Image of the Week: God of My Fathers
© D. Yael Bernhard
Western religion is rooted in a time of patriarchy. With the rise of agriculture came land ownership, complex hierarchies, and settled city-states. Men dominated women as people dominated the land. Yet as in most patriarchal cultures, the power of the feminine also coexisted, and with the passage of time the balance between the two can change.
God of My Fathers is the image for November in The Jewish Eye 5783/ 2023 Calendar of Art. It pictures the first lineage of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, the father of the three monotheistic religions that sprang from the Middle East: first Judaism, out of which grew Christianity, followed by Islam. It was Abraham who first questioned the prevailing pagan views of idol-worship, and envisioned a God that was formless, invisible, eternal, and most of all, omnipresent. From Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob and Esau, a revolutionary new idea began to take root: the concept of one universal God. Known by Abraham's descendants as "God of my fathers," called by the ancient name El Shaddai or just El, this God was not attached to a place, nor found in an object, but appears to characters in the Bible in visions and dreams. Abraham instinctively knew this God, and rebelled against his father, who worked as a idol-maker, fashioning statues to be worshipped. According to a story from the Midrash, Abraham smashed his father's idols at the age of eleven, and was brought before the king, who tried to burn him as a test of his God. Abraham was saved, baruch haShem (thank God), and lived on to become the progenitor of one of the oldest living traditions on earth.
But Abraham's twin grandsons Jacob and Esau did not get along so well, and here the family tree splits like two opposite palm fronds. The fraternal twin brothers go their separate ways, and father two separate lineages. Like a springboard, Isaac bears his son's feet in the palms of his hands. Isaac and his sons are small compared to the greatness of Abraham, who first questioned the nature of spiritual connection and declared the source of all life to be intangible yet merciful; infinite yet personal. His connection to the Eternal is strong and focused – for what statue of stone or clay could hold power over the lives of those who made them? Abraham's unshakable faith and clear vision changed the whole course of human history.
I don't feel the need to erase patriarchy from my heritage, and have no reluctance to honor the good that came from it. Only a man such as Abraham could have risen in his time and rejected the Canaanite ideology that sacrificed live children to the fiery mouths of stone statues. These statues were believed to be wrathful, vengeful entities that controlled weather, harvests, livestock, plagues, and warring neighbors. By contrast, Abraham's relationship with his God is personal, subject to arguments and challenges between them. Sometimes Abraham wins. Without his strength of conviction and his uncanny blend of logic and faith, where would we be today?
This image – a cross between a weaving and a tree – symbolizes the line of Abraham and all he stands for. It manifests as a living, growing structure of interrelating parts. The characters, with their intermingled narratives, come together and pull apart, full of the tension of fathers and sons. Their flesh tones are in the tree of which they are an inextricable part. White space plays an important role in their clothing and features that also appear as holes. The white background serves to make these holes ambiguous, so that figures and background interpenetrate. This interconnection is the presence of the Invisible One – which crowns the tree and marks the patriarch's forehead as the blue eye of El Shaddai. The original painting is painted in acrylics on handmade, coarsely textured watercolor paper. The texture is not visible here; in the original, it enhances the effects of the white background.
As a counterpart to this painting, another one is gestating in my mind – an image to honor our ancestral foremothers: Sarah, wife of Abraham; Rebecca, wife of Isaac; Rachel and Leah, Zilpah and Bilhah – wives of Jacob, who bore him twelve sons and a daughter. From these twelve tribes all Jews have descended, as well as Christians and some Muslims. Just as El Shaddai promised Abraham, we are as numerous as the stars in heaven, our footsteps joined in the same river of time as our ancestors.
The original painting of God of My Fathers is for sale. Please inquire if you're interested.
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A good week to all,
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
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