Image of the Week: View of Tzfat from Kaditah
© D. Yael Bernhard
It was a hot day in mid-July 2011 when I started this painting from the back of a zimmer (rural b&b) in northern Israel. I was there because a professional acquaintance, children's book author Allison Ofanansky, lives in this valley and recommended this place. For three days my traveling companions and I wandered the high rolling meadows that overlook the ancient city of Tzfat across the valley. At the highest point within walking distance, we found a dilapidated synagogue with no roads leading to it. We came upon flocks of sheep and goats, tended by a shepherd from Brooklyn (I kid you not, a young college student doing an exchange program). We walked along vineyards, through olive groves, and among rocks that looked as if they'd been there since Biblical times – and beyond.
I found a rocky perch with the view you see here, and pulled out my sturdy little travel-size painting pad. As I worked, a wandering cow made its way down the slope in front of me, stopping to graze, finally disappearing in a stand of fig trees. Soon another cow followed, its brown belly swaying casually. They knew where they were going: the sun was going down, and that was the direction of the farm. Behind me, Mt. Meron (shown in the photo below) was turning into a silhouette, while the shadows in Tzfat cooled the streets that had baked all day under the relentless Middle Eastern sun.
My greatest desire had been to walk the mountains in Israel, and here I was. Though the Catskills where I live may be just as old as their Galilean counterparts, the mark of humans upon the land cannot compare. History is so ancient in Israel, it's integrated into nature. The land I walked was suffused with human interactions going back 12,000 years. It is difficult to grasp the scope of time. Countless civilizations have risen and fallen in this place. I marvel that the Jewish people lived here in the time of the Philistines, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians – yet still exist today.
For me it was an immersion experience that linked me to the earth in a whole new way. Here the God of nature is one and the same as the God of human consciousness.
Of course, I wish I'd had a larger canvas, better paints, and more time. I could spend a lifetime doing landscape paintings in the Galilee. I'm hoping to get back there in the spring, b'ezrat Hashem.
View of Tzfat from Kaditah is the final picture in my new calendar, The Jewish Eye 5780/2019 Calendar of Art – available on Amazon ($18) and in my webstore ($18 including shipping).
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard