art

Landscape Workshop

Jill showed the group a landscape by Vincent Van Gogh as an inspiration for the children to create their own landscapes. My daughter created a cityscape, and I plan to show it as my next “What Do You See” post. Then she said “and parents feel free to do your own.” I happily took a piece of paper and created the above scene. My daughter wanted to help out, and she added her own embellishments to the painting. I wonder if you can figure out what parts she contributed?

A Squooshy Cabin

Jack hosts this week’s Haveil Havalim, the weekly blog carnival of the Jewish Blogosphere. He compares Haveil Havalim to the famous scene from Night at the Opera, when Harpo, Chico, Groucho and too many others crowd into an ocean liner cabin.

And I updated my Pics of the Month page. The page features some of my favorite paintings, photos or Flash creations. Featured in this post is a watercolor I did in 2007. Any ideas why I chose it for this post?

What Do You See?

Yes! It’s another round of “What Do You See?,” brought to you by my daughter. I stole this homework out of her hands before her teacher could write “So pretty!” in big bright red marker on top. (Can anyone relate?)

So, what do you see?

Be Happy Adar Is Coming

Two thoughts on how this happiness needs to be tempered:
1) This year marks the first anniversary of the terrible murder of 8 teenage students from Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem.

2) It is a custom to drink alcohol on Purim. However, one must always take care of one’s health and the health of others. Therefore, if you or family members do not know how to drink responsibly, don’t. We don’t need the happy day of Purim to turn to tragedy.

Sea Vegetables

Have you ever eaten a sea vegetable? If you’ve had sushi, then you have. The nori wrapper on the outside of the sushi is seaweed; it comes from the sea. Recently, I’ve been working at adding some seaweed into my diet. I bought some Eden© Mekabu, a wakame sea vegetable sporophyll, and every now and then I sprinkle it into soup or rice or noodles. Seaweed takes a while to get used to, but I am beginning to enjoy its distinct flavor.

Because I ask Klara so many questions about macrobiotics, she suggested I subscribe to the Macrobiotic Guide. Here’s how they answered a question of mine:

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Q: Why is it so important to add sea vegetables to one’s diet? Leora

A: Sea vegetables are nutrient-rich, unlike any other food I have discovered. They provide essential vitamins and minerals I cannot find in other foods I choose to incorporate into my diet. I think of them as the nerve center for my body. Without them, I feel lacking. I can fill my belly with volumes of food but without incorporating sea vegetables into my diet, my hunger will continue unabated until I provide it with those essential nutrients found in sea vegetables. (That is the purpose of “hunger.” It is the natural impulse that drives us; when rightly understood, it guides us toward the right foods, in the right quantity, at the right time.)

Without sea vegetables, I grope for foods that fill but do not satisfy. Organic foods are wonderful and vitally important – for many reasons – but even organic foods might be grown in deficient soil, yielding deficient plants.

Denudation is the natural process where minerals are carried off by wind and water from land into the sea. As a result, over millions of years of this geological process, we find a rich depository of nutrients in our oceans. For this reason, sea vegetables have become nutrient-rich unlike all other foods.

This is how sea vegetables affect me personally. This is not to say people cannot live well without them. Historically, traditional diets around the globe have provided healthful foods without the incorporation of sea vegetables. But looking around me today, traditional diets have all but vanished, and soil quality has become impoverished through poor soil/farming practices, making sea vegetables all the more important. There are medicinal values to them as well. Jeffrey Reel

Find out more about sea vegetables at http://macrobiotics.co.uk/seavegetables.htm.

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So, do you think you might try some sea vegetables? More on seaweed soon.

What Do You See?

Welcome to another round of “What Do You See?” with a drawing by my daughter. So, nu, what’s in this illustration? Thanks for playing!

Who is Helping Whom?

A note from Jill, her art teacher:
“My art professor suggested coloring books are the worst thing for a child, because they feel they can’t live up to the pre-made/adult created outline. That they come up with such interesting and wonderful things when given ‘permission’ to explore. ”

What Do You See?

My daughter is learning one point perspective with Jill, her art teacher. What do you see in my daughter’s painting? (click to enlarge)

Here are Jill and my daughter in Jill’s studio. What do you see in Jill’s paintings?

Girl with Tulip Watercolor

Transition to Exodus

Robert Alter writes in his Translation with Commentary: The Five Books of Moses:

As the long historical narrative of the Five Books of Moses moves from the patriarchs to the Hebrew nation in Egypt, it switches gears. The narrative conventions deployed, from type-scenes and thematic keywords to the treatment of dialogue, remain the same, but the angle from which events are seen and the handling of the characters are notably different. Genesis ended with death, and the distinctly Egyptian mummification, of Joseph. Exodus begins with a listing of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, thus establishing a formal link with the concluding chapters of Genesis in which a more detailed list of the emigrants from Canaan is provided…Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes of Israelites whose spectacular prolificness introduces to the story the perspective of the whole wide world of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis: “And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land [הָאָרֶץ same word as in Genesis] was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7).

Nahum Sarna in Exploring Exodus explains the title:

It is called in English “Exodus,” a title derived originally from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made for the Jewish community of ancient Alexandria in Egypt. It is abbreviated from a fuller title “The Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt,” which in turn reflects a Hebrew title current among the communities of the Land of Israel. The most widely used Hebrew name is Sefer Sh’mot (“The Book: Names”), taken from the opening Hebrew words of the book, “These are the names of the sons of Israel.”

Here’s how Sarna connects Exodus to its predecessor Genesis:

The narratives in Genesis focus upon individuals and the fortunes of a single family; they center upon the divine promises of peoplehood and national territory that are vouchsafed to them. In the Book of Exodus, the process of fulfilling those promises is set in motion…God’s commissioning of Moses at the scene of the Burning Bush directs him: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel and say to them: the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has appeared to me and said “I have taken note of you [Heb. paqod paqad’ti] and of what is being done to you in Egypt…'” This is a studied echo of Joseph’s dying words “God will surely take notice of you [Heb. paqod yiphqod] and bring you up from this land to the land which He promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

In the previous parshiot, the ones of Breishit, we got to know the characters well. In Shmot, we still can learn from the people presented in the parsha, such as the daughter of Pharoah, but I feel more distance. Perhaps we can see the upcoming parshiot as a bridge from character portrayal to nation-building and the giving of the Torah in the middle of the Book of Shmot.

Do you find transitions hard? How do you see the change from the Book of Breishit (Genesis) to the Book of Shmot (Exodus)?

Last year: Best Parsha in the Universe (includes link to a song)