Winter Gift 2024 Print

Description

Artist Statement by Liora Ostroff

For the first month of the genocide, I carried Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschels 1973 essay The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement in my pocket to sit-ins and protests, and thought of it as my amulet. Though Jews of various political persuasions claim Heschel as a spiritual and political ancestor, it was clear to me that his writings on the Vietnam Waras well as those on the Holocaustplace him firmly in the lineage of todays Jewish anti-war activists. While the Jewish establishment was insistently defending Israels razing of Gaza, one of the most venerated rabbis of the 20th century was calling through time, clearly and unequivocally: Some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Soon, inspired by the art of Jewish scribal amulets, which have been used since ancient times for protection or spiritual meditation, I began making prints that arranged text from Heschels anti-war essays as meditative amulets. For some, like the one youll find enclosed here, Ive taken inspiration from the particular tradition of Shiviti amulets, a Kabbalistic form that emerged in the 18th century. Traditionally, these amulets depict the text of Psalm 67 in the shape of a seven-branch menorah, with half of a verse from Psalm 16 on top:

‘
I have set the Lord before me always.

This ornately arrayed text is meant to be transportative: By gazing at its surface during prayer and focusing on the tetragrammaton (the four Hebrew letters of the holy name of God, which is abbreviated above but appears in full on the amulets) and the branches of the menorah (which for Kabbalists represent seven of the sefirot, or aspects of the Divine), we may find ourselves in a holy dimension. As Ive arranged and rearranged Heschels essays around such meditative frameworks, Ive seen new meanings emerge. For instance, for this printdrawn from Heschels 1971 essay Dissent, which affirms dissent and rebuke as essential characteristics of Jewish moral behaviorI replaced the tetragrammaton with the word acts, while near the bottom of the image, where some Shiviti amulets include another name of God, Shaddai, I placed word. This substitution reveals the holiness of words and acts of creative dissent.

In a moment when the vast majority of Jewish institutions have abandoned the path of righteousness while casting out those who object, I hope this amulet offers strength to the dissenters and reminds you that your protest is sacred.

Liora Ostroff is a Baltimore-based artist whose work explores Jewishness, queerness, and violence. From 2021 to 2023, she was curator-in-residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she developed the exhibitions A Fence Around the Torah: Safety and Unsafety in Jewish Life and My Odessa: Paintings by Yefim Ladyzhensky. She is the founding education director at the New Synagogue Project in Washington, DC.

8 x 10 inch print, printed by Radix Media in Brooklyn, NY