Description
Original art about Giving
This original Jewish art piece highlights the value of community and collective effort. Parshat Teruma in the Torah is about collective contribution to a communal effort. Everyone contributes what they can, and in the end, the Mishkan, or Sanctuary, is built. The word Teruma generally means donation, but, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out in this piece, it can also mean raised up. In this case the contributions are raised up for a divinely-oriented project, but in normal life, if you give something of yourself to others, you’ll find you’re uplifted by the giving. Teruma is a lesson in how much we can achieve, and how together we can be uplifted, if we work for a cause which is for something just a bit higher than our individual lives. By giving, we’re sharing in, and participating in the unfolding of, new realities.
Receiving
Before I made my painting of the runner Tommy Rivs (to help raise money for him and his family in a time of great difficulty), I was feeling rather despondent and demotivated about my art – a kind of creative block – a typical artist’s depressive, low spot. When I suddenly committed myself to making the painting, I was inspired by what Tommy had written about focus and goals and just not stopping. In that spirit, and deeply moved by his situation, I just stormed that painting, and worked on it every spare moment I had. In the process, I finished it in record time (for me), and it opened the door to a new approach to my art, helping me with new work which I’m working on right now. So the doing and the giving were also the receiving and in a tangible way, an uplifting too.
Spiraling Upwards
The aim in this picture was to show the many gifts being brought by the People of Israel for the construction of the Mishkan. Also, I wanted to show that the construction of the sanctuary is really described in a lot of really precise detail. The lower part of the picture shows the bringing of the gifts, and the upper part shows the scroll of the Law (Torah) with symbolic instructional blueprints. The scroll envelops Mount Sinai, on the top of which is standing the small figure of Moses, presiding over all the activity below. The scroll spirals upwards towards the heavens, alluding to the feeling of ascent, and to the helical nature of personal development. We go forwards and upwards, but we always somehow keep coming back to the same place…..
You can see more of my original Jewish art here.
And here is the Teruma page of inner.org, a website which deals with the many levels of meaning within the Torah, from the mystical perspective of Chassidut (Hassidism). This is quite a detailed website (understatement) – and it’s a bit intense (another understatement). In short – not for everyone!
Below is the full image for this artwork.
