Spring has finally arrived in the form of striped purple crocuses. One of the names of the upcoming holiday of Pesach (also known as Passover) is Ḥag HaAviv or Holiday of Spring. An advantage of Passover coming early this year is the by the time the magnolias and dogwoods are in bloom, our Passover cleaning/cooking will be done, and we will better be able to enjoy the spring buds. Next year there will be an extra month of Adar so Passover will be later in the spring. If we didn’t have that extra month of Adar, we might be celebrating Pesach in the winter.
In renaming this blog, I had some ideas of settling into a particular niche. I’ve read oh how a proper blog should have a niche and stick with it. Well, I fear that may not come to be, as I have all sorts of ideas for this blog, and rarely are they consistently of one sort or another. A friend today gave me a poem she had written several years ago. It is somewhat biographical, and it also alludes some of the difficulties of the Sacrifice of Isaac. So stay tuned for that one. I have in mind to write a review of Ester and Ruzya, a wonderful book. Some ideas for interviews of other bloggers have come into my head on a particular topic – we will see if I follow through with that one. And once I get back to my art group, I suspect that art exercises and sketches will again be topics for blog discussions.
What can one say about a striped purple crocus? It’s symbolism seems to be universal, as it often pushes out of the ground before other flowers do (my neighbor’s snow drops appeared a while back, however). The word crocus is Greek, and it may have its roots in the Hebrew כרכום karkōm. I am guessing that this is a Crocus vernus.
Happy Pesach to those who celebrate. Happy Easter to those who celebrate that holiday. And happy spring of crocuses, forsythia, tulips and daffodils and whatever grows in your part of the world to all.
Leora’s note: I’m not sure how I first connected with Debra Walk, but we seem to have 22 friends in common on Facebook. I enjoy seeing her beautiful artwork, so I asked her a few questions to learn more. Enjoy.
1) When did you realize you wanted to be an artist?
I loved art from an early age, and my high school art teacher told me that I should seriously pursue art, but by the time I reached my teens, I somehow developed the idea that art was not a valuable profession and decided that I wanted to do something medically related as a profession, and art would be my hobby.
2) Please describe the work you do.
I’ve worked in various media over the years – calligraphy, paper cutting, polymer clay, and, most recently, fabric.
When I was younger, I loved the exactly measured type of calligraphy that I did then, but after a while, I felt a need to work in a softer and less exacting medium. I was living far away from my children and grandchildren at the time and wanted to make them things for them that they could cuddle with and wrap around themselves and not just hang on their walls. This led to my beginning to work with fabric.
My “bread and butter” work involves making Challah Covers and Platta Covers, and I guess they fall more into the design category, but in between producing these, I like to work on new art ideas, often involving Hebrew quotations. I’ve had a running list in my head for probably 35 years of some of my favorite quotes and i enjoy interpreting them in the various media that I work with. There are also some basic design ideas that I’ve used over and over with variations, and I’ve come to consider them as a basic part of who I am an what I’m doing in the world.
I enjoy making family trees, often ordered by customers as gifts celebrating 50th anniversaries. It’s a pleasure to help people celebrate their family life. Over the years I’ve done family trees as paintings, paper cuts and fabric art.
I’m currently experimenting with combining my two favorite types of art/craft and doing brush calligraphy on fabric and also reinterpreting some of my paper cut ideas in fabric..
3) How have you used social media (Facebook, blog, Twitter) to promote your art?
I use Facebook and LinkedIn, but I really have to work on that. I have a tendency to use these social media once in a while, and then forget about them for long periods of time.
I love www.etsy.com (see http://www.etsy.com/shop/debrawalk), the online crafts marketplace comprising hundreds of thousands of crafts shops. It has revolutionized the crafts and handmade market, offering international exposure and highly attractive terms of sale for artists and craftspeople and I truly have only good things to say about it. It also is a social medium in its own right – you can follow artists of your choice, correspond with them, “heart” their stores or work and even create your own “treasuries” of favorite items that may be shared with others.
I must also mention Pinterest (see http://pinterest.com/debrawalk/), not as a means of promotion, but as a fabulous way of enjoying the vast array of visual treats available on the intenet and collecting visual ideas. It’s hard to express how much I enjoy looking at the stream of exquisite photography, whether landscape or wildlife, gorgeous gardens, waterfalls, forests, etc. I actually have begun to recite the phrase “מה רבו מעשיך ה’ כולם בחכמה עשית, מלאה הארץ קניינך” “How many are your works Hashem, all made in wisdom, the earth is filled with your creations (loosely translated)” as I surf the Pinterest boards, enjoying my armchair exploration of the wonders of the world.
4) What is your favorite part of being an artist?
Self-expression, work is fun, I feel as if I have little pieces of myself in homes around the world, at people’s Shabbat tables, etc.
5) Where do you look for inspiration?
The many art books I own, Pinterest, as described above, nature, various man-made goods I encounter in the world around me (textiles, housewares, children’s books). I also am an avid reader of “middle-brow” fiction, which nurtures my soul and thus, in some way, inspires me.
6) What are the hard parts of being an artist?
Discipline, disciple, discipline…I’m not naturally disciplined.
As someone who has a very strong critical voice in my head that tells me, among other things, that being an artist is a silly way to spend my life, I’d like to share a teaching that I once learned from Sarah Yehudit Schneider of A Still, Small Voice.
Sarah Yehudit takes the second half of the verse from Psalms, “פותח את ידיך ומשביע לכל חי רצון” and instead of the usually interpretation that seems to state that God fulfills our desires, says that it means that He provides each of us with our (deepest) desires, the ones that are connected to each person’s individual purpose in the world. thus, if one loves to play with fabric and color, that is somehow connected to that purpose.
That has become how I talk back to that negative voice.
I hope you have enjoyed this interview with fabric artist Debra Walk.
This was my father’s chanukiah – as he passed away in October, we had to decide whether to give away his chanukiah or to use it. We decided to keep it. The middle branch, called the Shamash (literally the helper), is broken off, and I plan to get it fixed sometime before the next Chanukah. I am hoping a jeweler can fix it. The photo above shows the candles as they were lit on the third night.
Here is the chanukiah on the last night of the holiday. You can tell it is the last night because one typically lights from left to right, and that chanukiah is going to get filled with light all the way to the very end! The other light in the photos are from our other chanukiot (or their reflections).
Thursday Challenge theme is Light (Photos of beautiful light, reflecting, shining through, colourful,…).
Tonight is the second night of Chanukah – we light two candles. It’s been a long time since I put up a review. Hurricane Sandy came and went, cardinals visited when I filled my bird feeder, and I painted a teacup watercolor.
The post that stood out in my mind last week was this one on the United Nations. I don’t think this is what Woodrow Wilson had in mind when he proposed that nations get together for discussions.
Congregation Sons of Israel in Asbury Park, now a church
Congregation Sons of Israel in Asbury Park, an Orthodox Jewish congregation, was founded in 1904. The congregation has since moved away from Asbury Park, but for several decades it was housed in this building in Asbury Park. A few weeks ago we rented a four wheel cycle (pedal car) from Brielle Cyclery on the Asbury Park boardwalk and cycled past the building, which now belongs to a church (First French Speaking Baptist Church).
The building now has two large crosses in the front: one has to look carefully to see signs that it was built as a synagogue. Details to notice are the stained glass windows.
What do you see in those windows? I see a Torah, menorah, ner tamid, a book, a dove, and possibly someone praying in a prayer shawl on the right.
Also, if you look carefully at the carvings in the front you will see the Hebrew date of 5709 and the corresponding Gregorian date of 1949, the year the building was built for Congregation Sons of Israel.
The 1920’s saw a lot of development in Asbury Park, including this casino. Unfortunately, unlike other buildings that were redeveloped in the past decade, the casino still seems to be just a frame of a building now.
The decline of the prominence of Asbury Park began in the Depression, and competition from shopping and amusements in other parts of New Jersey continued its decline. When my husband first took me on a tour of Asbury Park in the early 1990’s, it looked quite decrepit. In the past decade, however, buildings such as the Paramount Theater below were redeveloped. I posted another shot of the Asbury Park theatre in 2010, with a bit of its history. You can visit some cool shops like this one inside the convention hall and beside the boardwalk.
Pictured above is the Berkeley Carteret hotel, with the famous Tillie face in the foreground on the Wonder Bar. The hotel has a bit of personal history for me: when I was pregnant with my first child in the 1990’s, my brother-in-law knew the caterer who was working at the hotel during Passover. So he invited us to come and enjoy the bountiful buffet at the hotel. Unfortunately, I had morning sickness and could only eat the cucumber salad.
One of the amusements near the Asbury Park beach is this gigantic chess set.
Asbury Park Jewish history is one of the synagogue Sons of Israel: in 1904 the Orthodox Jewish community in Asbury Park incorporated as the Sons of Israel. My husband’s family belonged to this synagogue; sadly, it needed to sell the synagogue building and move out of Asbury Park in the 1980’s.
Interview with Iola Caplan: Iola Caplan is a friend of mine who now lives in Highland Park, New Jersey. In this interview, she talks about living in Asbury Park in the 1950’s and 60’s, including living through riots in 1967. She relates that the Hillel School also got its start in Asbury Park.
Lavan, Yaakov, Leah or Rachel
My daughter and her friend worked very hard on this diorama for her school’s Torah Fair. It’s sort of like a science fair, explained my husband, except the subject matter was all from the book of Breishit. My daughter’s project depicted the wedding of Yaakov and Leah. Or was it Yaakov and Rachel? In any case, for those of you who don’t know the story, Yaakov first had to work seven years to marry Leah. He thought he was marrying Rachel, but Lavan, Leah and Rachel’s father, tricked him into marrying Leah. After seven more years, he got to marry Rachel. Poor Leah – I once did a painting of Leah crying.
In other news, my eldest son graduated from high school, which emotionally is charged for me – how could my first baby be a high school graduate? We discussed in the car on the way home what is the meaning of “real life” – does being a high school graduate mean one has entered the real world? According to my niece who just finished her first year of college, college is not real life.
Have any leftover matza? See any matza for sale and wonder what one might do with it? Here’s an easy dessert I made with my daughter during Passover.
Ingredients:
1 bag chocolate chips
1 sheet of matza, broken into pieces
1/2 cup of your favorite nuts (walnuts, almonds or pecans) broken into pieces
Paper plates, a large spoon and wax paper
If you want, you can soak the nuts for a few hours to make them more chewable. Melt the chocolate chips in a saucepan. Add broken matza and nuts and mix with the chocolate. Put a sheet of wax paper on a paper plate (the flat white kind that one puts in the microwave work best). Put a spoonful of the chocolate mixture unto the wax paper. Repeat until you have filled the wax paper (you can probably fit about 5 or 6 of these on a paper plate). Repeat on another paper plate (our mixture made two platefuls). Place flat in the freezer. Serve straight from the freezer.
Before Pesach we have a custom of burning chametz (bread, crackers, cereal, pasta, anything made of five grains: wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt). When I was a kid, I remember burning chametz in our backyard. Now there are laws about creating fires, so observant Jews get special permission to burn chametz. This burning took place in Edison, New Jersey.
A tradition we have in our family (and others do as well) is to burn the lulav, the palm branch left over from Sukkot, the fall holiday in which we sit in a booth outside for a week.
In this photo you can see both lulavim (plural of lulav) and real bread. It got quite smokey – my husband doesn’t remember it being so smokey in the past. Maybe this is because the regular Edison staff were on vacation for Good Friday and a nice person was left in charge who didn’t quite manage the smoke? I don’t know, but I left there sniffing my clothes, wondering if I smelt like someone who had walked into a smokey bar.
I had enough time to attend biur chametz (burning of the chametz) this year because I managed to get all the cooking I had planned the day before and early in the morning. One of the most popular dishes among my sister-in-law’s family that I made was mushroom paté; personally, my favorite was the marinated beets with ginger and garlic. Planning to make both of those again tomorrow.
Shabbat watercolor with challot, candles, and kiddush cup; watercolor by Leora Wenger, 2012
Every week traditional Jews around the world celebrate a holiday. As one of my friends said, we prepare Thanksgiving dinner every week! Well, maybe not turkey. In the painting are two challot (plural of challah, the traditional braided bread), two candles (we are not allowed to light new flames on Shabbat, so we light candles before the day begins; I actually light five, one candle for each family member) and 1 kiddush cup (filled with wine or grape juice). The two loaves of bread symbolize the fact that when the Children of Israel were in the desert, they would pick double the bread (actually, it was manna) the day before and rest on Shabbat. Kiddush means “sanctification” – it’s the special prayer said at the beginning of the Friday night and Shabbat lunch meals. We also say a version of kiddush on Jewish holidays like Passover or Sukkot.
I asked a few of my blogger friends to tell me some of their Shabbat favorites. Enjoy the responses!
My favorite zemer is Mizmor L’David.
My favorite things to eat on Shabbos are freshly baked challah and potato kugel (which always tastes best at the shul kiddush).
A favorite pastime on Shabbos is reading, but I also really enjoy spending time with family and friends (without the usual distractions of telephones, television, etc.).
Least favorite part of Shabbos? When it ends of course! (and we have to clean up and go back to the usual routine).
“In New York there were laws that forbade opening stores on Sunday so in order to keep Shabbat an orthodox Jew had the choice of keeping his store closed two days every week or to open on Sunday and if a policeman passed by pay a fine. My grandfather did a little of both. So what was only a marginally profitable business in the dark days of the Great Depression became even more marginal.”
And in this post From Generation to Generation Risa talks about her mother and shares how she is one of a long chain of women who have lit candles for Shabbat.
Batya talks about how she and her husband eat on Shabbat: lots of vegetables! Her Shabbat every week also has Torah – she regularly attends a women’s class called Shiur Nashim (class for women).
Ilana-Davita enjoys planning her Shabbat menus in advance of the day and reading and napping on Shabbat. Traveling back in time to 2008, she posted Quick Shabbat Dishes with Asian Touch.
Mirj of Miriyummy writes:
Favorite zemer: Dror Yikra, sung in an authentic as possible Yemenite accent.
Favorite Shabbat food: my husband makes these amazing roast potatoes. He parboils them and then roasts them in a hot oven in shmaltz!
Favorite parsha: I love parshat Beshalach because of Shirat Hayam.
Favorite dvar torah: My husband has a dvar torah for parshat Noach where he compares Noach to Avraham and Moshe. I never get bored or tired hearing that one (every year!).
Favorite Shabbat past time: kiddush hopping! Some whisky, some kugel, lots of friends!
Favorite Shabbat blog: my own post: The Story of Noah — Good Friends in High Places — where friends of ours helped us when God and the weather made it uncertain that we would get Shabbat on the table in time.
Favorite Shabbat image: my challot after they come out of the oven.
Least favorite part of Shabbat: clearing the table. I don’t mind washing dishes, I just hate the whole clearing up after a good meal. I just want to sit at the table and savor the meal, instead of getting busy clearing everything away.
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If you keep Shabbat/Shabbos, what are your favorites? Songs, food, parsha? Anything else?
