Next week London’s JW3 centre will join other places across the world in a celebration that happens only once every seven and a half years. It will host a siyum to mark the completion of the 13th Daf Yomi cycle, the programme to study the entire Babylonian Talmud by learning one folio every day.
But true to its creative mission, JW3’s event will offer something different. It will be led by artist Jacqueline Nicholls, who set herself a dual challenge, not simply to undertake the daily regimen of Talmud study but also to record her response to it by drawing about it every day. Her Draw Yomi project consists of 37 notebooks, one for each tractate, that use a variety of styles from Chinese ink stains to collage, and has resulted in a unique visual commentary on the text.
She has turned to the Talmud previously, creating a series of ten textile works inspired by some of the stories of women which appear in it. She called it “Ghosts and Shadows”, because these women are unnamed.
And as if as it were a prelude to her learning marathon, for a number of years, she has also done a drawing a day to count the Omer between Pesach and Shavuot.
“The meeting of the art studio with the beit midrash has been the creative tension behind a lot of my work,” she says.
She acquired a taste for Talmud in 1992, when she spent a year at Nishmat in Israel, one of the institutions which has changed the shape of Jewish education by teaching Gemara to women. She was prompted to embark on daf yomi by the publication of the Koren Noé edition of the Talmud in time for this cycle.
“I’ll learn and I’ll be in my studio and I will let the text marinate in my head,” she says. “As I draw, the different parts of the page come together and weave together in the process.”
On Shabbat and Yomtov, she would have to wait until they went out before she could take up her ink. Travelling could also prove tricky. “I remember one time we were going to New Zealand and I was sitting in Hong Kong airport doing the daf — waiting for the changeover of the plane but also not knowing what day it was because of the change in time zone.”
Often, her drawings would be simple at the start of a tractate but become more complex as she moved through it. The collage shown right, from tractate Shekalim, depicts the idea that there were 13 gates to the Temple and refers to a legend that water will one day flow from the place of the Holy of Holies. She has used frontispieces from volumes of the Talmud, which are often represented as gates. “We no longer have a Temple in Jerusalem to be close to God,” she says, “but instead we open the gateway title page of the Talmud and we learn.”
Through the act of drawing she sometimes made links that were not explicit in the text. For example, in tractate Berachot, the rabbis thought it safer to pray in a group because alone you could be vulnerable to attack by demons. They believed, she explains, that “if you put dust around your bed at night, and you wake up in the morning and you see bird footprints, you know there were demons” .
For the next day’s daf, on a completely different topic, the rabbis say that God gets angry for as long as it takes a rooster to stand on one leg and his crest to turn completely white. “I found it really interesting that it was the same image they use for a demon — the bird’s footprint.”
Drawing has also her enabled to convey the “emotional aspect” of Talmud study — an aspect which is particularly powerful in some of the tractates that deal specifically with issues affecting women.
In one part of tractate Ketubot, the exchange of defective animals is compared with blemished brides. In her graphic ink stain image, the shadow of the animal morphs into a woman.
“It’s fascinating, on one hand, to see this is where rabbinic Judaism builds up halachah … and on the other hand, it is very hard to see how women are talked about,” she says. “Learning the detail makes you choke a bit. It was difficult to acknowledge what was there and how it is being discussed. My drawings are a way of processing that.”
At the JW3 siyum, a number of guests will talk about different elements in the Talmud. One will be the head of the S & P Sephardi Community, Rabbi Joseph Dweck, with whom she’ll have “a conversation about Seder Nashim [the group of tractates on women] and what it is like to learn this as a man and in a traditional male yeshivah — how does it affect their view of women, if at all.”
Her drawings reflect her own perspective as a woman in the 21st century. “When I read certain things in the text, I have an opinion, I have something to say about this text that isn’t in the traditional commentaries because I am not coming from that standpoint. My drawings are a way of speaking back.”
JW3’s Daf Yomi celebration is on Tuesday, January 7 at 8pm
For more, see http://drawyomi.blogspot.com/
