May 2009

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This week, Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. This holy observance commemorates the time when the Israelites received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. It is not as well-known in the non-Jewish world as holidays like Channukah and Passover, but it is still a very important day in Judaism.

Shavuot, a Hebrew word literally meaning "Weeks" is one of the few festivals explicitly described in the Five Books of Moses. It falls on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan. The term "Weeks" refers to the days in between the first night of Passover and Shavuot which are counted by a special calendar called the Omer. This calendar marks 49 days, with the 50th being Shavuot.

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When people think of rock and roll, they usually don't think of Jewish culture, but they should. Like all other areas of show business, Jews have had a significant impact in the development of the art and business of rock, and of pop music as a whole. Indeed some of the most influential performers, producers and promoters come from Jewish backgrounds. Many of them end up adopting stage names to hide the heritage that may distract from their talents, an unfortunately necessary tradition as old as show business itself.

In the 1990's, no Jewish rock musician had a greater impact than Perry Farrell. He was born Peretz Bernstein in Queens, New York in 1959. In 1962, Ferrell's mother took her own life. His family would later move to Miami, Florida. Young Peretz grew up listening to the revolutionary rock of David Bowie and The Velvet Underground, the musical pioneers of the 1970's. From them he adopted a sense of theatrics and high-energy performance.

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When I was 16 years old, I attended religion school at my synagogue for the Confirmation-level class, basically the "senior year" of a Jewish education. My father taught Confirmation and always capped every year with a class trip to a city with Judaic significance. Most Confirmation classes end up going to Washington D.C. or New York City, but my class took an unusual trip to Chicago, Illinois. Why Chicago? Why not? It's home to a number of historic synagogues, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies and its connected museum, and many Jewish entertainers got their start with the Second City improvisational comedy troupe. On the Saturday morning of our class trip, we walked to shabbat services at a prominent downtown synagogue. We had to go through parts of town where, to put it bluntly, we were the only white people in sight. Race has always been something of a sticking point in Judaism, and in the 21st century Chicago is where the dialogue about the role of Judaism in race relations is happening in real time.

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Politicians, religious leaders and scientific pioneers are truly important people, but a culture is nothing without its artists. In the study of many civilizations of antiquity, art is all we have left. How much would we know about ancient Egypt without the statues and the paintings preserved inside of the tombs of kings? How deep would our understanding be of the daily lives of the Sumerian people without the fragments of personal votives found in the ruins of a home? Artists document the soul of a people. Without them, our collective histories are nothing but a series of facts, like bones with neither flesh nor blood.

One of the greatest artists of the Jewish culture is Marc Chagall. His colorful, lively paintings depict the joyous spirit of our people using the strange geometry of Modernism that was otherwise so often dark and troubled. Chagall studied under many talented painters, sculptors and theatre professionals in his youth. He faced anti-semitism his whole life but never lost his passion and hope.