Shana tova (happy new year) to readers of the blog. During this time of thinking about renewal as we celebrate the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah and contemplate the coming Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, a number of works currently on view at The Jewish Museum stand out.
The image shown here is a still from a gorgeous video by artist Dafna Shalom, “Yamim Noraim (Fearful Days) #2″ (2007). Shalom documents the movement of bees in and around a honeycomb. Visually, it condenses our appreciation of honey, which is a staple of the Jewish New Year in a hope for sweetness, into something else: a metaphor for the fragility of community and the architecture of relationships. The video was inspired by the colony collapse disorder of several years ago, which reduced bee stocks in North America with frightening alacrity from unknown causes. The video’s soundtrack of melodic Moroccan Jewish singing sacralizes the present moment’s concern for well-being. The title refers to the ten day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We are in that time now, when the sweetness of honey mitigates our positions in the scheme of life.
“Yamim Noraim” is currently on view in The Jewish Museum’s exhibition Rite Now: Sacred and Secular in Video, organized by Andy Ingall. The show introduces new takes on rituals not explored in Reinventing Ritual, such as mourning and the amidah, or standing prayer.