Blink and a hundred messages appear. The ring tone is seldom silent. Technology chains us to our jobs, connects us to fake “friends” and wires us to a world of bad news. In the 21st century, more than any time in history, the benefits of a regular decoupling from everyday pressures is a luxury no longer but a necessity.
The demand for a drastic disconnect—a day of rest—was heard in Judaism thousands of years before the advent of the internet and smartphones and was enforced with strict yet benevolent rules for the Shabbat (Sabbath). The day of rest is the topic of the current exhibition at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, “The Seventh Day: Revisiting Shabbat.”
“You find the idea in many cultures of disconnecting from everyday details—of setting aside a point in time as a sacred space,” says Molly Dubin, curator at the Jewish Museum. Christianity shifted its Sabbath from sundown on Friday to Sunday, giving western civilization a precedent for a day of rest that would later be taken up in secular contexts by labor activists seeking to limit the hours spent in workplaces. An edited version of an exhibit originally mounted at New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, “The Seventh Day” represents the concept from Jewish perspectives, yet the wider implications aren’t hard to envision.
The exhibit includes the work of some two dozen artists from the late 19th century through the present in media ranging from painting, woodcuts and lithography through sculpture, paper cuts and photography and into the realm of digital and mixed media. Preparing for a day without work can be hard work—and was traditionally shouldered by the women who cleaned house, baked the knotted challah bread and set the table for the night and the day to come. It’s only appropriate that a preponderance of work in “The Seventh Day” is by women or comments on women’s role in Shabbat.
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Joan Roth’s handsome black-and-white photographs show women of multiple generations lighting Shabbat candles, a metaphor for keeping darkness at bay and bringing light into the world. Ayana Friedman’s Legend of the Soiled Shabbat Dress is a digitalized and somewhat enigmatic fairytale about a girl who dirties her white dress while performing a good deed—helping an old man haul charcoal through the forest.
Will Barnet’s lithograph Saturday Afternoon, Gramercy Park illustrates the playful aspect of Shabbat. Executed in heavily outlined figures against simple color blocks are a grandfather watching his granddaughter scamper along a park bench amid birds. Their fluttering suggests souls elevated through the release of everyday cares. Archie Rand’s panels in acrylic on canvas, The 39 Forbidden Labors of the Sabbath, has fun with the rules governing no-work on Shabbat through its acid-bright colors and cartoony figuration.
Judy Chicago’s self-explanatory Rainbow Shabbat is the exhibit’s deliberately ecumenical piece, showing a virtual family of humanity gathered at a Shabbat meal, heads turned toward the wife as she blesses the candles.
Through Dec. 31 at Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave. For more information on “The Seventh Day” and a roster of programs accompanying the exhibit, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
