Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist

Epilogue: Alone with My Mother

Epilogue: Alone with My Mother Helene_ebook.indd 118 4/11/12 3:38 PM If I felt angst about showing The Liberation of G–d in a venue like The Jewish Museum, I was sick with worry about the museum’s plans to travel the piece to secular sites like the Los Angeles Hammer Museum. I feared this work would not be good for the Jews. When Flora Biddle, granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, told me that The Liberation of G–d was meaningful to her, I did not think, how nice that someone from the Whitney likes the work. Instead I said, “Flora, you’re lucky, you have Jesus whose words are much kinder than the words of Moses.” “But we also have the Father G–d!” Flora reminded me. The museum viewer I most worried about was my grandson Mendy, who was then eight years old. He stood intently before the installation at the “family opening” while his parents and everyone else were looking over their shoulders to see who else from the family came. Mendy scrutinized the fifty-nine books, the proclamation, the video of the highlighting , all of it. Finally he looked up at me and blurted out, “Moses wouldn’t lie!” Oy. Was I tarnishing this child’s pure faith? I crouched down beside him and said, “Mendy, you have dreams, right?” He nodded. “Sometimes you have scary dreams. Sometimes you have good dreams, and sometimes you have silly dreams, right?” He nodded. “Well, Mendy, so did Moses have these different kinds of dreams.” Mendy nodded once again. Whew! If these were the dreams of Moses, Moses was not responsible for saying that G–d spoke to him. It was just a dream—only Moses did not wake up from his dream. I dedicated The Liberation of G–d to Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who was shot and killed in 1995. The passage in Deuteronomy 13 might have influenced the assassin, an Orthodox Jew. It reads: If there arises in the midst of you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams and he gives you a sign or a manifestation and the sign or the manifestation comes to pass . . . then shall you not listen to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer of dreams . . . your hand shall be the first on him to put him to death and the hand of all the people afterward. To me, Yitzhak Rabin was a dreamer of dreams, ready to exchange land for peace. I wrote a letter to his widow, Leah Rabin, and since I didn’t know her address, I simply wrote on the envelope, “Leah Rabin, Israel.” Three weeks later, I nearly keeled over when I got a surprisingly folksy answer on her letterhead. She said she would be in Baltimore at the same time The Liberation of G–d was being shown there. I was to call for her at her hotel. She came down to the lobby with a tall secret service agent, and we drove to the Jewish Museum of Baltimore. I was a bit anxious about the whole thing. I hadn’t told her anything about the installation, just that it was dedicated to her husband. Sure enough, at the very entrance to The Liberation of G–d, Leah Rabin scoffed, “God does not need to be liberated!” She must have been expecting a marble bust of her husband. I told Ms. Rabin that I believed her husband’s assassin had imagined he was doing what the Torah wanted. I talked about projections laid on G–d in every religion. She listened without interruption, and finally said, “Ah, Ha’aseemahn nafal. “The token fell down,” meaning what I was saying registered; it clicked. It was the first time I’d heard this Hebrew expression. I stopped worrying whether liberating G–d was good for the Jews. Helene_ebook.indd 119 4/11/12 3:38 PM I INSISTED that each venue showing The Liberation of G–d include me in a rabbinic symposium. Mother was right about my fine education coming in handy when I showed off in debates with rabbis who thought they and Moshe Rabeinu (Moses our rabbi) knew best. The San Francisco Jewish Museum programmed “Four Rabbis and an Artist: A Talmudic Debate,” in which I took on an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist rabbi. The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia...