Schechter News | In the Media

Stephen Horenstein: "Read the text before entering." (Photo: Motti Rozitzki)

Visitors arriving from downstairs to attend the opening of the art exhibition "Concealed and Revealed" at the elegant Mishkenot She'ananim center in Jerusalem on Monday night were immediately confronted with a bright red British-style telephone booth.

The sign on it said in English and Hebrew: "Please read the text before entering." On the wall near the booth hangs a printed Talmudic text that describes a strange conversation between Moses and God that travels back and forth in time and ends with God telling Moses to shut up and do as he's told.

"The actual form and shape of Talmudic text suggest the multi-layered forms and shapes of music," says the creator, Stephen Horenstein, an Boston-born composer and musician who came here 15 years ago. "Like music, you can come back to this text time and time again and always discover something new."

Inside the telephone booth, another sign tells the visitor to pick up the receiver, listen to the end, and only then take an envelope from the shelf and read what is written inside. The music is entrancing and the surroundings fade at once. The envelope's contents (which will not be revealed here) add another dimension to the interactive musical piece of art.

Horenstein is one of 10 Israeli artists who took part in the first seminar of the recently established Ma'aseh Hoshev (Informed Creations), a "house of study" for artists. The artists are all well-known in Israel and were chosen individually. They work in all types of media - poetry, music, plastic arts, dance, video, photography - and have been engaged in a dialogue using different talmudic texts taught by different teachers since February.

"Up until now talmudic study has been inaccessible, locked into yeshivas. Now it has been made accessible as a source of artistic inspiration," says Horenstein, who is already planning his next art piece for the second seminar. "There is such depth, it's fascinating."

Ma'aseh Hoshev, which is part of the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies (SIJS), is the combined inspiration of Professor Alice Shalvi, SIJS Chairperson, and Naftaly Gliksberg, its curator, producer and adviser.

Shalvi, a well-known British member of the Anglo-Israeli community, became interested some years ago in "the relationship between the arts and Judaism and how aesthetics express themselves in the text. In the Bible, you see in the description of the Holy Tabernacle the emphasis on dimension, color and textures. I was interested in the artistic elements of Jewish practice," she said.

She believes Jews withdrew from art because they were wary of falling into Greek ways. "I think a fear developed that once you start worshiping beauty as the Greeks did, you start worshiping idols and material things rather than the spiritual." Nevertheless, she feels the Jews maybe went too far. "Now look at the Orthodox and how they dress - it's like they almost negate beauty. There's almost antagonism, a fear of beauty."

Maya Cohen Levy, "Hundred Stones as Big as a Handful"

Horenstein's art is only the beginning of the short but provoking tour of creative art works at Mishkenot She'ananim. The Jewish element of the works is sometimes no more than a symbolic word in the title, which gives conceptual depth to the exhibit, or it can be a whole text as in the case of Horenstein and Maya Cohen-Levy.

However, in Cohen-Levy's case, there is a not-so-latent element of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Cohen Levi superimposes a biblical text on the testimony of an arrested Palestinian man.

Ruth Almog is inspired by the story of Rachel and Jacob and writes a story of a conversation between them that is more reminiscent of a reservist soldier and his wife. Gliksberg says that "at the moment a dialogue develops on cultural identity, it obliges the artist to comment on the cultural reality. Here Jewish identity is part of the Israeli identity that is so involved in the conflict."