Passover:
Abridged Description

This painting pivotally takes off on the dual meaning of a single Hebrew root word “Beka” found in the Torah and Haftorah readings for Passover. The essential miracle of Passover is the splitting of the Red Sea by Moses (Vayebaku hamayim; Exodus XIV: 22). Ezekiel describes his vision of the reconstitution of the dead bones, resurrection of the dead, as taking place after G-d sits him down in the midst of a valley (Habikah). According to tradition the Resurrection of the Dead will take place on Passover.

This painting fuses imagery from both these sources creating a new combined visio-literary portrait illustrating that after the sea is split, low and behold in its exposed dry valley there reside dead bones, which are then stitched together bone to bone, ligament to ligament, leading to the resurrected family unit of father, mother and child. The image of dead bones conjures up images of the Holocaust Auschwitz victims who are spewed out of their crematoria (Behold, I open up your graves) and are reconstituted (resurrected) to form the corpus Judaica. With resurrection (recreation) just as in the original biblical creation, we see the four blue winds representing G-d’s breath coalescing from the four corners of the world symbolized by the blue (techaylet) of the tallit rejuvenating and resurrecting the dead bodies. Phylacteries (Tefillin) which are worn in order to remember the redemption of Egypt are here seen as orthopedic straps holding the bones together as in Ezekiel’s vision.

There are additional references to the Seder plate, the concept of creation, and recreation based on scriptural Passover Haftorah references mentioned in Samuel II and Isaiah. Thus this painting conjures up Passover’s transcendent message of redemption, salvation, creation, recreation, and resurrection based on the interwoven tapestry of Passover textual sources derived from the Torah, the Haftorahs, and the Haggada and holiday prayers. This painting contains innumerable puns, metaphors, and delicately layered subtexts.