“It’s too soon to know whether he just had a brief moment or the beginning of a longer moment,” the curator and scholar Ori Soltes told JNS.

By: Anna Rahmanan & Menachem Wecker

A private tour of the former Manhattan home and studio of the Jewish artist Ben-Zion presents as the artistic version of an ice-cream headache. Spread over several floors, including a basement with a hidden trap-door staircase, the works are a dizzying array of drawings, paintings and sculptures, some that include the self-taught artist’s poetry, set among hundreds of books, artifacts and knick-knacks.

Ben-Zion was born in Ukraine in 1897. After the death of his father, a cantor and composer of liturgical music, Ben-Zion’s mother moved him and his younger siblings to Boston in 1920, where she had a brother. Six months later, Ben-Zion moved to the Bronx, N.Y., where he met Hebrew and Yiddish writers, with whom he published a Hebrew-Yiddish journal. (The group hoped it would be the first of many, but there was no second iteration.)

In 1965, Ben-Zion relocated to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the house that is now a museum and where he lived until his death in 1987. “Chelsea was a rough neighborhood at the time,” Tabita Shalem, who manages the Ben-Zion estate, said on an April 2019 tour of the house.

Ben-Zion often mined biblical and other Jewish subject matter in his art; his style and temperament at times evoke the works of Marc Chagall. But it has taken a recent exhibit of his works, which ran at the Maor Art Gallery in Brooklyn, to remind the public about Ben-Zion, who is little known even among many Jewish art aficionados.

“Ben-Zion was among the first to create works in America in response to the Holocaust and its effects on the continuation of Eastern European culture in America,” Matthew Baigell, art history professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of many volumes on Jewish art history, told JNS.

The artist “was among the very few artists through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to create works based on the Hebrew Bible at a time when many Jewish artists avoided stressing their Jewish heritage,” according to Baigell. “His choice of subject matter did not find a ready audience for many Jews who sought assimilation into mainstream American culture and who were unfamiliar with biblical history.”

“Today, people are more open about acknowledging their heritage, and Ben-Zion’s work is central to that heritage,” he told JNS.

Ori Soltes, a teaching professor at Georgetown University, author, and former director and chief curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, told JNS that “it’s too soon to know whether he just had a brief moment or the beginning of a longer moment.”

Ben-Zion “certainly deserves one,” Soltes said.

Soltes, who curated a one-man, centennial show of Ben-Zion’s work in 1997 at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that he was “overwhelmed by the range of interrelated modes of his artmaking—verbal and visual—and how he evolved from verbal to visual.”

At first, Ben-Zion used sticks, as if writing calligraphy, and later used small rocks, stones, driftwood and steel fragments, “from which he extracted visual personalities that only became obvious with his revelations of them,” according to Soltes, who finds Ben-Zion’s art “revelatory.”

“I appreciate the range of his literary and conceptual underpinnings, from Babylonian epic to the celebration of the Shabbat,” Soltes said.

Whether an artist’s star rises or falls often depends upon whether the right museum, gallery or critic latches onto the work and promotes it, according to Soltes, who noted that some members of the artistic movement with which Ben-Zion was affiliated, The Ten, are widely known and exhibited, including Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

Shalem said during the 2019 tour of Ben-Zion’s home and studio that the artist never achieved recognition like Rothko and others did, because “he never became entirely abstract.”

Ari Kirschenbaum, a Chabad rabbi and founder of the Maor Gallery, told JNS he saw the Ben-Zion exhibit as a “form of saying kaddish for his soul.”

“I was inspired not just by his works, which I had never seen prior to that, but by him as a human,” Kirschenbaum said. “Most people have a very parochial viewpoint, but Ben-Zion saw the world, he saw everything as art, as God’s art.”

“Whether it was a painting of a landscape or taking stones from Central Park and engraving them or finding discarded wood on a Manhattan street and turning it into art,” he said. “There were so many facets of his talent and life that I thought, ‘How do I not know about him? How is he not being spoken about, shown or exhibited?’”

The artist wasn’t a ritually observant Jew, but Kirschenbaum told JNS that his soul “is embedded in all of his work, and that is very clear when you just walk into the exhibit,” particularly depictions of yarmulkes, Torahs, beards and biblical tales.

“They never left him,” the rabbi told JNS. “He may have left, but they never left him.”

Shalem, who manages the Ben-Zion estate and curated the exhibit with Kirschenbaum, told JNS that she met Ben-Zion when the artist was 81 and worked with him until his death, and also worked with the artist’s widow, Lillian, until she died in 2012.

“I had the privilege of being part of their lives for many years, and it was a labor of love,” she said. “Ben-Zion was a man of great passion and profound thought.”

Ben-Zion was “deeply immersed in the Hebrew language and was a poet, a writer and a thinker,” Shalem said. “When his family emigrated to the United States in the 1920s after his father’s sudden death, Ben-Zion carried his original music manuscripts and his own Hebrew writings. He always combined his love for Hebrew, his Jewish background and his passion for art.”

Shalem told JNS that Ben-Zion shouldn’t be “pigeonholed” as a religious Jewish painter, and there is much more to his work than that. “The discoveries that people can make in getting to know his work go beyond Jewish and biblical themes,” she said.

Ben-Zion’s Abraham and Stars, from his series on biblical themes, is one of nearly two dozen works by the artist in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

The barefoot forefather sits on the ground looking heavenward with his head in an unnatural position. His beard points toward the stars at an angle that almost suggests that Abraham has removed his head from his shoulders and is holding it with his right hand.

The abstracted stars, which God has likened to the forefather’s descendants-to-be, hover about like will-o’-the-wisps or fireflies, with one emanating from Abraham’s walking stick. The work, like many of Ben-Zion’s, combines a direct drawing style with a complex composition.

According to the rabbi who curated the recent exhibit, Ben-Zion’s work is striking a particular Jewish nerve in recent months.

“There has been an explosion of Jewish pride,” in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Kirschenbaum told JNS. “People came to the exhibit to connect with others, to find meaning in these turbulent times. It was not just about the art, but about reconnecting with something deeper.”

“If there is another Ben-Zion out there that we haven’t heard of yet, hopefully we’ll meet them soon,” he said.

(JNS.org)

Moran Stella Yanai was attending the Supernova music festival as a jewelry vendor when she was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists.

By: Amelie Botbol

“This represents closing a circle—coping and understanding what new direction to take,” said Moran Stella Yanai, a former Hamas hostage, at the 07SH10AH23 art exhibition in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

Yanai was attending the Supernova music festival as a jewelry vendor on Oct. 7, 2023, when she was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. She spent 54 days in captivity in the Gaza Strip, during which she was moved between seven heavily guarded locations under constant surveillance. She endured limited access to food and water and was required to ask permission to use the bathroom.

Her family discovered she had been taken when her 12-year-old niece spotted a video of her pleading for her life that surfaced on TikTok.

Yanai was released in November 2023 as part of a hostage exchange.

“I came to Nova as a vendor. I had so many dreams—it was my first time opening my jewelry shop,” Yanai told JNS, standing beside her exhibit: a table covered with jewelry crafted from materials recovered from her original booth at the festival. “What you see here is what people found in the field days after the attack. It’s made from the dust and leaves of Nova.”

She explained that it took her a long time to work with the recovered items due to the emotional weight they carried. “Every time I look at it, I remember who I was that night—an hour before it started. I had concerns. I felt something was going to happen. So many memories come with it.”

Her installation also includes a series of photographs, one depicting a young girl holding a yellow balloon. “It captures my emotions from inside captivity—my greatest fears, the hope that helped me hold on, the belief that beyond the darkness there is a way out.”

The series has grown in meaning, Yanai added, especially as hostages remain in Gaza. “This is my fear—that they won’t come out, or that we’ll have new Ron Arads,” she said, referencing the Israeli airman missing in Lebanon since 1986.

The 07SH10AH23 exhibit opened on April 24—Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel—as a national reflection on the trauma following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 dead. The name of the exhibit reflects the date of the massacre.

The show features 24 artists and is curated by Simon Durban, a British cultural figure and former business manager of renowned street artist Banksy.

Alongside Yanai’s display is work by Ariela Wertheimer, inspired by the food-based ‘HELP’ sign created by hostages Yotam Haim, Samar Talalka and Alon Shamriz, who escaped Hamas captivity in Gaza only to be mistakenly killed by IDF troops.

“My exhibit is about growth,” Wertheimer told JNS on Wednesday. “It was made from spices, fruits and vegetables. I extracted the colors from them. When I first created these pieces, they were very colorful.”

But upon arriving at the exhibit, Wertheimer was surprised to see that the colors had faded. “It took me a moment. As we spoke about trauma, I realized—even for us, the color has faded this year.”

Her message, she said, is one of empathy. “We need to remember what compassion is—to look at the world more gently. The evil exists in everything, from how people speak to how they interact. The most important thing is for people to be good. We can disagree, but we must respect one another.”

Wertheimer also participated in the Art as Testimony: Creation Between Trauma and Healing panel discussion, alongside Yanai, Jonathan Cuperman and Matan Sacofsky, and moderated by Dr. Tal Patalon.

Sacofsky, a tank commander in the 10th “Harel” Reserve Armored Brigade’s 360th Battalion, created his piece from spent bullet casings.

“I had the idea to collect these casings and bring them to my studio,” he said. “It’s very different from my usual work, but I wanted to reflect and express my experience in a visual way.”

Sacofsky fought in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7 and spent approximately 250 days on reserve duty during the current war. “What I really want is for people to stand here and feel something powerful—something that pushes them into their own thoughts about war,” he said. “Some who’ve had similar experiences told me it triggered something in them, each in a different way. That’s the point—provoking personal reflection.”

The 07SH10AH23 exhibition runs through May 14 in south Tel Aviv.

(JNS.org)

Why This Book Is Important and What It Says

By: Tzvi Freeman

Writing a book review is reminiscent of high school, an enduring trauma to which I have no desire to return. Instead, I’ll just write a perspective I’ve gained by reading Eli Rubin’s latest book.

Rubin weaves Chabad metaphysics and significant events so they illuminate one another, taking us through the forks in the roads to better understand the path that forged forward. In each case, the vision of Chabad unfolds and reveals more of its true meaning. It’s an approach that presents a major leap forward in the study of Chabad history and philosophy.

In Rubin’s narrative, the Lurianic description of tzimtzum represents that rupture. The history of Chabad is a history of confrontation with that tzimtzum head-on, embracing it, struggling with it, and healing it.

What Is Modernity?

What is that rupture? We need to know, because if Rubin is correct (and I think he is), we cannot have a proper understanding of Chabad without some knowledge of the great shift in thought that was occurring in Europe, a shift that distinguishes modernity from all that came before it. As it turns out, that shift was far more related to Jewish, and in particular, kabbalistic thought, than most imagine.

Rubin points to René Descartes with his mind-body duality. However, to lay a seismic shift in the destiny of civilization on the shoulders of one bright and gleeful Frenchman who spent much time lying in bed staring at the fly on the wall and pondering how he could prove his own existence—I’m sure that’s not what Rubin means.

When Rubin’s book landed on my desk, I was in the middle of Jessica Riskin’s landmark work, “The Restless Clock—a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes things tick.” This was more than serendipity. I don’t think I could have grasped the import of Rubin’s thesis without Riskin at my side.

Riskin is a formidable scholar whose book has left its mark in the field of biology, cited in numerous papers since its publication in 2016. She brilliantly and skillfully tells the story of a civilization shaken by a great rupture that has left its wounds to this day.

The civilization was post-Reformation Europe. Having relegated the Great Designer/Primal Cause to a position outside His creation, intelligentsia were now stuck with a universe of divinely designed automata that have no spirit or agency of their own. Or perhaps they do. That was the debate.

The Protestant church of the time rathered that they don’t. G‑d, the reformers preached, has exclusive rights to life, spirit, and destiny. Allowing every living creature the autonomy to somehow own its own life ran against the theology of the time, certainly of Calvinist doctrine, but generally throughout Western Europe.

And so, the spirits within things were banished. Even the organs within churches were dismantled, as they represented just that notion—a spirit running through the pipes to create music and life.

The aristocracy also found the notion of distributed agency threatening. Better to keep it exclusively at the top of the hierarchy of things. Naturalists and philosophers, including Descartes, were wont to bow to their patrons and to curry favor of the church.

And it was enabling. If living organisms are messy things that make up their own minds with a spirit of their own, why bother studying them? How reliable could any predictions be? How can mathematics apply to deliberate, voluntary actions?

But if they are divine automatons, the craft of a Great Mind who has permitted us to peer into the mechanics and wondrous patterns of His work, then the naturalist is G‑d’s apprentice and the philosopher His PR man.

The wrench in the works was that those fuzzy creatures seemed so sensitive, even sentient, and, well…alive. Descartes had provided a special dispensation for humans who just had to have a soul, because, well, they do. Somehow the church was good with that. But others, notably Henry More, could not swallow the lifeless-machine pill.

The outlier of the time, and perhaps the most creative mind of the 17th century, was Gottfried Leibniz. On the one hand, Leibniz accepted that all of G‑d’s creatures are machines—wondrous machines made of smaller machines made of yet smaller machines, ad infinitum. And yet they are alive. Because machines are alive. They have to be, because everything is alive, not only humans, not only animals and vegetation, but even the fundamental elements.

Leibniz called the life force of all things vis viva (Latin for life force) and demonstrated that it never vanishes, but only transforms from one form to another. Vis viva eventually joined our vocabulary as “energy,” and Leibniz’ insight into its preservation became known as the conservation of energy—one of the most important principles of science. Where would we be if we couldn’t speak of “energy and matter?”

To us, today, energy is just another predictable element of the universe. To Leibniz, however, energy was a kind of god-likeness within each thing, so that each thing, even the clock, moved by its own agency in search of equilibrium.

Almost a century later, inspired by Leibniz, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck authored the discipline of biology. He defined it as the study of “vital mechanical striving.” Living organisms, according to Lamarck, strove autonomously towards perfection through their own will and agency. We can credit Lamarck for the notions of biological adaptation and evolution over time. Only that, for him, it was not by external natural selection, but rather by the purposeful striving of these organisms themselves.

Yet the dominant voices continued to overwhelm the protests of such Romantics and mavericks. As the steam engine powered Europe, the brute-matter machine idea dominated human thought, the Great Designer was eventually dropped from the picture, and we ended up with a flat, vacuous world. Progress and evolution proceed counter-entropically toward greater complexity without navigation. Lots of action, no actors. Great design, no designer. Stuff happens because stuff happened beforehand that made it happen.

As Riskin describes the determinist belief system elsewhere, it’s turtles all the way down, and anyone who believes otherwise is insane.

This is modernity. A rupture between spirit and matter, mind and body, Creator and created, then and now. An internally contradictory concept of reality, but convenient and enabling nonetheless. And into modernity stepped the Jewish mind.

Tzimtzum as Rupture

Although modernity began two centuries earlier, its landmark eruption was the French Revolution, which sent seismic waves throughout Europe in the final decade of the 18th century. It was during that decade that Rabbi Schneur Zalman was busy writing his classic work, the first part of which he called “The Book of the Beinoni.”

A beinoni is a person in the middle, not wicked, not saintly. The guy on the street. The wannabe tzadik, who just doesn’t have what it takes to make it all the way. Much like the bourgeoisie out to emulate aristocracy. A work directed towards the beinoni couldn’t be more in synch with the period of the French Revolution.

The second book of this work references the rupture of modernity directly. Neither Descartes, nor Leibniz, nor Spinoza receive any mention. Rather, a yet earlier articulation is at play here. Two decades before Descartes’ birth, in Tzfat, under the rule of the Ottomans, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria espoused the notion of tzimtzum.

Tzimtzum, as Rubin points out, was a radical break from the Neoplatonic cause-and-effect model of the cosmos that had dominated Western thought for almost 2,000 years. In that cosmology, there’s a continuity, clean and simple. It begins with a formless Primal Cause whose introspection spontaneously generates perfect forms that then mechanically set off a long chain of steady ontological descent, finally resulting in our coarse, imperfect world.

The implication is that whatever is, had to be. There is no intimacy between Creator and created, only a long chain of the inevitable. Forced to debate on such ground, Maimonides was hard put to argue that there was a first point of creation. If the world has to be, how could there have been a point when it was not?

Rabbi Luria now turned the tables. He made an assertion that is a radical break from that cosmology and a return to the Biblical tradition of a deliberate act of creation. Before the beginning, he taught, there was no space for a world. Divine infinite light filled all. Any creation, anything at all other than G‑d, was not just unnecessary. It was an absurdity.

And then there was a deliberate action. Not of creation, but of withdrawal. A tzimtzum. Within the infinite light, a vacuum came to be, entirely devoid of any light whatsoever. It is this void of absolute darkness that provides the background upon which the act of creation can proceed.

Into that void, a fine thread of light pierced the barrier from the infinite light beyond. Only now could a system of cause and effect begin, and even then entailing more mini-tzimtzumim and similar catastrophes, until this physical world was able to be.

At the very core of existence, then, is a rupture. A barrier of utter darkness stands between the divine infinite light and the created worlds. Between Creator and created.

Truth be told, as Rubin is quick to point out, the Lurianic world is full of life. Divine life, pervading everything. Did Luria or any of his disciples see in this narrative a sustained barrier between spirit and matter? Or was such a perspective entirely outside their frame of reference? I don’t know of anyone who settles this question, Rubin included.

(Chabad.org)