The last portion of the book of Genesis, Vayehi, is read on Shabbat, Dec. 26, 2015. It begins with Jacob asking Joseph to bury him in the land of his fathers (Genesis 48:29) and ends with Joseph asking his family to bring him to the land that he promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Genesis 50:24, 25). To be physically rooted in the Land of Israel is the culminating idea of the first book of the Torah.
This Torah portion shapes the eternal connection of the
Jewish people to the Land of Israel. It offers
me the opportunity to introduce readers of my weekly Times of Israel
posts to my wife Miriam, my partner in creating the Torah Tweets blogart
project on which my posts are based http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com. Her essay below “Embracing the Earth of
Israel” talks of her being physically rooted in the Land of Israel as she holds
its earth in her hands forming it into expressions of spiritual power. Miriam is the high-touch counterpart to my
high-tech affinities.
EMBRACING THE EARTH OF ISRAEL
by Miriam Benjamin Alexenberg
I embrace the Land of Israel with my fingers hugging its
earth. As an artist, I bestow form to
pliant earth responsive to my touch that flows in veins of clay in the Negev
desert mountains near Yeroham where I lived for seven years.
To honor the president of Israel who was coming to visit
Yeroham, the town’s mayor commissioned me to make a gift for him. I wedged air out of Negev clay dug with the
aid of a geologist from Ben-Gurion University and centered it on my whirling
potter’s wheel. I shaped earth of Israel
into forms for marking the boundaries “between holy and profane, between light
and darkness, between Israel and the nations, and between the seventh day and
the six days of creation,” the words of the havdalah ceremony.
My wet fingers shaped the spinning clay into a goblet for
wine, into a spice box, and into a candle holder – three partners for bringing
closure to Shabbat through the interplay of the senses of taste, smell, and
sight. I impressed Hebrew letters
spelling out the words of havdalah into the clay around the rim of a
plate formed to hold the three ceremonial objects. I fired them in my kiln to harden the fragile
earth. I formulated a glaze from the
ashes swept out of the frena, an earthen wood-burning oven for baking pita
in the backyards of my neighbors who immigrated to Israel from Morocco.
President Yitzhak Navon visited my ceramics studio at
Ramat Hanegev College where I taught ceramics in a program to educate art
teachers for community centers throughout Israel. I explained to him how I had created the havdalah
set to link Jewish tradition to the North African immigrants of the town and to
the earth of the desert.
In an interview on the evening television news about the
waning pioneering spirit in Israel, President Navon said that he found the
pioneering spirit alive and well in Yeroham.
He spoke about how I left the ceramic studio of Columbia University and
moved to an isolated town in the Negev desert sight unseen with my husband and
three children.
ALIYAH OF A SAND FLOOR
I was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, the capital of the
Dutch colony where the Amazon jungle touches the Atlantic Ocean. To my good
fortune, I was born in Paramaribo and not in Amsterdam where all of my large
extended family there were murdered by the Nazis.
As a child, I loved to feel earth flow between my fingers
in the Suriname synagogue where my father chanted the Torah portion on Shabbat.
The entire floor was covered with sand to remind us of the trek of the
Israelites across the desert to reach the Promised Land. I rushed to be the first person in synagogue on
Friday evenings after the sand floors were raked smooth so that my footprints
would be the first to show.
I ran my fingers through the earth of Israel for the
first time outside my house in Paramaribo when my father's mother had passed
away. It is Jewish tradition to bury our
dead in the Diaspora with earth from the Land of Israel. The feel of this special earth in my hands
for the hour before it was taken to the cemetery fascinated me.
In 1950, my family made aliyah along with a prefabricated
house from Holland that was erected on my uncle's farm in Hibat Tzion
(Affection for Zion). There my sister
and I spent many days with our hands in the earth planting and harvesting
potatoes and planting a flower garden and vegetable patch beside our
house.
Our Paramaribo synagogue along with its sand floor
followed us on aliyah 60 years later. It was dismantled, transported to Israel
and reconstructed on the campus of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
In 1959, I met Mel Alexenberg a third-generation American
from a Zionist family. We were married on motzei Simhat Torah in New
York. Jews throughout the world danced
on the Simchat Torah holiday and our families and friends continued to dance
into the night at our wedding after the holiday had ended. In the first five years of our marriage, we
were blessed with three children. 18
years later, our fourth child was born in Yeroham when we already had two
granddaughters.
We went on aliyah with our first three children in
1969. Being unhappy with the way
Israeli schools stifled creativity, Mel and I worked together to create the
first open school in Israel – the Center for Creative Learning – the
experimental school of the University of Haifa.
All subjects were studied through the arts. We traveled in USA from
coast to coast visiting alternative schools that encouraged creativity that we
documented for presentation to the Education Committee of the Knesset.
CREATING CLAYSCAPES
Living in the Negev desert so strongly shaped my aesthetic
consciousness that it followed me into my Pratt Institute studio in New York
where I earned a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA). Living in the desert, I
fashioned vessels to hold food or to use in Jewish rituals. On leaving the
desert, I stopped throwing pots and began to express my connection to my lost
desert environment.
 | |
| Photograph taken by my talented grandson Or Alexenberg in the Negev where he lives |
I had developed a vocabulary of earth forces from my walks in the desert mountains stretching out from my home in Yeroham to the edge of the Great Crater that begins the drop to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on our planet. The desert is the best place to see the Earth’s skin. It is there that the shapes created by geological forces from beneath and by erosion of wind and water from above are most apparent. The desert landscapes that we see are but hardened moments of vast geological time not hidden by grass, by trees, by snow, or by buildings and pavement.
The vocabulary of earth forces that I developed from my encounters with the desert is the same vocabulary that I express through my clayscapes. It is an obvious, yet frequently overlooked fact that clay is earth. My clayscapes are made of earth and their subject matter is earth. After flash floods in the desert, I watched the wet earth dry out and crack into beautiful patterns like the skin of a giraffe. On the hillsides, erosion wrinkles the earth like the hide of an aged elephant. Sometimes the fast-moving water leaves patterns like the feathery frost on winter window panes or like the venation patterns of large tropical leaves.
When I hold wet clay in my hands, my pushing, pulling,
lifting, tearing, pressing, scoring, folding and pinching caused clay to crack,
wrinkle, warp, rupture, slump, swell, shear, part, gnarl and burst. I also used a rolling pin to create flat,
smooth, continuous, quiet plains to contrast with active earth.
My clayscapes are living forms documenting my dialogues
with pliable slabs of clay fired into stone.
Like a dry river bed shows where water once flowed, my clayscapes record
the interactions between my moving hands and the flowing response of wet
clay. They mirror the poetic vision of
the Psalms that assign life and motion to the mountains and deserts that
inspire my clayscapes. We read in Psalm
114: "The sea beheld and fled; the Jordan turned backwards; the
mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs. And in Psalm 97: "The earth
beholds and trembles. The mountains melt
like wax."
Artist Yaacov Agam visited my studios in Yeroham and
Miami intrigued by my clayscapes. He
arranged a solo exhibition of them at the gallery that shows his work in
Honolulu. Proof that I captured in my
clayscapes the geological dynamics of natural systems was my exhibition's
failure. Hawaiians saw my clayscapes as
if they were solidified lava rising up from inside the earth in the volcanic
eruptions on their islands. In their
tradition, it brought bad luck to remove pieces of frozen lava from their
natural resting place to show them in a gallery or have them in their
homes.
Clay in the hands of a creative artist can form earth
into expressions of the spiritual. In the Yom Kippur liturgy, clay in the hands
of a potter is used a metaphor for humanity in God's hands. The Hebrew word for
"clay" khomer is also used to mean "material" in
general. If it is read backwards with
the middle letter dropped, the word for "clay" becomes the word for
"spirit" ruakh. In
Judaism, the difference between the material world and the spiritual world is
one's perception. We can look at the
material world and only see its physical properties. On the other hand, if we shift our
perspective we can see the spiritual emerging.
A perceptual shift can transform the ordinary into something
extraordinary and the mundane into the miraculous.
REMNANTS OF A BURNT FOREST
In my studio at the South Florida Art Center on Miami
Beach, my clayscapes formed cylinder.
One cylinder climbed atop another until they grew taller than me. I saw them as branchless trees or limbless
bodies.
My human-size sculptures are both like trees stripped of their branches by a forest fire and like helpless limbless Jews like my Dutch family whose lives were cut short by the Holocaust and whose branches were cut off from our family tree. My sculptures were exhibited at the National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, to commemorate my mother's parents who perished in the fiery hell of Auschwitz. I shared my mother's grief at the loss of her entire family that stayed behind in Holland.
What an awesome statement of rebirth I experienced seeing
my mother giving a Hanukah piano concert at Beit Juliana Parents Home in
Herzliya when she was100. Mel photographed her with me, my daughter Iyrit, my
granddaughter Inbal, and my great-grandson Eliad – five generations. "From generation to generation, they
will dwell in the Land of Israel where the wilderness will rejoice over them,
the desert will be glad and blossom like a lily. Her wilderness will be made like Eden and her
desert like a Divine garden. Joy and
gladness will be found there, thanksgiving and the sound of music." (Isaiah
35:1, 51:3)
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