blogs/rabbi-ed-feinstein

Dear Friends,

When you visit the synagogue next, you will notice something new on the walls. Our annual gala celebration this year premiered a project, “A Week in the Life of VBS.” Working with master photographer, Bill Aron, VBS spent weeks taking photos. Kids, adults, professionals, amateurs, brought cameras, cell phones and I-Pads to record the vitality and spirit of VBS. Among the thousands of photos submitted, we chose an array to represent the energy and poetry of our community. You'll find these on the walls of the synagogue hall, and in the video montage that can be accessed HERE. I hope you enjoy these images.

Through this project, we hope to create a visual celebration of a vital Jewish community. More than that, we hope to expand the visual vocabulary of Jewish life. What does “Jewish” look like? What images do we hold of authentic Jewish life? Lots of us have pictures on our walls of old, bearded rabbis studying Talmud in some distant world. But we are all old. And Judaism is not distant. We are young and old, male and female, joyful, engaged, and very much present. By offering new images of “Jewish,” we change our deeply-help impressions of our faith and culture.

Finally, the project represents one small step in a much larger project of reviving the Jewish arts and to bring the Jewish artist home.

We are taught that God is an artist. The world was created with balance, color, proportion, and beauty. In Genesis, God creates a Garden in Eden with trees and plants that were “pleasing to the sight and good for food.” The Creator brought an aesthetic to the act of creation. There is something sacred in the aesthetic, in the appreciation of form and beauty and design. But over the centuries, Jews lost that sacred sense. As a wandering people, we could hardly invest in architecture or plastic arts. And then the rabbis forbade the presentation of images as a violation of the Second Commandment. Literature and law became the media of Jewish aesthetic impulses. We created magnificent religious poetry and majestic codes of holy law. Until modernity, the Jewish painter and sculptor had no home in our community. The storyteller and actor were pushed away. Music was subordinated to the word. When a community found the resources and the security to build a great synagogue, we borrowed the art and architecture of our neighbors. Spanish Jewish synagogues look like the great mosques of the Spanish Golden Age. European synagogues look much like the great churches. And American synagogue looked like the palaces of cinema celebrated by our culture.

It is time we brought our artists home to the Jewish community and set them to work creating new sacred spaces and sacred forms. This is one of the projects we've taken on at VBS.

Before becoming our cantor, Phil Baron composed songs for Disney. Three years ago, he invited his former colleagues�"composers, musicians, performers�"to create new music for the synagogue. The Helfman Institute, named for the great Jewish composer, Max Helfman, has welcomed home the talents of dozens of great composers and performers. Many have performed for us here at VBS at our annual Shabbat Shira celebration of new music.

Theatre Dybbuk, an experimental theater group headed by Aaron Henne, performed a special piece for our Selichot service this year. Deeply moving, the performance raised the question of how worship is itself a form of theater and how theater is a form of worship. This Summer, Theatre Dybbuk will premier an original new piece, “Tefilla” continuing this exploration of our prayer traditions and their dramatic resonances.

This year, our Etz Chaim Learning Center offers a Performing Arts Academy. This new concept in supplementary Jewish education organizes learning projects in dramatic arts. Led by Lisa Clumeck, the Performing Arts Academy presented the musical “Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat,” in December, and this past Sunday, presented an original work written by the Academy's students titled "In the Brothers' Defense."

The exhibit before us, “A Week in the Life,” has been organized by Bill Aron, the Jewish world's leading photographer. Bill has spent a lifetime creating a visual language of the Jewish experience. Not only are his pieces exhibited in museums and galleries the world over, but they have become our way of perceiving our Jewish identity. We see ourselves differently because of Bill's remarkable eyes, and how he has shown us the depth and design of Jewish life. We are proud to share this remarkable experience with him.

This is just the beginning. Drama, music, photography, design, painting, poetry, sculpture, storytelling…these are the arts that God has shared with us. These arts have something deeply sacred within them. We welcome the artists home. Home to the synagogue. Home to their privileged place as vessels of divine creativity. Home to their people.

Come to the synagogue and enjoy the art that now fills our hallways. In the meantime, CLICK HERE to view the montage, and celebrate our living, joyful community of Jewish life.

With blessings,
Rabbi Ed Feinstein