TEMPLE HIGHLIGHTS | RABBI'S MONTHLY COLUMN

We live our lives in moods and moments; Take Elul as an opportunity to reflect

From the study of Rabbi David Stern.

This summer, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts features an exhibition called “Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly.” The title of the exhibit paraphrases the artist James McNeill Whistler, who in 1880 said, “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” Whether a gloomy twilight on the Thames or the blues and greens of a summer field encircling a woman’s hat, in these paintings objects give way to the immaterial, as bold lines become blurred contours, and color creates shape.

Whistler and his followers were criticized by some of their more conventional peers for creating works which lacked sufficient foothold in reality – full of color and suggestion, but lacking shape and story. Whistler’s school painted the feeling of rivers and fields, the critics claimed, but not the reality of the rivers and fields themselves.

The same day that we visited the Clark, I found myself in my trusty red kayak in the middle of a familiar Massachusetts lake at dusk. I looked up at the hills surrounding the water, and as one level of the woods gave way to the next, not with a boundary or a sign, but with a shift from dark green to silver to the sky’s fading blue, I realized that Whistler and his crew had it just right. Far from unrealistic, their paintings reflected not only a reality of the landscape, but a reality of the human eye and the human heart. We live our lives in moods and moments. Sometimes the colors are bold, sometimes muted; sometimes in the brightness of our joy, sometimes in the darker hues of sadness and pain. Our most unforgettable moments will not be described with even our most exact words, or drawn with our clearest lines. They are like breath on glass – faint but profoundly real, ephemeral and alive all at once.

And so the gift of this season, of these Elul weeks and the High Holidays soon to come: an opportunity to pause and reflect on the days and moments of this past year, to gather again the moments of breath on glass: when we were lifted up by love, or found nobility within ourselves; when we said a word or shared a silence that brought strength to another; when we brought another breath of decency or justice into the world. And all those times we erred – when the light was murky and we strayed from the path; when our anger flashed red; when we moved through the world of blurred contours judging other human beings with self-righteous and self-serving certainty.

And in all of it, a sense of return – not only to those moments, but to our own best possibilities: to seek and grant forgiveness, to challenge ourselves and our world towards the wholeness which God created at the first. A sense of return to the God who enters creation as ruach elohim – a wind, a breath from God, that hovers on the waters. Even in a creation marked by separations, the divine entrance is as a breath on the surface of water, mingled and intangible and profoundly real: like the trees reflected in a summer lake, like the whispered goodness in the human soul, like the infinite and shimmering promise of a new year – may it be bright with blessing for us all.