Fine Art Digital Inkjet Paper with Archival Pigmented Inks, 12 inches x 18 inches
My photograph, Garments of Light, is now included in the online gallery forthe Global Day of Jewish Learning, Nov 13 2011. When submitting the work, I was asked to describe the connection between my art and my Jewish community.
When I first attended services at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah more than 15 years ago, I was thrilled to find a spiritual home where my gay, activist and Jewish identity was welcomed and celebrated. CBST has the largest LGBTQ congregation in the world,and is a synagogue where gays, heterosexuals, non-Jews, and folks of all ages and ethnicities can pray together. It is also a house of study, a community that initiates social justice actions and is deeply committed to tikkun olam, mending the world. The mission of CBST is to champion a Judaism that rejoices in diversity, denounces social injustices and strives for human rights for all people.
For more than three decades my career as a photojournalist, fine art photographer and international photography teacher has been driven by a life-long desire to make a difference through projects that address vital social justice issues and have a positive and transformative effect on the world.
In this composite image, Garments of Light, two teenage girls wearing ceremonial clothing that express their relationship to their God, are stitched onto a collaged border of transparent headscarves and embroidered tallit. These layers, transparent and solid, represent the visible and invisible threads that link their youthful fashion and religious culture. Both the jilbab and the tallit can be used to cover the head and shoulders with the intention and direction of enhanced prayers.
Rena Dewi, a twelve-year-old at the Al-Azizia Orphanage in Banda Aceh, Indonesia is wearing a jilbab. Wearing the jilbab symbolizes adherence to Allah’s commandments in the Qur’an, the Islamic holy text. The interpretation of the text encourages modesty and social propriety for girls and women.
Rena lost her parents to the 2004 Asian tsunami and is living in a once secular state moving towards fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic traditions. When photographed she was carrying her notebook to the digital photography and storytelling class I was teaching.
On the day of her Bat Mitzvah, thirteen-year-old Faith Hill, adorned with an embroidered tallit, is standing in front of a stained glass window at her synagogue in New Jersey USA. The fringes of the tallit’s four corners hold the tzitzit. The Torah, the divine Jewish texts, instructs Jews to wear these fringes as a way of remembering and doing all God’s commandments.
Recitation from the Torah in synagogue is an ancient Jewish ritual once reserved for a boys’ rite of passage to Jewish education and adulthood. After thousands of years of exclusion, only in recent decades have girls been allowed to wear a tallit, study Torah, and take part in this sacred Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Fifty years ago, I was one of the first girls permitted to become Bat Mitzvah at my synagogue and that experience became a symbolic marker in my spiritual, feminist and artistic path.
Garments of Light represents the unspoken dialogue between a Jewish and Muslim girl about education and faith, and can be viewed as my commitment to tikkun olam.