I don't get to do any Jewish art projects in school anymore. But the Jewish holidays keep coming anyway, whether I know that they're coming or not. They keep coming, no matter how much else I have to do. And like most people, I am caught up in my own life, a huge chunk of which I spend painting. During the past year and a half, I have devoted most of my leisure time to working in the little quasi-studio spaces I set up for myself, transplanted into my own universe with my canvas and my tubes of oil paints and my brushes. And this is how I found myself at some point in December. I had just finished a painting--an abstract thing--with different shades of red and blue serving as a background to lots of yellow circles. This is not typical of most of my work. I had just completed the painting and noticed that it was already dark outside, when one of my roommates came home and said, "Guess what? It's Chanuka."

I was shocked. How could it be Chanuka already? How could it be Chanuka and I hadn't even known it was coming? How could I have let my Jewish awareness slip to this level? How could I have been so wrapped up in my painting that I could let myself be oblivious to the flow and passage of Jewish time? But my roommate wasn't interested in listening to me moan about the inner struggle of my Jewish identity. Instead, we brought out a Chanukia we had packed away somewhere, and she took out the candles she had bought. As we were about to light the first candle of Chanuka, I suddenly remembered something. I ran into the other room where I had been painting and I counted the little yellow circles I had put on the canvas. There were eight small circles and one big one. Against the background of muted reds and blues, the nine yellow circles jumped out like lights from a deep darkness. I had painted eight lights for each day of Chanuka and one light for the shamash, the candle that lights all other candles, without even knowing it.

I have always had a strong Jewish identity. This is not a fixed identity: I am constantly thinking and re-thinking how I understand Judaism and in what ways I feel comfortable expressing it, but it is always there, in its core. And over the past several years, I have begun to think of myself as an artist. But not until this Chanukah did I start to fuse these two components of myself together and begin to think of myself as a Jewish artist.

The typical conception of what Jewish art can be is very limited. When most people, including myself, think of Jewish art, we think of Chagall's portraits of shtetl life: flying cows, dead relatives overhead. Or we think of the embroidery on challah covers and kippot. Perhaps we think of Jewish artists who design beautiful k'tubot, marriage contracts, with flowering vines and cascading fruit. Enhancing a Jewish ritual object can even be considered a fulfillment of hidur mitzvah, performing a commandment in an especially beautiful way. Depictions of Jewish life, whether by a master like Chagall or by an illustrator of a Jewish book, are vital components of Jewish art. Yet it is not enough to stay within these established frameworks of what Jewish art might be.

I am reminded of one of my favorite books, My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. This novel tells the story of Lev, a boy raised in a strictly observant Hasidic household in Brooklyn, who possesses a great gift for art. The book details Lev's struggle to develop as a painter while trying to remain true to his heritage as a Jew. Ultimately, he cannot fully reconcile the two. In his crowning artistic work, 3The Brooklyn Crucifixion,2 he paints his ultra-religious mother on a cross as a symbol for her suffering. He felt that the Jewish tradition does not offer strong enough visual symbols of suffering and redemption. But Lev pays the price for stepping beyond the unspoken Jewish boundary. He is ostracized by his community. Essentially, this book is about the conflict between the need to express oneself artistically and the structure and built-in guidelines of being a Jew.

An attribute of God's that we often take notice of, as Jews, is His ability to create. In trying to emulate God, the process of our own acts of creation can be understood as part of our avodat hashem, service of God. In Exodus, B'tzalel is commanded by God to use his artistic talent to beautify the tabernacle. The Torah says that God provided B'tzalel with 3wisdom of the heart2 so that he could fulfill his task. The name B'tzalel means, literally, 3in the shadow of God.2 B'tzalel was not by himself creating his artwork. He stood in God's shadow, imbued with God's wisdom, as he created.

But Jewish artists are not B'tzalels. We are not directly provided with an assignment and a meaning and a context for our work. Rather, we struggle to figure out what our assignment is, and then to define out context. This kind of internal challenge, this kind of twisting, baffling path, can feel out of place in a Jewish framework. Judaism makes room for study and debate and questioning. I often wonder whether it leaves room for the depiction of the abstract. Is there room?

For me, it is not so much about the content of what one deems appropriate or inappropriate to paint as a Jew (don't get me started on my mother's reaction to the nudes I was required to paint for a class), but the approach one takes to painting. I have never painted a Jewish ritual object, or a skyline of Jerusalem. My handwriting in Hebrew is far from beautiful. Yet I feel in my heart, that when I paint, whatever the subject, I paint as Jew.

What is most wonderful to me about art is how it goes both ways. It is a coming together of the human attempt to create and the divine power that facilitates that attempt. We may not be B'tzalel, standing directly under God's shadow as we work, but we are not by ourselves. I stand in front of the canvas and I rarely know what will appear on it, even if a have a prepared plan in my head. I don't have to know the outcome, and it doesn't have to be perfect, I just have to put out the effort. I begin moving my brush, and I am not alone.