Being Jewish Poem by gershon hepner

Some say being Jewish is a weeping
of the heart,
while others say that it depends on keeping
apart
from people who aren’t Jewish. Although it
appears
that being Jewish may depend a bit
on tears,
it is the laughter of the Jews and not
their weeping
that helps them to survive, bound by mitsvot,
keeping
them as people who do not live far
from others,
since they know that all who’re laughing are
their brothers.
Six hundred thirteen is their total sum,
but after
they’ve kept just one they’ve really picked the plum
of laughter.


Inspired by Holland Cotter’s obituary of Hyman Bloom in the NYT, August 31,2009:
Hyman Bloom, a mystical and reclusive painter who for a brief time in the 1940s and ’50s was regarded as a precursor to the Abstract Expressionists and one of the most significant American artists of the post-World War II era, died on Wednesday in Nashua, N.H. He was 96 and lived in Nashua. Mr. Bloom’s art mixed a baroque exuberance and jewel-like colors. His historical influences ranged from Grünewald and Rembrandt, to Redon and Rouault, to Indian tantric art and Chinese painting. His images often fell on the hallucinatory side of visionary and could be confrontational, even repellent: synagogue lamps scintillating with light, translucent spirits evoked in séances, disemboweled bodies on autopsy tables. His paintings were hard to love, but they are not easily forgotten.He was born in Latvia in 1913, a time when Eastern European Jews, caught in the clashes between competing German, Russian and Cossack forces, lived in constant fear of pogroms. In 1920 his parents left for the United States and settled in Boston, where they changed their name from Melamed to Bloom and joined thousands of other immigrants in the slums of the city’s West End. Quiet and dreamy, at 14 Mr. Bloom was given a scholarship to study drawing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He simultaneously enrolled in art classes at a settlement house where his teacher, Harold K. Zimmerman, taught him to work from memory rather than directly from models and to use art as a vehicle for intense emotion. Zimmerman introduced him to the work of William Blake and, through Blake, to the idea that it was possible to paint the metaphysical, to depict spiritual truths visually…
Some critics had strong negative reactions to his graphic autopsy scenes and deplored the general theme of disintegration in his art. Others were dismissive of his religious content, which Hilton Kramer, writing for Commentary, compared to “finding gefilte fish at a fashionable party.” No one knew quite what to make of his exotic, Symbolist-style depictions of ghostly visitations. Mr. Bloom’s response, quoted in a 1996 catalog essay by the art historian Dorothy Abbott Thompson, was that he wanted to make the meaning of death “more understandable, even more acceptable, more familiar, more knowable.” “I thought of it as a very positive effort, ” he added. He defined the “Jewish feeling” in his art as “a weeping from the heart.” Well before his career started he had been intrigued by various forms of occult thinking. He claimed to have had, in 1939, a single, traumatic, life-changing experience of cosmic consciousness, a sudden “conviction of immortality, of being part of something permanent and ever-changing, of metamorphosis as the nature of being.” “Everything was intensely beautiful, ” he was quoted in the essay as saying, “and I had a sense of love that was greater than I had ever had before.”

8/31/09