Communion, Craft, and Solidarity

My mother has been the art teacher at our synagogue’s Sunday religious school for the past 15 years. When I was younger and attending classes, I would wait as the building emptied and she cleaned her room. Sometimes the kitchen had snacks left over for the taking, sometimes I’d help her put away the colored markers. Sometimes, I would peek into the main prayer hall. Only a few times was the room empty, and I could wander inside and look up at the stained glass. Although reflecting now I know it was certainly permissible for a teenager to sit before the Torah ark in privacy, at the time it felt like I wasn’t supposed to enter the room alone, like I would get caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to. I remember vividly the feeling of sitting in that room alone though. It was a gentle and overwhelming emotion, an intimate sense of joy and grief between me and the holy essence. Grief because many people must have asked for healing in the room, and joy because many people must have bowed their head in thanks. The space in its vastness and emptiness held me, as if the tall architectural ceilings and wooden pews absorbed people’s prayers, people’s wishes and sadness. The power in the room silently hummed to me. The room was a vessel for prayers, for hope. And the room never seemed so large when it was full of people. When I was 21 I spent 11 days in a silent meditation retreat to learn vipassana, a Buddhist method. The guru said that if you meditate in the same room every day, the room itself will begin to be holy.  It was not my prayers in that moment in the temple that overwhelmed me (though I probably did mumble something about my 7th grade crush or for the health of my friends and family) but the fact that other people’s prayers might have been heard in such a space.

I’ve since felt this feeling many times: in religious spaces, in nature, in art museums, looking at my friends around a fire drinking cocktails and cuddled up, watching a sunrise, reading a good poem. The sense of fullness, that someone else once felt the same joy or gratitude or hurt and another will feel it in the future. I feel God most profoundly when I am aware of the fullness of each moment, and I do believe that feelings can become entrenched in a space, in memory, in stories, in art.

I am thinking about religion not only because I am studying Buddhist craft in Nepal, because also because of my Jewish upbringing in context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. I am confused how the holiness I wrote about before could be the same holiness that is being ‘protected’ by violence. I am saddened that for some, Jewish grief does cannot find a loving vessel. I am heartbroken that Palestinian grief is rendered illegitimate in media discourses. I am betrayed by Jewish people who fail to recognize the weaponization of our people’s wounds and I grieve that too many have not learned of the beauty of liberation movements, how all our struggles are connected.  There are many women who are brave and smart and loving and have taught me and others what a liberated world might look like. Only through learning how world powers (white supremacy, capitalism, etc) gives and takes away power behind curtains have I begun to understand how this conflict mirrors many injustices in the world. I recommend reading and following these women now: adrienne maree brown, Celine Semaan, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.  Their dreaming gives me the same sense of fullness I felt in the synagogue, and I am beginning to wonder if communion with the holy essence is the same as standing for freedom and reciprocity and compassion.

I’m trying to come up with something to contribute to the world, art that will make others feel The Fullness. I feel guilt and shame about being a white person making Buddhist art. I wonder if I am the same as an imperialist extracting ideas - that the truth of my current situation is far from the reciprocal values I respect and strive for. I can’t change who I am or where I was born, but I can change how I move through the world, how I listen to others and champion for those who have not had the same privileges. I’ve come to the hesitant conclusion that learning to make art, even when it is not from our own culture, can be an act of devotion to our teachers and their histories. This learning requires a diligent listening, and has required of me to leave my ego and preconceived notions of making at the door in order to receive their knowledge. What is more compassionate than to committing to understand another’s point of view?

I keep waiting for images and symbols to appear before me, some sign that reappears in my life that I am to make art about. For a while it was lady bugs, after that my weird amoeba flowers, some sort of ode to girlhood and imagination. In my mind, the story went this way: a spiritual sign comes to the artist who renders it visibly legible to the outside other. The secrecy of the temple is seen through the crack in the door. But why do I think I need to invent the symbols, that I need to do something different or something better? This individualist line of thinking is catastrophic to authentic expression, to communion, to solidarity. So I continue painting and chasing the traced images of my teachers, symbols of a religion and region that are not mine but slowly becoming known.

It feels like I’m supposed to make something that has a political statement, that joins hands with others who are fighting for justice, but I just want to make things that feel good. And maybe that’s the political statement itself. To build more vessels that might help hold joy, that might remind us what we are fighting for.