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May 16, 2003/Iyar 14 5763, Vol. 55, No. 38
Drawings illuminate Reform Haggadah
ALISA SLOAN
Special Sections Editor
Once every 30 years the Reform Movement updates its Haggadah. New editors and new artists give the volumes a new look, and sometimes, a new take on the holiday.
This year, artist Ruth Weisberg was selected to create the artwork for "The Open Door Haggadah," and over a period of approximately two years, she produced 29 drawings from the text. They are currently on view at the Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum at Temple Beth Israel, and after a stint at Brandeis University, will be distributed to the people who have acquired them. The local showing is a chance for Valley residents to see them all together, not just as Haggadah illustrations, says Weisberg, but as a cohesive body of art.
"I just really hope that people will take the time to come and see the drawings," she says, "because that's the aesthetic experience more purely. And as an artist, I just always like people to see the work itself as well as the reproduction."
Weisberg, an accomplished artist and writer, is dean of fine arts at the University of Southern California. She works primarily in painting, drawing and large-scale installations. A documentary titled "Ruth Weisberg: On the Journey" by Laura Vazquez was released this April.
For "The Open Door Haggadah," Weisberg spent time studying Jewish texts. She looked at about 200 Haggadahs in the library at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Los Angeles.
"I wanted to get a really good historical overview of what other artists had done," says Weisberg. "(The Haggadah) is the most illustrated text of all Jewish texts. It has the richest history. I wanted a good, solid grounding in what other people had done."
After studying on her own, she turned to her rabbi for illumination. "I wanted a Jewish process as well," she explains. "Ways of thinking about it that were part of the tradition rather than extraneous."
That led to innovation, says Weisberg.
"That may seem like a contradiction, but if you study the text you uncover new ideas. So the study of the text is traditional but the ideas that emerge from studying the text can be quite innovative," she explains.
After a national selection process and with the luck of good timing, Weisberg was chosen to be part of the collaborative team that put the book together.
"The editing of the Haggadah by Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell had not been (completed)," says Weisberg. "They were in the midst of the process. So I wasn't illustrating a finished manuscript. I was part of the dialogue about what should be included and what should be emphasized."
According to Weisberg, that makes a tremendous difference in the artwork.
"It's not so much illustration as it is interpretation, which is a very midrashic Jewish activity, and I was very aware of that," she explains. "It was a form of commentary to decide how and what the drawings should be that would accompany this text."
The theme of this Haggadah is inclusivity, says Weisberg. "It's the open door, meaning that everyone is invited in. The God language, for example ... it's not a feminist Haggadah but it incorporates some features of feminist Haggadahs. So that it isn't for women - it's for men and women and children."
An example of this, she says, is in an image called "And They Cried Out to the Lord." After perusing the 200 Hagga-dahs, she found that no other volume had marked that moment in the text. Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, where Weisberg is affiliated, explained the moment's significance to her.
"(Geller) indicated that everything before that particular line in the text is about slavery," says Weisberg. "And pretty much everything after that line, after we petition the Lord - when we're no longer thinking so much about the pharaoh - then it's about liberation and freedom."
The exhibition has been touring the country for some time now. It started out at the HUC-JIR campus in Cincinnati, then it was shown at the HUC-JIR campus in New York, and finally it was shown in Ann Arbor, Mich., at the Jewish Community Center before making its way to Scottsdale.
Weisberg visited the Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum on April 27 to give a presentation that she described as "quite wonderful."
"Had a terrific audience, interactive, had a lot of questions," she exhorts.
She has previously been to Arizona during her two stints at Arizona State University as a visiting artist.
Weisberg explains why she believes it's so important to create Jewish art.
"I think if we want Judaism to be a living culture, we have to be involved with it in every way. Culturally, intellectually, spiritually. And of course when those things combine, that's when it's the richest experience," she says.
She hopes that visitors will bring their own experiences about seders to the exhibit, and in that way each viewer will see the art a little differently.
According to Weisberg, she wants viewers to ask themselves, "What is my connection to the drawings?" and "What is my experience?" She hopes that viewers can imagine themselves at the seder table.
"That's the task of the holiday, to tell the story as if we went out of Egypt," she says.
Weisberg says she is very interested in making the connection with the past through her drawings, so that people won't feel separated or divided from it.
Says Weisberg, "I think that's really the great lesson in the Passover service."
Details
- What: "The Open Door Haggadah"
- Where: Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum at Temple Beth Israel, 10460 N. 56th St., Scottsdale
- When: Through June 30
- Call: 480-951-0323
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