To experience the divine promise of settlement and fruition in the world requires our creating relationships of openness and commitment. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
After our mother died, my sister and I needed to attend to the many works of art she and our father had collected over the years. Some we kept. Some we sold through an estate sale. And a few pieces we sent out to auction. One of those was the family portrait pictured here.
It was a painting that had occupied a place of privilege in our family’s apartment and within family lore. It hung center stage in our living room, above a lush green sofa. The figures in the painting played host, along with our parents, to decades of gatherings of extraordinarily stimulating individuals: artists, musicians, playwrights, civil rights leaders, politicians, journalists, actors, business people, priests and rabbis.
My sister and I were old enough to sense the stimulation and fellowship stirred by these gatherings but young enough to not have the skills necessary to be full participants. We were happy to bear witness to the nourishment these encounters brought to these adventurers of the human spirit, creativity and responsibility.
Our parents treasured the painting not primarily for its surface beauty or technical skill. It was for the story it seemed to tell and for the hand that seemed to be behind it. Pictured is a family gathered in their sitting room. Three generations are present. The youngest members of the family are each engaged in one of the arts: music, literature, painting. Mother and grandmother are each involved in a sewing project, creative work that sustains what exists. The father stands proudly in the middle of the scene.
There is no artist’s signature on the canvass. According to our family lore, the piece was painted by Ann Hall. If so, that would be quite extraordinary. Ann Hall was a highly successful artist in the early 19th century. She was the first, and until the 20th century the only, woman admitted to the National Academy of Design. However, her known medium was not that of oil on large canvasses. She was a prized miniaturist. She painted very small portraits in watercolor on ivory.
Still, the painting had appeared in at least one book on women artists and in a catalogue published by the Vermont Council on the Arts and was attributed to Ann Hall. Our father and mother were contacted by a relative of Ann Hall who was working on a monograph about her. She identified the members of the family in the painting. In the middle, she wrote, are Eliza Hall Ward (Ann Hall’s sister), her husband, Henry Ward, and their son Henry Hall Ward. She believed the older woman to be either Ann and Eliza’s mother, Bathsheba Mumford Hall, or Henry Ward’s sister-in-law, Julia Cutler Ward (great-grandniece of Revolutionary War hero Frances Marion, also known as the Swamp Fox). She identified the young woman at the piano to likely be Henry Ward’s niece Julia Ward Howe. Howe would eventually compose The Battle Hymn of the Republic after witnessing a skirmish between Union and Confederate soldiers in Virginia. Seated at the easel, Hall’s ancestor wrote, is the artist herself, Ann Hall.
When we sent the painting to an auction house, we were informed that the price it would sell for would be quite low, perhaps the value of the frame. Both auction house staff and an outside expert hired by them noted the absence of a signature. This, they informed us, made it impossible for them to list the painting as the work of Ann Hall. The best they could do would be to list it as “by tradition attributed to Ann Hall.” And they would have to highlight the absence of any signature, in art sale industry terms “not visibly signed recto.” At auction not a single bid was offered. The painting was returned to us.
We offered it to anyone in our family who might want it. Our sister-in-law, our brother’s widow, asked for it. She and our brother had met when he worked on a United Nations’ project to locate and identify the social impact of land mines in East Africa. She was born in Ethiopia, and they were married in a traditional Ethiopian ceremony, our brother dressed as a prince. Once they arrived in the United States, our sister-in-law was immediately and lovingly embraced by our mother, who brought her into the family with the hospitality that was her nature.
Our sister-in-law wanted the painting not for its surface aesthetics or for any financial value. The absence of a signature meant nothing to her. She wanted it for the many moments and stories it evoked. For lessons about love and home and welcome. She wanted it for the memory it gave her of our mother. The inscription that was meaningful to her was the relationship she had with our mother, something that she saw when she looked at the painting that had hung above the couch in Mom’s living room.
This week’s Torah portion is titled Re’eh. It is a form of the verb “to see.” Its use in this portion is typically translated as, “Behold, I [God] set before you blessing and curse.” The common Hebrew pronoun for “I” is ani. But here it is Anochi. It is an unusual word, one that refers to God speaking. It is how the Ten Commandments begins: “Anochi am God who brought you out of the land of Egypt…”
As I viewed the portion this week, I thought: What if I read Anochi not as the subject of the sentence but as the object of the verb “to see”? “See Anochi/God, the one who set before you blessing and curse.” So much of this portion is a powerful warning about the dangers of idolatry, of worshipping images made from stone or wood. Or gold. The Israelites made that mistake once, to disastrous and deadly consequences. Surely, we are not supposed to even imagine a defined figure, a being with limits and boundaries, as God. What then would it mean to “see Anochi”?
In a section on Shabbat, the Talmud explains that Anochi is an acronym for Ana Nafshi Ketovit Yehovit: “I wrote down My very soul and gave it to you.” Or perhaps, “My Soul is inscribed in these words that I gave you.” The Ten Commandments bore no signature of its author. It does not need one. Its artistry, weaving a tapestry of both ethics and ritual, of both meaning and mystery, reveals that true communication is not merely conveying information or instructions. It is a relationship, a covenantal bond between parties entrusting to one another their very souls. That heart-felt sharing and the memories we create in doing so becomes the true inscription of the art we make of our lives with one another.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday August 29 as we explore true inscriptions.
