. If you look at the Siva temples, the Elephant Caves. My teacher, Leo
Bronstein, from the depths of his childhood developed a grasp from having had a presentiment
as a child that beyond or beneath any object which emerges suddenly and very ancient, and
***, that there he might begin to try to cease his certitude of the possibility or
the potential of infinity. Leo once wrote, The elemental spot of our inner most self,
we call sensation... and I have some material that you can look at later in one of the handouts.
Sensation of the immediate direct reflex of flesh, body, and minds awakening. It is unceaseable,
because it is unretainable in experience, as a presence unretainable. It is infinity,
because ironically, infinity becomes exhaustible in the very attempt to cease it physically.
Sensation therefore being immediate is always lost. It can be retained or approximately
reconstructed by an approximate semblance by the meditative activity of our memory,
and then, once memory comes in, sensation transforms in to impression. But human beings
in our freedom, and perhaps in our folly choose to possess or cease the unceaseable wholeness,
the thatness of a sensation, the unceaseable totality by the power, by our spontaneous
arbitrary choice of a substitution what Leo called as substitution testimony. And we try
to do this in an object or any possible or immediately witnessing object. So in art,
this substitution for the unceaseable totality, the choice of this flower, this broken line,
this geometry of a configuration, this sound, this smell, this visual touch, obviously this
any artifact, this any object of art. But in another way, this is substitution, but
in another way, they Leo says it is open to us and he calls this impression. This he calls
the way of correspondence of solidarity and added sense through the use of the memory
of sensation, and he calls this correspondence. Correspondence that is a continuation in to
the world outside, not a break with the world, and the need to substitute it by a fragment
of that totality, but a continuation of that which is remembered, reconstructed as an impression,
a memory. Impression is always a form of correspondence, a continuing in to the world. And what we
call naturalism and art, is always more or less an impressionism, an impression correspondence.
But we human beings, we want certainty. We want the actual presence. We want as close
as we can get, in fact, no, we want certitude. That is, we want total identity with a present
sensation. This total identity with the immediate sensation Leo says it's folly, because it's
impossible, because sensation as immediate total presence is impossible. It can't last.
The minute you start to think, I want this sensation to last, you're already in the ground
of impression and memory and restatement. But nevertheless, human beings want this identity,
and the impossible, and the unfeasible. Come what may, at almost any price, at almost any
risk. This is our humanity's central, Leo calls, metaphysical despair, but is also the
source of creativity. Sensation and idea are reversible. The only lecture we have ever
recorder, because Leo wouldn't allow himself to be videotaped. We only have one tape from
1952, obviously old tape recorder, where he tried to elucidate, and some day, I hope to
edit this tape and publish it, elucidate the possibility of the intratranslatability of
the visual and the verbal. And he says, sensation and idea, the visual and the verbal are reversible
in the depth of what he calls, our visual labor. The entire poetry of our world, visible
and invisible as yet, is there in the depths of our visual labor. All the meaning of beauty
therefore, mediation, thought, and history is there. Leo Bronstein discovered, and this
is a story I will not tell afterwards, a similarity, a relationship between his lifelong ideas
about art, and Kabbalah. Both contain, what he calls, mind's two ways of search and penetration.
The way that leads to the immediacy of touch, and the way that leads to the immediacy of
concept. For Leo and relationship to art, Kabbalah is the transfer of the world of medieval
scared what cosmogenies, that is theories of creation. The transfer of the medieval
world of sacred theories of creation into our world of profane ways of knowing, profane
epistemologies. He read an enormous amount of Jewish thought, the legalista, halakhika,
traditional Hassidic. He focused, in a way, upon the creation written by Isaac Luria from
1534 to 1572 in Safed in Israel today, what is called the Lurianic Kabbalah. He looks
at the Lurianic Kabbalah's concept of EynSof. EynSof means infinity. He looked at EynSof's
act of manifestation, not as expansion, but as, in the Hebrew word. By the way, all the
original Kabbalah writings so far were written in Aramaic. They were written first in southern
France and Provence, but mostly, fascinatingly enough, in Spain. So, what occurs is what
we call zimzum. That is a contraction, a concealment, creation's mysterious instantaneity of contraction
and of growth, and then of achievement. Kabbalah's great absolute, that is EynSof, infinity,
is the unceaseable totality which is totally transferred, and thus partially seized into
the act, the primeval first act, the never growing, but evergrowing, you see these inexplicable
mysteries that never growing, but evergrowing, never achieved, but forever achieved act of
infinity's self contraction. That is the act of zimzum, an act of divine contraction that
preceded all emanation, that proceeded all creation, that preceded EynSof, that preceded
infinity's selfreduction to the infinitesimal point. The concept contains the even more
daring doctrine of the cause and effect of even primeval error. It was Leo's interpretation,
which is sometimes argued, that there is no such thing in Jewish thought as sin or original
sin. There is era, which can be redeemed. The era that Kabbalah explains is the very
act of creation, but in Kabbalah is also the modalities of correcting and redeeming this
era. In this era, the primeval man's era, is, according to Leo's interpretation of Kabbalah,
the primeval is of not yet being as EynSof is, both simultaneously male and female. Male
via female and female via male, and then simultaneously with this act of creation, the second act
of creation, out of nothing unfolds. When the light is manifested, the light of Tsimtsum
has manifested itself, and the light's radiation and weight become a new kind of reality. A
new weightiness, and so that the recipients of this light, the vessels called kilim broke,
some of them broke under the pressure of the weight of light. So that, then there is the
third and last act of this simultaneous drama in Isaac Luria's vision. It is the vision
of Tikkun sometimes spelled Tikkun or Tiqqun. Tikkun means the redemption of the primeval
era. The sin was that of separation, rather the era was that of separation. The era was
that of discontinuity and of disruption. For Kabbalah's vision of possibility, even of
necessity was to be part of a dynamic continuum of man via woman, or woman via man. So, Tikkun,
the repair, the redemption can be achieved by the loyalty to the origins, that is the
loyalty to the presence. The presence within, particularly within any righteous person or
righteous person's the withinness of Shekhinah. So Leo says, with the Western Europe and United
States in the 19th and 20th century begins a kind of selfliberation. And a new dignity
begins to develop to what Leo using the ancient Greek word called techne. The new capacity
to think not only with concepts in the mind, but to think as the artist thinks with the
body. This new thinking with the body rose up to meet already the advanced development
in Western culture of thinking with the mind, so that, Leo says, for Jewish people and the
Jewish artist, the creation, it was a creation of a new, what he calls the simultaneity of
touch, smell, taste, vision, pose, abstraction in painting and sculpture, and dancing. All
this body creating art, and their equalization with what had already achieved a great ascent
in Western thought that is scientific thinking. And so this new body touch language began
to be exuberantly achieved at the start of the 20th century. In this way, the American,
mostly Chicago based, but there is a building on Bleecker Street between Broadway and Lafayette
Street of the late great architect Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan gave a good example of this
when he spoke of the dignity of human thinking via the body as the 10fingered grasp or reality.
So, Leo feels that Kabbalah touched Western culture, and Kabbalah believed in the concreteness,
the fleshiness of abstraction. This also seems to emerge in the thought and art which I will
discuss in a moment of Picasso, Leo thought, of John Merrow, and of Paul Klee. The idea
in these artists and the Kabbalah that cosmos is equated with mind, is pure creation. This
thought and this art were joined by the thought and art that created soul, with the interaction
and the continuum of malefemale with the balance of judgment and mercy, of judgment via mercy,
and mercy via judgment. So Leo Bronstein found these two orientations joined along with a
moral imperative that gave birth and energy to the Jewish 20th century artists such as
Chaim Soutine, and Leo said of Chaim Soutine that his painting is all of this soul structure
painted in harmonies, distortions, and plentitudes. So, Leo found this in the work of 20th century
Jewish artists such as Chaim Soutine, Max Xavier, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, Marc Chagall,
Jacques Lipchitz, and Jacob Epstein, and many others who are still coming in the sudden
flowering, particularly women artists. From Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish
thought and Jewish mysticism, and his translation and editing of Zohar which is translated as
the Book of Splendor, basically is from the Kabbalah. We learn...this is from the Kabbalah,
When a person is one, when this is said of a human being, when he is or she is one, they
are only one when male is together with female, and thus when they are together highly sanctified.
Leo asks, Through which underground channels came the possible Judaic influence on our
West? The presence, how did the presence, Shehkinah in Leo's mind, come in to the very
imagery of the West? And so, now I want to find, if I can find, yes! I don't have this
unfortunately on the power point, but I did make enough copies, but please pass these
three examples around, so you can at least take a quick look at it. The first example
I am going to discuss is Picasso's. Leo interprets this in terms of his understanding of one
of the elements of Kabbalah. Leo speaks of the daring imagery of Kabbalah, and the daring
imagery of Picasso's where he says the great initial event here is the cosmic creation.
And a graceful woman h vers, pouring in to the male, the seed of creation and procreation.
According to Leo, this female figure, which he interprets as Shekhinah, and this is why
I say, presentation is very controversial, but think of it poetically, that she holds
Picasso's whole secret. And here Picasso's whole secret, Leo says, is similar to Kabbalah.
Unity comes, oneness comes only through the man via woman, the woman via man, through
life, and through life as presence of the Shekhinah. For the man, Leo, Picasso, the
philosopher, the poet of art, the artist, there is certitude of infinity. And this certitude
of infinity brought him in to contact with a secret woman. The secret woman who is plentitude,
who is the return, who is the rebirth, who is the redemption, redemption without redeemer,
the woman, the soul/spirit, and Hebrew Neshama, the life, all included in the understanding
of Shekhinah, the indwelling. And Zohar continues and says, it behooves a man to be male and
female. And it is she, Shekhinah, the female, it is who obtains for the male, heavenly union
without her there is no heavenly union. And the only stability that we can find in life,
the only aspiration Kabbalah says, is the balance between man and woman, of oneness.
So, Leo felt, so he touched that in this union, a very ancient, very majestic, very ancestral
feeling emerges from this oneness of man via woman, woman via man, and this he called,
the presence of tendresse using the French word the presence of tenderness. He imagines,
for instance, in this scene that is written about of the betrothal of the embrace of the
union of the night of their marriage between the Vesht, the Baal Shem Tov who is the founder
of Hasidism and his wife to be, his wife Hannah. This is Leo's interpretation of this betrothal
scene. That Hannah in the embrace, in the union sees tenderness. Thereby, she sees the
secret woman thus present at the creation, the creation ex nihilo from nothing. The creation
of man, of the world, of mind, of woman. This creation, this sensation, this seeing on Hannah's
part, was the poignant recognition of tenderness. This notion of tenderness is that the core
of Leo's lifelong theory of all art but he finds this also he sees it in Kaballah. And
for Leo, his understanding of language and living action is seen as what can be described
if I had this on white board or black board, as a interconnecting aesthetic continuum which
connects in a way that uses dash between tenderness, solitude, solidarity, of human beings and
Shekhinah, all of one continuum. And he calls her the secret woman, Shekhinah, remains still
to this day the most mysterious and sensual image word in Judaism. Here, I want to offer
a brief reprieve of Kaballah's view of creation which is uncannily similar to the theory of
big *** in advanced physics. We are, before creation, we are at the beginning, before
the beginning of the beginning. We are behind what in Hebrew is called Tehiru, TEHIRU. Behind
the vacated space, the vacated space point, where Timzum takes all that might have existed
in this life, which in God's universe, and contracts it to a point. Into the nothingness.
It's infinity's withdrawal into itself. This is Kaballah and this is also physics. Withdrawals
infinity into a nothingness, then emerges the memory of a pure, existing presence. There
comes the first spark. The first spark is also interpreted as the innermost woman, Shekhinah.
It continues into the visionary world of image via touch. The conceptual world, image of
correspondents and beyond both what Leo calls the perfect poignant circle, which I think
you'll see in some of the later slides we'll sure. This finite circle which represents
humans correspondents in solitude with the cosmos, and the neverending final, multidirected,
continuing line. Leo calls this human solidarity with the cosmos. He says, again to repeat
that, the immediate sensation is unceaseable. The unceaseable is hidden in infinity, in
EynSof. Now, while I have that out, one of the first handouts is pictures of the Sefirot.
The Sefirot as I think that is also there in the footnote. The Sefirot imagery is on
the first page, and the second page is definitions. These are the metaphysical numerations of
the divine aspects. Sefirot are the divine aspects and the principle keys in Kabbalah
to the mysteries of life, universe, and the world. They form a 10fold hierarchy, and their
names are enumerated from the highest downward, and from downward upward. So, you have there,
just as an example Keter at the top which is the crown, and Keter in its pure and absolute
essence has no aspects. It is the eternal mysterious reality. Thus, the Kabbalah calls
Keter in itself Ayin nothingness, nonbeing, or super being, noncause of all causes, no
end, infinity. In the origin stories of both Kabbalah and Leo's theories of art, through
his experience of solitude and solidarity with the world, there is ultimately an experience
of the union, self, and soul that Leo calls as I mentioned, tenderness. For Leo, tenderness
is the last, the 10th Sefirot, which is called as you see in the second Sefirah Malchut.
The 10th Sefirot contains all the Sefirots, and Sefirah Malchut, the 10th produces, encircles,
and penetrates all the entirety of all creation, and it is she, it is she in the end that joins
the beginning, the mother, the presence Shekhinah. Malchut, the 10th Sefirah is the secret woman.
It is Shekhinah's home, and Shekhinah contains tenderness, tendresse, that makes man via
woman, woman via man, that makes judgment, then towards mercy and binds and balances
them in to judgment via mercy, and mercy via judgment. Down and via this path is again
tenderness. It is the moral imperative, the spirit made body, is Shekhinah. And Leo Bronstein
writes, Art is the shelter of justice. Art is the point, the spark hidden in the rock,
the finite circle, and the neverfinished line of Kabbalah's meditation, and the finite circle,
and the neverfinished line in Paul Klee's Spark. In the drawing that he created, Paul
Klee, noted European artist, called the Formation of the Black Arrow, and this is a drawing,
Paul Klee's drawing, the Formation of the Black Arrow that Leo interpreted. And almost
literal Leo notes in this drawing of Paul Klee, almost a literal cabala expression of
descent on behalf of the ascent. That is from itself to itself, from nothingness to nothingness,
where iron has created the opposition and correspondence of two directions, of two curves,
more tension, more tension, more white in the drawing, more of its opposite, more black.
Till the resulting final mixture of two opposed, about to be, bodies, the tense white, the
tense black, culminate in the fullbodiness of a new, the first thing of creation, the
black arrow. This is Paul Klee's primeval infinity substituting point, the tzimtzum,
the withdrawal, the root of all roots of all his manifestations . The concentrated and
manifested universe of discourse in Play's line, in his color, in his meaning, in his
imagery. So, Leo wrote at one time, as an example of this substitution process, A painter
paints what she or he does not paint. That what a painting wants to say, its beauty,
its truth, its goodness, is not expressed merely in the conduct of a line, that is the
story that the line would tell in relationship to other elements in the painting, or the
structure of the color, that is the promise of a painting's narrative. An artist does
not paint this deeper meaning in the narrative itself, in the material or technical elements.
And I have this written in the fourth page of your handout. The meaning of the work is
in the very line itself. Leo speaks of the what level, which is the story telling of
the painting, the how level, which is the technical material. Then he speaks of the
what of the how, which is the deeper inner meaning or style told in the very essence
meaning of the style. And Leo then refers to that as the line itself, the color itself,
the composition itself, has the meaning. What he calls, as I said, the what of the how level.
I know it sounds a little silly but think about it and repeat it to yourself, the what
of the how. And Leo recalls the philosopher mathematician, Bertrand Russell who when speaking
about the work of Lichtenstein, the great 20th century philosopher. Russell says, Every
human language has a structure concerning which in that language itself, it cannot say
what it wants to say. So, there is another language which has a new structure. And to
this continuous creation and invention, when a language cannot say what it wants to say
in its own language about a reality, or about its meaning, we discover immediately, or hopefully
immediately, that there's another language that can say. And when that language becomes
inadequate, there's yet another language, on into infinity. That is, the loss or the
nonpresence of something in one language. And I don't mean verbal language I mean any
language that we human beings have created. Any artistic language, any movement, any tooled
language, any technical language. When there is a loss or a nonpresence of something in
one language, it is transferred and present in still yet another language, and a new awareness.
Almost done with this part. Into every artist, within every artist, transferred from the
what level, the narrative story, into the how level, that is the technical material,
the transfer level, we learn the what of the how level. This is the artist's secret, the
what of the how level. It's their central obsession, their secret presence, their substitution
for the unseizable totality. And Leo calls this substitution their metaphysical tenderness.
That is, in all art, he says, is the secret woman. Unbeknownst maybe to the artist, exists
the Shekhinah. The Shekhinah in you, in me, in everyone's creation out of nothing. It
is the secret of poetry, for instance. Examples, it is the birth of the dark pearl in Rembrandt's
painting, of the miraculous birth of a porcelain in the earlier Goya, the birth of the rainbow
in Renoir, the birth of the white in Winslow Homer's waves, and of the red in Thomas Aiken's.
It is the simple, banal and ponderous weight in Cezanne's substitution for infinity when
he constantly paints and repaints Mont SainteVictoire. And then all of a sudden, Leo recalls the
phrase in French LA'rt ne c'est large pas, il se resume. Translation: Art is not expansion,
it is reduction. Leo says immediately it's reduction, that's, reduction to the infinite
smallness. And then Leo asks Who said this? Why, it happens to have been Edgar Degas,
the rabid, professional hater of Jews, who always remained ignorant of the Jews, he despised.
And Leo says Despite himself, this realist painter of Parisian scenes, his little ballet
dancers, his bathing women, his portraits of women. He too... Leo says was a painter
unbeknownst to himself, of the secret, silent, invisible presence. One example, I'm sorry
I don't have this, but I'll refer to the painting, you can look it up sometime. He says, Leo
says, what Degas is doing from reduction to reduction, from transfer to transfer, Degas
concealed and manifested, painted another presence, painted what he calls the invisible,
yet coporial presence of an astral body in his paintings. A body surrounding a painted
living being, an aura of a person's action. So, for instance, there's a painting of a
young woman in a luminary shop, trying on a hat. The young woman is facing a mirror.
You see her face in the mirror, and the mirror is nothingness. It doesn't exist. It's flat.
It's a reduction. It is something else. It is an Absence. Leo calls it, in her presence.
She is concealed, reduced, OK. So now, concluding this section, Degas the Jewhater, was despite
his conscious hatred, a painter of the Jewish mystical vision of creation out of nothing,
creation through the act of reduction, the mystery of what the Kabbalah says, Art is
not expansion, it is contraction, it is reduction. The theory, the ideas of Kabbalah. For Leo,
Degas, even Degas, by painting this offcentered act of Kabbalah's primeval, divine era, and
its redemption, and its correction. How, Leo says, did Degas correct the primal era? Leo
says, By the will of tendresse which is in the very line, tendresse which
is in the very color structure, there in the color and line structure he painted his secret
tenderness, the metaphysical woman, the Shekhinah. I'd like to conclude this little section with
a little quote from Goethe's Tragedy of Faust. Goethe wrote: All of mere transient date,
as a symbol showeth, Hear the inadequate to fullness groweth. Hear the ineffable wrought
as in love. The everwomanly draws us above. Now into my last section of this talk, which
will bring on some of the slides. Just as I'm moving into a new element here, jumping...
...can we move onto the next slide, please? I just wanted to show as a part of Jewish
art, which we can talk about later or at another time, how works of various mid20th century
Jewish artists begin to include actual elements that come symbolic or as direct symbols from
Kabbalah. And this is Adolph Gottlieb, The Enchanted Ones,b next is Mark Rothko's Untitled,
and I'm not here to talk about men's art, but Barnett Newman's Onement, all of this
with direct reference. It is known that Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman particularly did know about
it. And the last one of Newman's, this is, The Name, number two. I mention, in parentheses,
one of the reasons I am delighted to be here this afternoon, is that when I was an infant,
my mother used to bring me here, teething on a little crust of Rye bread, to see my
father's paintings, which were exhibited, God knows when, in the early 40s, in the community
galleries, here in the Brooklyn Museum. So, one time, I was riding up an elevator in the
Fuller building, to an exhibition of Hans Hoffman's paintings, and Hans Hoffman was
my father's painting teacher. And we were riding up the elevator, and who gets on the
elevator, but this extraordinarily, awesomely tall man, and a man of average height next
to him. And who was it? The tall man was the critic and writer Harold Rosenberg. Enormously
impressive. And next to him, dressed up in a threepiece business suit, with a nice grain
moustache, strong presence, was Barnett Newman. And what indeed were they talking about? The
relationship in Barney Newman's art, as Harold said, to Jewish mystical tradition. So, I
want to show, in this emptyness, I am nothingness is related to that. Next slide, please. And
in the last slide of any males I want to show, is Jacques Lipchitz Mother and Child. And
I wanted to show this because this work, which may be the most bittersweet of all the responses
to the Holocaust anywhere and by any artist: Lipchitz Mother and Child. In this sculpture,
the woman, who is missing her hands, carries a child on her back. The work exists in several
versions, but it's most poignant to be in the presence of is the one on the grounds
of the Israel museum located on one of the hills of Jerusalem. When one looks at that
sculpture in that location, I can imagine a voice saying softly, I have been maimed,
I have been bloodied, but I am here. I am in Israel. I am of Israel, and I am carrying
the future generations within me. OK. Next, please. This is a work that represents...
This is Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Female Identity In Contemporary British Art. It also included
some American art, and the exhibition was dedicated to the memory of the artist Sandra
Fisher, the wife of the distinguished artist Kitaj. OK, I want to show a few examples of
the work. Next, please. This, again is showing aniconism that was accepted throughout all
of art history, history of Jewish life and nonJewish life, did not recognize, even in
the 20th century, this 20th century work of Jewish women's art of themselves. Here's a
selfportrait, Hannah .OK. Next, please. This one is particularly interesting, Jane Logemann's
because here you have broken into the multitude of letters, the Hebrew Prayer for the Dead,
which is only a prayer, it doesn't mention death in this prayer. It mentions only praise
of the universe and of God. One of the reasons this is so interesting
and connected to Kabbalah, because, of course, something I didn't have time to discuss in
Kabbalah at all, is that Kabbalah is deeply engaged in the numerical representation of
letters, through both the interpretation of the meaning of the letters themselves, and
of the numerical representations, that's one of the ways they reinterpret the Torah. In
other words, Torah is at one level, and the deeper level says Kabbalah, all the writers
of Kabbalah, from Spain, to France, to Israel, to Jerusalem, is through the vision and ideas
of creation through Kabbalah's notion by interpreting the words. And it's often said that every
single Hebrew letter has embedded in it someplace the tiny yud. That letter yud, standing for
the Almighty, Yahweh, God, the infinite, et cetera. Next slide, please. Here Gillian's
Singers on title 1996 has a multitude of imagery. Many of which directly refer to the 10th Sefirot
embody the 10th Sefirot and beyond in multiple interpretations and imagery of the Sefirot
in the Kabbalah. Next, please. Here, Carol Berman's, you know, one would hope, in a certain
way, I would, that you would see the man be a woman, the woman be a man. But I think there
is the implication of this in the multiplicity of both bodies. And certainly, for Jewish
art, this is an example of the lack of fear of presenting the body itself, and of the
expression of meaning through what Louis Sullivan calls, the tenfingered grasp of reality, the
capacity of Jewish art, and particularly in this case, Jewish women's art, which I would
call feminist art, expression of these multiple meanings, also referenced through Kabbalah
and Shekhinah. Here, Angela Bounds Rachel, for me, is a visual presentation of the very
act of creation. Of EynSof, of infinity creating through its reduction and withdrawal into
the single point, then the explosion of the big ***, creating the universe. My interpretation,
it's the way I feel it, the way I see it, what have you... OK, next slide, please. Here
Kitty Klaydmann. Its initial reading is that of her memories of the attic in which she
and her family hid away during the Holocaust. But, it also represents, through the explosion
and encapsulation, the encapsulation and explosion of light, for me, not only survival through
the Holocaust, but creation. Next. Alice Locohannah's Jacob's Ladder. Of course, Jacob's ladder
is one of the most extraordinary and wellknown verbal imagery from the bible. Here, interpreted
by this Jewish woman artist in this marvelous visual, which is for me, the steps ascending
from Sefirot Malkuth, from Shekhinah...top and bottom, the constant creation, from Sefirot
Malkuth, to Keter, the crown. And there can be no crown, in unless in the lowest Sefirot,
which contains all the other Sefirots, in order to give them the energy through the
woman, through the mother, to emerge back into the ascent, to the crown. Next, Lillian
Legion's My Body, My Self. This is, to me, an example of the capacity to return without
fear, and to emphasize, and manifest, the capacity of the body in its different forms.
And here, one might say, Isn't there restriction through the wires, through the spines? But
to me, rather than being the wounding, but wounding is also connected to redemption and
healing and recreation. There is particularly through the head, the notion of birth, and
emergence, and of creation, in my understanding of this. Finally, next, is Susan Schwab's
Creation. And there is a great deal to say about Susan Schwab. Let me just refer back
to Klaydmann's work that you saw earlier, it was the attic imagery in the light. Such
works fall on the border between the representational and the abstract. And they exist between,
and this is something that when Kabbalah speaks about judgment through mercy, and mercy through
judgment, is also speaking about the process of mercy and tenderness the process of healing
the pain of the past. Susan Schwab was born in 1944, and she has, and implies different
ongoing questions about Jewish art. Her concern is about creating women's Jewish art within
a nonJewish world. And she has a series of triptychs using the traditional ChristianCatholic
modality of the triptych that she calls Creation. Here, she's inspired by the opening images
of that most famous medieval Jewish illuminated manuscript which is the 14thcentury Sarajevo
Hadadah. Her creation has been revisioned in the abstract geometry which is so close
and in depth part of Kabbalah, of EynSof infinity. She discusses the notion of infinity in the
modalities and moods of the circles of the moons, that is she says they are without beginning
and without end. And the image of God is not represented but sun moon and earth are clearly
rendered in the same circular form of creation. Certain of Schwabb's work add to the arccircle
configuration of the downward pointing triangle with vertical lines from midbase to apex.
This symbol of femaleness is traceable all the back to the Hebrew Goddesses Astarte,
Asher and others. It is the role of the artistic creatrix, so long suppressed for women is
now, in her work and other Jewish women artists restored in the very textures of the silver
point surfaces she works with and the watery wavelike lines of her silver point surfaces
within the luminescent frames recall for her the verbal and visual images of the primordial
watermothergoddesses of ancient Hebrew thought. And finally amongst the issues raised by JewishAmerican
women artists in the last few decades has been the question Where do I as a female artist
fit into Judaism and the images that are part of Judaism's history?Scores of American women
artists since the early 1980's have wrestled with the question of where and how as women
they fit into the Jewish tradition and the artistic tradition. Some like the Israeli
artist, who I don't have a slide of, Elaine Eyron and Carol Hamoy have created installations,
particularly in the 1990s, rather paintings and sculptures. And what they have created
is new versions, new imaginings from feminist perspectives of Torah scrolls, prayer books,
[inaudible 01:20:10], the material elementals of Jewish spirituality are used and transformed
from their feminist perspective.Many have contributed to the development of a new ritual
object, a new ritual universe as in Judy Chicago's dinner party so magnificently exhibited outside
this door which reintroduces particularly they've created something called the Mirriam
goblet which reintroduces the sister of Moses and Aaron to the Passover table side by side
with the cup of Elijah. And that is all that I have to say about this. Thank you very much
indeed. I am sorry, I went so long. I don't know if we have any time for questions, a
few comments. Elizabeth says we do. by all means... May I apologize for going so rapidly.
There was so material, but I wanted at least to give you a kind of poetic jumpdance phase
of what I have just started to look at, and I hope that the time to look it for a long
time...Frank Menusen. While you were discussing one of these images, it came to me that one
of the oldest female images going back to ancient prehistoric God is the triangle which
represents the female, the feminine role. And if you look at the motivator, you have
intertwined triangles and probably triangles, the base of creation, and they have two intertwining,
like a male and a female triangle. And then you have this, the miracles encountered, the
six triangles that comes to 18, which is the number known as light [inaudible 01:22:00]
that in the triangle is light, and is against the male and female connected to great light
here. Absolutely! Yes, I agree very much so. And Leo would say from Kabbalah that any point
of the triangle was the process of Tsimtsum reduction of EynSof which is infinity to that
point, and only through the reduction to the point.
And this is exactly, I mean, this sounds peculiar from another dimension. It is the notion of
reduction to the point that is the basic theory in, not only in Einstein's theory of relativity,
the general theory of relativity, it's in the special theory of relativity. It's in
quantum physics, and it's even now in the new notion of string theory, that the reduction
to the possible point of infinity's reduction is the only possibility thereby of the Big
***, the explosion, the creation. So, there in the triangle is the point leading out to
the creation of the endless growing universe....Dina! Why do...perhaps you already answered perhaps
you have not answered...why do learning of Kabbalah until they contained certain ages
amount of learning? Well, there are two things I would like to say about the Hasidic... Yeah,
about relation. In the early years of Hasidic experience, the early teachers, all the early
holy men, rabbis, were particularly, pointedly, focally trying to create a popular access
often for Kabbalah to their people. It's only in the more contemporary period of time when,
this is not the answer for your question, but it's one element of the Hasidism, where
they have more or less turned their back on aspects of this and become, in my mind, that's
more structured in some ways, perhaps slightly rigid. But it was a traditional notion that
within Kabbalah, because of these challenging, massively controversial ideas, particularly
that more central idea of Shekhinah the female, God as female, of male including female and
female including male. But having a female numeration and nomination name that it would
be so threatening and potentially dangerous that one had to achieve a certain maturity,
which obviously now in order to begin this study. Obviously now, it's completely beyond
all this. But I think, there is obviously now a totally new Las Vegasization or Hollywoodizationof
Kabbalah. But there is also, I think, on the whole, a very serious study of this. Leo did
it through arts. I am trying to continue to do it through the arts. And women's art, I
told you in the beginning of...hope rest of my lifelong study. But as I said earlier,
this popularization I think could only have happened with the feminist movement. The idea
that there is now hope in this license and capacity to look in this realm, is available
to us, because of feminism in general movement and in the arts. Yes please! Well, as a feminist
artist, I am so fascinated. Thank you. On similar lines to be considered that I am not,
in the sense of the. I find it very because I think certainly every time you confront
a new work of art, which you are creating, you are seeking to speak in a way that will
have a new language. Especially, plentiful I think when it was certain there is so much
language that didn't exist. Now I think, perhaps it's easier, but it's never...and the idea
of...I mean in order to create something, it has to be some very, very You are just
like turning inward to a small point and then manifesting outward. And you know, something
I have actually no time to do. There are multiple Kabbalahs, all coming from the original Zohar
written in Spain between 1280 and 1284 in...I forget the name of the town, same town, and
same city in Mexico Guadalajara in Spain. There is also, you would come across quite
frequently books that, all of my references are Kabbalah with a K, which is the traditional
translation from the Aramaic to the Hebrew to the English. Then you see books and discussion
Kabbalah from the sea, that is the Christian reinterpretation and version of Kabbalah.
Now Kabbalah, you know, you say, How does this man say? How did Leo say? How do I say
that there is this undercurrent that brings Shekhinah in to the late 19th or 20th century
Western and American world? I mean, isn't not a little farfetched? What's that underground
stream? Well, there wasn't an underground stream. Starting with the initial creation
of the earliest books and writings in France, mostly in Spain, in the Mediterranean, and
then in to Judea, Israel, it is thought in the 16th century on noted Christian Catholic,
particularly scholars, renaissance humanists, became totally engaged in the reading and
study in the original languages. Pico della Mirandola was a great Kabbalah scholar and
many others since then scientists, philosophers, humanists. When I asked Daniel Matt, the great
contemporary translator from the Pritzker where are the most special or unique copies
of the Zohar, he said, most of them are owned by the Vatican, and you can see them in the
Vatican library. So, this is not something that is so arcane or esoteric or nonpresent.
It is openly present for those who have wanted to look for it. Any other comments or questions
please. Let me thank you so much for your attention. Thank you so much, Lauren. This
was really outstanding, and I would like to invite you as you continue to refine and reflect
to come back again, perhaps next year, and do a second part with us. Thank you, thank
you very much. Because I believe this is extremely, extremely important. Please, I hope you have
opportunity to enjoy the dinner party. Ghada is an Egyptian born feminist artist, is going
to be up only for another two weeks. We open on October 31st, an exhibition called Burning
Down the House creating the feminist art collection work which will be a group show of some very
famous and wonderful feminist artists. So, please join with that, and also we have women
votes, which is a marvelous exhibition in the Gallery, and we have some wonderful pieces
of our memorabilia during the suffrages movement. And I think you will enjoy that. That's going
to be up until January, and then after that, we will have an exhibition based on the goddess
plate of Virginia party, and that I think could tie and again next spring to some additional
thinking that Lauren Raiken may have for us. Thank you all for joining us. It was really
wonderful. Thank you! Thank you so much. Really appreciate so much being here.