WHO CARES ABOUT JEWISH ART, and where does it belong? The category has long faced a problem wherein work is either too Jewish too niche, too religious, too rootless-cosmopolitan or too secular, too queer, too political (often code for too anti-Zionist). Jewish spaces censor their own; non-Jewish spaces are afraid to engage. For artists, there’s often a question of what language one has to speak to obtain funding: a question of whether one can show up as their whole self. In her 2019 essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde,” Maia Ipp calls for a revitalization of the visionary in Jewish art,
But first, I want to put these prizes in context, beginning with a word about
shabbat, shmita’s temporal Jewish sibling. The world needs shabbat right now. We need boundaries. We need rest. We need time when we switch off electronics. We need at least one day that we don’t buy stuff. We need at least one day that we spend with family and friends. After a boundary-less year of covid, our need for some kind of structured shabbat has never been greater.
And so, then, to shmita. The word means something like “letting go.” It’s part of the Torah. You could argue that it’s a somewhat obscure part of the Torah. In Israel, every seven years, there’s an ongoing public argument about the price of vegetables – because of shmita. And roughly every seven years, most orthodox shuls, and in recent years a growing number of non-orthodox shuls, have had someone speak or teach about shmita. It’s a fine topic for a sermon one day.