Tag Archives: Torah

Jew of the Week: Marc Chagall

The Colour Master

Moishe Shagal (1887-1985) was born in the shtetl of Liozna, in what is today Belarus, the oldest of nine children in a Hasidic Jewish family. Shagal went to a religious heder school until age 13, but wanted to learn a wider breadth of subjects, so his mother managed to bribe a local high school to take him in. (Jews were then forbidden from public schools, and the bribe was a whopping 50 roubles—three months salary—a small fortune for their impoverished family.) This is where he discovered his passion for art. He soon enrolled in Yehuda Pen’s art school in Vitebsk, and was given free tuition since he was so poor. While most Jewish artists in Russia at the time hid their Jewishness, Shagal embraced it. He would later say how Hasidism greatly influenced his artwork, and many of his pieces are deliberately meant to preserve Jewish culture. He wrote that every single one of his artworks “breathed” with the “spirit and reflection” of his childhood home and memories. In 1906, Shagal moved to St. Petersburg and joined a prestigious art academy (using a friend’s passport). A few years later, he left to Paris and henceforth went by “Marc Chagall”. Among his biggest influences were Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and (former Jew of the Week) Pissarro, though he did not want to be associated with any particular type of art. An exhibit in Germany in 1914 first brought him wider renown. He then returned to Russia to get married and start a family. In 1917, while broke and going hungry for days, Chagall was offered a job as arts commissar in Vitebsk. He accepted, and went on to found the Vitebsk Arts College which would go on to become the top art academy in the USSR. A few years later, Chagall moved to Moscow to be the stage designer of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, where he produced some of his most famous murals. In 1923, Chagall moved yet again, back to France, and partnered with Ambroise Vollard. The latter commissioned many of Chagall’s greatest works, including illustrations from the Tanakh. For inspiration, Chagall moved to Tel-Aviv and stayed at the home of Meir Dizengoff, the city’s first mayor. (That home was where the State of Israel would be proclaimed in 1948, and is today known as Independence Hall.) The Holy Land made a huge impact on Chagall, causing him to become something of a ba’al teshuva and return to his Jewish faith. He immersed himself in Jewish studies, and worked diligently on his “Old Testament” collection (which took until 1956 to complete, and was then hailed as being “full of divine inspiration”). Chagall returned to France shortly before the Nazi invasion. He was imprisoned and had his citizenship revoked. Pressure from the United States got him released, and he arrived in New York in the summer of 1941. His favourite hangout was the heavily-Jewish Lower East Side, where Chagall felt at home and spent much of his time socializing in Yiddish. Meanwhile, Chagall worked as a set and costume designer for the Ballet Theatre. He would return to France after the war, and in his later years produced sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and stained glass. He painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera (covering 2400 square feet and using 200 kilos of paint), and wrote an autobiography, too. Chagall has been called the “greatest image-maker” of our time, and Picasso said that he was “the only painter left who understands what colour is.”

Words of the Week

I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.
– Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s “Abraham and the Three Angels”

Jew of the Week: Moses Mendelssohn

Father of Jewish Enlightenment 

Moshe ben Mendel (1729-1786) was born in the Germanic municipality of Dessau to an impoverished, religious Jewish family. His father was a sofer (a Torah scribe), and trained young Moshe in the scribal arts, as well. Moshe also learned Torah and Talmud with Rabbi David Frankel. When Frankel took up a rabbinic post in Berlin, Moshe moved with him to the capital. To keep him safer and open more opportunities, his father had asked him to make his name more German-sounding, resulting in the name Moses Mendelssohn (“son of Mendel”). Mendelssohn continued in his rabbinic studies with the intention of becoming a rabbi, but also took up the study of mathematics, Latin, and philosophy. He soon began learning French and English as well, with an influential Jewish physician and tutor. That tutor introduced Mendelssohn to renowned German philosopher and writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The two became good friends, and Mendelssohn inspired Lessing’s popular play Nathan the Wise. Mendelssohn’s genius soon spread throughout the secular world, and he even won the top Berlin Academy prize for mathematical proofs of metaphysics (second place went to Immanuel Kant!) In 1763, the King of Prussia granted Mendelssohn the special status of schutzjude, “Protected Jew”. At a time when secularism and atheism were sweeping Europe, Mendelssohn remained a believer and resolved to convince the masses On the Immortality of Souls, published in 1767. The treatise became so popular that people began calling him the “German Plato” and the “German Socrates”. In 1775, an order of expulsion was being drawn up against Swiss and German Jews, so Mendelssohn intervened to get the expulsion rescinded. Mendelssohn was constantly mired in theological debates with his German acquaintances, and often pressured to convert to Christianity. He resisted and defended his faith. Nonetheless, the stress was so great on him that he eventually fell deeply ill and was bedridden. At this point he resolved “to dedicate the remains of my strength for the benefit of my children or a goodly portion of my nation”. To make it more accessible to a wider audience, he started a new German translation and commentary of the Torah. The resulting Biur was hugely popular, and received approbations from many rabbis. Meanwhile, he worked to get various restrictions on Jews repealed, and played an instrumental role in getting Jews in Europe basic human and civil rights. In his Jerusalem, he argued passionately for freedom of religion, and for the Christian authorities to leave the Jews alone. Mendelssohn corresponded with one of the leading sages of the day, Rabbi Yakov Emden, and wrote how he “thirsted” for the rabbi’s teachings. Intriguingly, while Rabbi Emden had criticized the Zohar (the famous “textbook” of Jewish mysticism), Mendelssohn actually defended its authenticity. He also defended the authenticity of nikkud, the traditional Hebrew vowel system. Although he was widely admired and respected in his own day, Mendelssohn’s work opened up the door to more Jews learning secular subjects and entering mainstream society, which led to wider assimilation. Four of his own six children ended up converting to Christianity, and just one grandson remained Jewish. (Another grandson was renowned composer Felix Mendelssohn.) Mendelssohn was later credited with being the “father of Haskalah”, the so-called “Jewish Enlightenment”. Because of this, in the decades after his death he became something of a villain in the Orthodox world, and any positive mention of his name was expunged. Today, he is still viewed negatively in religious Jewish circles, although he had truly done a great deal on behalf of the Jewish people.

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Video: The Myth of Moses Mendelssohn

Words of the Week

If you believe you can damage, believe you can repair.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Jew of the Week: Philo of Alexandria

The First Jewish Philosopher and Torah Commentator

A 16th-century illustration of Philo Judaeus

Yedidya “Philo Judaeus” HaKohen (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE) was born to a wealthy Jewish family of kohanim in Alexandria, Egypt, which was then part of the Roman Empire and had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. His father had earned Roman citizenship from Julius Caesar, and his nephew was a Roman prefect and military commander. Philo received an extensive education in Judaism, as well as the wisdom of Rome, Greece, and Egypt. He became a well-known philosopher and scholar, and a leader of Alexandria’s Jewish community. Around 37 CE, he led a diplomatic mission to the emperor Caligula to seek the end of the oppression of Jews in Alexandria and to reaffirm Jewish civil rights. He also convinced Caligula not to put a statue of himself in Jerusalem’s Holy Temple, for that would surely instigate a war, and explained why the Jews could not accept him as a deity or worship him in any way. Philo is most famous for his written works, producing what may very well be the first commentary on the Torah. He also wrote several texts to explain Judaism to the non-Jewish world, and a number of detailed works about the Roman Empire—now a gold mine for historians. He was also the first to synthesize Greek wisdom with Jewish wisdom (and in this regard, predated the great Maimonides by more than a millennium), and demonstrated how many fundamentals of Greek philosophy had already been laid out in the Torah long before. Philo advocated for a democratic government with the Torah serving as the constitution. Because of his numerous easy-to-understand Greek explanations for the Torah, Philo’s works ironically became more popular among Christians, and mostly forgotten in Jewish tradition. Nonetheless, he was a noted defender of Judaism at a difficult time of persecution, an important scholar and advocate on behalf of the Jewish people, and an inspiring philosopher and political figure. Interestingly, he is the first to mention the custom of staying up all night on Shavuot to learn Torah and recite holy hymns, in his description of a group of Jews associated with the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shavuot Begins Saturday Night! Chag Sameach!

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The Mystery and Mysticism of the Essenes

Video: Why NBA Legend Amar’e Stoudemire Learns Torah

Words of the Week

The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the Five Books of Moses and the Bible as a whole.
– Arno Penzias, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of the Big Bang