June Blooms
A New Scroll of LA Jewish News
Folks,
Shavuot flowers for the table add more than color to the holiday, they connect with its history. Shavuot, which begins Saturday evening, has long had an association with flowers, especially roses. Originally celebrated as more of an agricultural holiday than today’s emphasis on Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah, and the reading of the Book of Ruth, Shavuot from ancient times until mid-20th century was more celebrated as the harvest of the first fruits, Yom Ha’Bikkurim. Synagogues in the U.S. and kibbutzim in Israel would decorate with baskets of fruit, and even green branches from trees as well as grasses and flowers.
For me, the flowers of Shavuot also represent the hope for a continued blossoming of awareness and understanding in our city and state. To that end, I want to share with you a few of the men and women I will be voting for in the upcoming election on June 7.
A rose for each:
Mayor of Los Angeles: Karen Bass. Though I would like to dream that a candidate with no experience in elected office could sail in on a wave and solve homelessness, the city’s vast and sometimes creaky bureaucracy calls for a tested and result-driven hand in government like that of Karen Bass. To restate the wisdom of Pirkei Avot: The day is short, the work is great; it’s not a time for amateurs.
City Controller: Paul Koretz. A reasonable and fair-minded guy with enough experience in government to know where to find the fat in the city budget, and the line items that are too lean. Also, one of his interests is LA Jewish history.
Los Angeles Council District 5: Katy Yaroslavsky. A focus on urban planning and environmental policy will serve her well in office. As a plus, I met her recently at a Shabbat dinner at the Westside JCC, and she didn’t seem like a politician at all.
California State Controller: Ron Galperin. As LA controller, Galperin brought a new level of transparency and accountability to city spending. Besides, before he was elected to office, he served as cantor at B’nai Emet in Montebello. Sacramento needs his voice.
A vote for MegilLA would also be sustaining at this time. I need your financial support to continue publishing. If you can find something better please support that publication. But if you find MegilLA enlightening, refreshing, or a wake-up call to your own Jewish yearnings, I need you to subscribe.
Shabbat shalom &
Chag sameach.
Edmon J. Rodman
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GUIDE FOR THE JEWPLEXED
How we roll on Shavuot
Photo licensed under CC BY-SA
Edmon J. Rodman
In a knowledge world ruled by wikis, thumb drives, and digitized memory, why do Jews hold onto the scroll?
The Torah is said to be a “Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it,” but is it the words alone that call to us?
As Shavuot and its focus on receiving the Torah arrive Saturday night, I must ask: Could it be that rolled along together somewhere in our minds with the love of Torah is the love of scroll?
We are fascinated with book forms that when opened, extended, unfolded or unrolled change shape before our eyes. In the scroll, we have a form that can also expand our minds.
Though the scroll is used in other cultures and religions, it remains a central form to Judaism, distinguishing it especially from early Christian writings that used the newer form – the Roman codex, or book, to record their writings. It is our handmade, not mass-produced form passed from generation to generation that we read, study and honor.
Seeing the words of the Torah scribed in perfect columns makes us think of a book. But as the parchment unrolls without a beginning or an end in sight, we think of a journey. You find your place in a book by turning the pages, moving through paper by the numbers. With the Torah, you turn and turn and move through place and time.
Grab on to the wooden spindles to which the Torah is attached, the etzai chaim. As your hands and arms move, you also move through time, places, names and law. As you cross the Red Sea, you cross the sea of context as well. As you scroll, and the portion is chanted, the physical action moves you inside the story: the sea parts, you hurry through, and are saved and ready to sing as you reach the other side.
Consider that in the Torah when the Ten Commandments are given, they are written on two tablets. From a book designer’s point of view, the tablets are two pages – a spread. Form-wise this is perfect – attention is focused only on the two tablets; nothing more is needed.
Yet the Torah is not contained on a series of tablets or pages, it is on a roll. So where is our attention directed?
Open the Torah scroll to a single column and that is what we see. Open it two columns, three, four, and our attention suddenly opens to the entire beautiful calligraphic panorama before us.
As time passes the scroll becomes more modern. As an information system, the scroll is a forerunner to many of our modern information systems that also work by revolving mechanisms: computer hard drives and DVD players. We scroll down our computers only reluctantly, hoping what we need is in the opening screen. But unlike the monitor, the Torah scroll encourages us by its form to scroll across – to continue to read, visualize and, week after week, make the journey’s end.
Our brains are wired mostly for visual experience. It‘s a visual system that is ready for more. As you scroll through the Torah, names and places pass by and the mind makes connections. The scroll encourages the particular form of Jewish study that requires skipping from passage to passage, and from book to book. (So, add Web surfing to the claims of Jewish invention). The form helps the mind hold together as one, the words, the verses and parashot from throughout the Torah.
For those whose task it is to the find the place in the Torah for their congregations, the scroll can be a curvilinear calendar, the position of the reading being associated with season or date. Many of us know that if the left side is small, then the end of the Jewish year is approaching and it is time to send out your Rosh HaShanah cards.
Even our coming Shavuot readings remind us of the scroll’s circularity. On this holiday, many read the liturgical poem Akdamut, which pays poetic homage to the endlessness of Torah. The end of each line ends with the Hebrew letters tav-alef, the final and first letters of the Hebrew alphabet, reminding us that when we get to the end of the scroll we begin anew.
Our culture places high value on creating totally designed environments. In restaurants, hotels, theaters and homes, we surround ourselves with music, lighting, art and colors. We admire the seamless and the artful motif.
The scroll, the Torah, is a gateway to a whole environment as well. It unrolls in so many ways, and as it does, we can become enveloped by its words and texture, and understand that indeed everything is in it.
It is said that on the first night of Shavuot, at midnight, the heavens open. This year, imagine they unroll.
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Torah on the streets of LA
"Justice, Justice shall you pursue," from the Torah portion "Shoftim," or Judges. From a mural on the Workman's Circle building.
Edmon J. Rodman
In a city that seeks to capture the perfect image, I have found myself wondering how to picture the Torah on Shavuot. For a holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, I wanted to find locations that would bring this revelatory event into my daily focus.
Though Shavuot often is associated with an image of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, I was looking for something that was more expansive. I wanted to find imagery that showed how the Torah was all around — even in Los Angeles. And I had an idea how to do it.
It was inspired by a custom many called Tikkun Leil Shavuot (repairing the eve of Shavuot.) The practice relates to a midrash that on the morning the Children of Israel were to receive the Torah, they overslept and needed to be awakened by Moses. To make repairs for our somnolence, we now show we are awake by studying, especially the beginnings and endings of the 24 books which comprise the Tanach an acronym for Torah (The Five Books of Moses), Nevi'im, (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings).
But instead of sitting down to the pages of textual study, I wanted to turn to the streets and demonstrate my awakening, my readiness to receive by finding visual counterparts to the scriptural passages—a photographic Tikkun. The world of Torah was all around me, waiting to be studied. All I needed to do was open my eyes.
Setting out to find my “text,” I began driving around my familiar Sinai — the urban landscape west of downtown and east of the 405. At first, amidst the visual clutter, I was overwhelmed. The “words of the prophets” might be “written on the subway walls” in the music of Simon and Garfunkel, but on the streets of Mid-City L.A., you are more likely to find eerie Kobe murals, looming billboards for TV shows, and talmudically worded “No Parking” signs.
But over time, portion by portion, the street Torah began to emerge. Eventually, I found visual referents for many of the 54 Torah portions. Here is a selection of those that continue to resonate:
“When the bow is in the clouds, I will see and remember the everlasting covenant.” From the Torah portion Noah, photographed at Sony Picture Studios, Culver City.
“We saw the Nephilim [Giants] there.” From the Torah Portion Shlach Lecha. City Terrace.
Blessing for bread, bringing to mind: “Man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees," from the Torah portion Eikev. Mural by Hillel Smith. In the alley behind Bibi’s Bakery.
For "anything that your fellow loses and you find.” the Torah insists that “you must not remain indifferent,” From Ki Tetzei. Gold Line Heritage Square Station.
“How fair are your tents O Jacob…” from the Torah portion Balak. Mid-city.
“You shall not eat anything abhorrent,” from the Torah portion Re'eh. Neon sign on Pico.
Take the rod and “order the rock to yield its water,” from the Torah portion Chukat. The Cascades, Sylmar
"I will bring but one more plague upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt," from the Torah portion Bo. Mural by Corrie Mattie on Doheny.
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Seen on the way: Joohyang Presbyterian Church, formerly Congregation Sinai,
4th St. & New Hampshire
Continuing on the floral theme of Shavuot…When Jewish architect S. Tilden Norton designed the second synagogue that housed Congregation Sinai (dedicated in 1926), he included a Rosette window on the north and south sides of the sanctuary. On a specially arranged visit a few weeks before Shavuot, to what today is a Korean church, the morning sun was gloriously illuminating both. The Byzantine Revival synagogue served the congregation until 1960, when Sinai's new temple opened in Westwood. The earlier building, which today still has the nameplates of several members affixed to the pews, was declared Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 91 on November 17, 1971.
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I enjoyed this issue as well as the last.