2023
Pencil, acrylic, and marker collage, on paper

Many inaccurately claim that Judaism is a “Western Religion.” Despite the notion that the Orient, meaning The East, and the Occident, meaning The West, are constructs based on the indexical theory, in other words what is The East and The West is relative to the vantage point of the author. If you are in France, what is considered “East” or “West” of you is relative to your location. Regardless, we have preconceived notions of what is Eastern and Western. These labels can be applied to objects, values and ideologies, even physical features. A connotation often follows suit with the East being deemed backward or more primitive, and the West representing civilized culture, etiquette, and American centric or Euro-centric ideas of what is superior or more desirable.

So, here is an illustration showing all these “Western” Jewish artifacts, a shofar, tefillin, Torah, the blessing hands of the Cohenim (Priests), and Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad (1835-1909)ז״ל, all over the Kotel, or Western Wall in Jerusalem. The Land of Israel is located in Southwest Asia, in “The East.” The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh takes place almost entirely in the Levant, as do both Talmuds. Jerusalem, the direction to which Jews from all over the world pray, and the words' of Israel’s national anthem, HaTikvah, invoking the yearning and gaze of the Jewish people to the mizrach, or East. For Jews whose diasporic experience was in Europe, the Yiddish language is written in the Hebrew alphabet, comprised of many Hebrew and Aramaic words, Semitic languages from the East. Many of the Jewish holidays follow the agricultural cycle of the Levant, the region which is the ethnogenesis of the Jewish people, in the East.

Hatikvah’s Lyrics in  English Transliteration and Translation:

Transliteration:

Kol od ba’le’vav p’nima,Nefesh yehudi ho’miyah.

U’lefa-atei mizrach kadimah,

Ayin le’Tziyyon tzofiyah.

Od lo avda tikva-teinu,

Ha’tikvah bat sh’not al-payim

Lih-yot am chofshi b’ar-tzeinu

Eretz Tziyyon v’Yerushalayim.

Translation:

As long as within our hearts

The Jewish soul sings,

As long as forward to the East

To Zion, looks the eye –

Our hope is not yet lost,

It is two thousand years old,

To be a free people in our land

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.