The Case for Jewish Visual Literacy
A New Paradigm of Jewish Literacy:
“Jewish literacy entails the capacity to produce meanings, create artifacts, or enact cultural performances in a particular Jewish cultural environment. “
“Traditional Jewish practice does not have a lot of space for artistic expression, but if we take the new paradigm seriously, we would cultivate opportunities for youth and adults to create and produce works of art—music, dance, drama, creative writing, visual arts, and more. “
Jon A. Levisohn, Brandeis University
Visual Art and Jewish Life:
“Making art, like Jewish practice, is premised on the belief that a careful attention to process itself is necessary to imagine and ultimately reach an unknown, but desired, outcome. Artmaking and Jewish life both demand surrender and determination; precision and wild abandon; patience and urgency; solitude and community. And at the very center of both Judaism and experimental artmaking is a generative tension between modernity and tradition; between a commitment to the lineage that formed us, and the desire to see and represent the world anew.”
Maia Ipp wrote in her widely shared 2019 essay Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde:
Combatting Visual Illiteracy:
A famous Israeli artist Yaacov Agam was upset. He marched into the Center for Scientific Research in Education and declared, “Children are visually illiterate!” The education researchers worked with him to further develop and test a program he created to teach visual literacy based on a theory of shapes and how they combine to make everything from alphabetic letters to great art. (https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/early-math-introducing-geometry-young-children/)
Yaacov Agam, Rabbi of the Jewish Visual:
In her 2013 “Agam Beyond the Visible”, Sayako Aragaki relates a self-perspective of Yaacov Agam: “Perhaps I am a visual rabbi’ smiled Agam shyly, indicating that he does secretly see himself as a spiritual inheritor of Rabbi Yehoshua.” Rabbi Yehoshua Gipstein his father, was a devotee of mystical Kabbalah and the search for the invisible, hidden divinity. Sayako Aragaki underscores Agam’s visual mission with his characterization of his artistic endeavors: “I don’t pray with words. I pray visually. My works are, so to speak, a visual prayer.” (Sayako Aragaki, Agam Beyond the Visible, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1997, P,?)
Developing a program for “Jewish Visual Literacy”
Beyond our own life experiences are the life experiences of innumerable Jews that have accumulated into the centuries of the Jewish historical experience. If we move from Judaism as “we have to believe” to Judaism as a record of the wealth of human experience coping with life’s struggles and achievements, then a whole world of possibilities opens to us.
Behind or underneath each biblical story, each prayer in the prayerbook, each ritual, and every life cycle event and period in Jewish history is a fundamental human experience or set of experiences. If we can allow ourselves to enter into that experience, no matter how apparently different or foreign it might seem from our own, we can gain perspective and enrich our own lives by expanding our experiential vocabulary.
Whatever one’s spiritual upbringing, “experimental” entering into Jewish historical and spiritual experience can teach us much about ourselves. Centuries of rich and varied experience can become creative resources we can “try on” to discover or rediscover important aspects of ourselves or the significant others in our lives.
As we expose ourselves to the visualizations of our people’s past, we learn to create our own meaningful visual environment.