A story about mine (and to some extent, my family’s) experience of pandemic times - one of so many countless, specific experiences of this time, mid-March till now, told through four objects.
1. Corona Cups - when the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place started, my hands kept feeling drawn to create these simple little vessels from air dry clay. I think the idea was originally sparked by a sweet long ago post from @readtealeaves but these were more meditative than functional. After some William Morris style decoration attempts they eventually morphed into being something to occupy my kids during zoom calls, and at some point along the way Ariel officially named them the Corona Cups.
2. When the protests and ever more urgent focus on racial (in)justice in the US arose we convened a working group to think about what we could contribute from a #makerTorah perspective. That’s still in process...during one of our meetings this figure emerged from some terra cotta @macobrent air dry cay in response to the prompt from Maker Kollel alumna Anna thinking about what the goals of our racial justice maker community of practice might be. In a writing reflection (very @jewishstudioproject!) I wrote: “I see a figure, maybe female, perhaps carrying something on her back. What has she experienced? What has she endured?Who is she? Gets me thinking about all the questions we’re asking all the time and the ones we’re not asking enough. How can we make sure we’re seeing each other as individuals and not just as lumpy masses?” We are continuing our learning as we work towards convening this community of practice, will share more when we know more!
3. In April, as we prepared for Pesach in quarantine, we invited our #makerTorah community to consider these Dayenu questions: “What has allowed you to get to this point? What is enough in your life?” Ezra, 7 year old maker-in-residence created this clay laptop and reflected: “I don’t love Zoom school but it’s definitely better than not having school, so Dayenu!”
4. I took up a poetry+handmade paper embroidery project to try to process some of the difficult and tragic realities of the summer through my hands and my heart (since my brain could not compute). At some point I noticed the beautiful and mysterious back of the embroidery, and reflected to rabbi-in-residence Ariel that this must be some makerTorah that ppl who regularly do embroidery have long thought about, but that it felt especially appropriate in this moment. He reminded me of the verse in Exodus 33:23, God’s response when Moses asks to see God’s face, after the people’s sin of the golden calf: God places Moses in the cleft of the rock and says “You will see my back but my face you shall not see...” in these times, it certainly feels like we’re looking at God’s back.
So often we don’t know how to connect the dots, but it can be a comfort to have the sense that we’d have greater insight from a different perspective, that it’s there somewhere all along...