There’s something wrong with my mirror.  I knew it as soon as I got it.  I’ll tell you how it happened.

Last Sunday the family down the block had a garage sale. My dad went by and bought the ugliest looking mirror I ever saw.  It was carved out of green, moldy wood with bats and birds and wings coming out of all the sides.

Dad said it was a bargain for only five dollars.  He hung it up in my room over my dresser.

The first time I looked into it, I knew there was something wrong.  The face I saw looked miserable.

I asked dad to return it but he said a deal was a deal.

I invited my buddies Charlie and Sam to take a look at it.  They laughed so hard it almost fell off the wall.  Every time they looked into it, they saw two of the funniest looking faces they ever saw.

So I tried again.

No luck, the face was still miserable.

So I decided to ask my baby brother for advice.  He’s only one year old but people tell me that he’s pretty smart for his age.

I picked him up and let him stand on my dresser.  I told him to look in the mirror and tell me what he thought.  As soon as he saw his face, he started giggling. Then he got closer to the mirror and started smushing his nose into the glass.  And every time he did that, the face in the mirror did the same thing. Then, whenever he laughed, the baby in the mirror laughed.

He started laughing so much, that I started to laugh.  Pretty soon, we were all laughing – me and my baby brother and the two faces in the mirror.

I couldn’t believe it.  When I looked in the mirror, my face wasn’t miserable anymore, it was actually happy!

I just don’t understand how the mirror does that.

There is DEFINITELY something wrong with my mirror.

King Solomon tells us how the mirror did that in his book of Proverbs.  He stated that the same way we see our reflection in a pond of water, people reflect back to us the mood that WE are in. Your inside feelings may belong to you but the look on your face belongs to everyone else.

So, think of yourself as a happy person and SMILE!

We all know the story. Father comes home from work one day, tired, irritable. He sees his favorite tree in the front lawn laying on its side. He storms into the house and demands, “Who chopped down the cherry tree?”

His son, contrite but confident replies, “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.”

Did it happen? Possibly. Who knew about it? Well, certainly the father did, so did the son and probably a few of the friends who asked little George why he wasn’t able to sit down for a few days. We’ve all heard the story but is it history or legend?

In the end, little, honest George Washington eventually grows up to be the First President of General Motors.

Hold on a minute, you say. Not General Motors (they weren’t part of the government until recently). He was the First President of the United States!

Well, how do you know that? The story wasn’t exactly covered by CNN. Or Fox News. How do you know THAT’S true?

In a word - witnesses. Millions of people in the orginal colonies voted, elected and recorded that GW served as our first President. And that’s how you get “History”. It’s all in the numbers.

The Jewish Holiday of Shavuot (May 19th and 20th this year) commemorates the giving of the Bible to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai over three thousand years ago. (Shavuot means “weeks” and it always occurs exactly seven “weeks” after Passover).

How do we know it actually happened? Witnesses.

The Bible tells us that there were over 600,000 men between the ages of 20 and 60 who heard Gd speaking to them from out of the flames. Most of them had wives and we can assume at least 1.7 children each (that’s the American average, Jewish families are usually MUCH bigger). Our Sages calculate that between two and three million people witnessed the revelation of Gd in the most miraculous event ever to take place in the history of the world.

This is history that has been passed down from those who witnessed it directly to your great-great-great-grandfathers, to your grandfathers, to your fathers and then, yes, to you. Tell the truth, isn’t this something you would want to tell over to YOUR grandchildren?

Following (in italics) is an excerpt from a Jewish prayer that we say on special Holidays:

You have chosen us from among all the nations
(What about those two hundred and ten years of slavery in Egypt?)
You loved us
(The First Temple was destroyed)
and favored us.
(The Second Temple was also destroyed)
You have exalted us above all people
(Don’t forget about the Crusades)
You have sanctified us with Your commandments.
(And the Spanish Inquisition)
You drew us near to Your service
(We suffered through the pogroms of Europe and Russia)
and proclaimed Your Great and Holy Name upon us.
(And survived the Holocaust)

We have been reciting this prayer for over two thousand years.  It was composed by the Men of the Great Assembly (those who formed the link between the last of the Jewish Prophets and the first of the Talmudic scholars) during the time of the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Admittedly, it is hard to understand in light of history, but then again, we have always been a nation of opposites.

Consider this: Several weeks ago on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemerated the destruction of 6,000,000 Jews at the hands of the Germans. This week, we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim (The Day of Jerusalem), commemorating our victory during the 1967 War when we took control over the Holy City of Jerusalem after 2,000 years of living in exile. First we mourn and then we dance.

The most striking “opposite” of our existence is that we are likely the smallest nation in the world, comprising less than 0.2% of the world’s population and yet we are regarded as the most powerful, influential nation on Earth.

We have been hated because we are communists and because we are capitalists. (Make sense?)

People don’t like us because we stay stubbornly by ourselves and when we have assimilated, we are accused of polluting their superior race (as in Germany).

We have a chosen people mentality and many of us have inferiority complexes.

We are members of a nation that has been persecuted and killed by nations that no longer exist. The mightiest empires have fallen and the Jewish nation has survived. (It should be the opposite).

There is a reason for all of this.

The Bible has charged us with the responsibility for Tikkun Olam - repairing the world. We haven’t completed our job thus the world is not quite perfect yet.

Today when we see the rest of the world falling into selfishness, violence and hatred, let’s do the opposite. Let’s bring the message of God into the world by living the way we have been told to. That is by loving our fellow man, seeking justice and doing kindness to others.

Now that’s an opposite we can ALL live with.

Yes, it’s me. You may not have heard about it but I’ve won millions of dollars. I’m so excited! I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.

I prefer to take my prizes in small doses so that I can enjoy each one. I can’t wait until tomorrow morning to claim them.

Bright and early at 7AM, the sound waves of my radio will strike my ears as I wake to the sound of the weatherman telling me that there’s a 50% chance of partly cloudy or sunny or rainy weather.

Then I’ll open my eyes, those two perfectly synchronized, coordinated, full color cameras that process a billion-million images per second.

Then I’ll sit up and wait those 12 seconds it takes for the blood of my system to fully return to my head. While I drink in the thoughts of a new day, I recite the 12 words of the Hebrew morning prayer that begins with - Modeh Ani Lefanechah - I give thanks before You.

I stretch my legs and put them on the floor. Muscles are fully functional. Nervous system is operating well. Heart is pumping. Lungs are breathing.

Priceless prizes each one!

But that’s just the beginning.

I stand up and head for the bathroom. The all-important digestive system is working as planned - especially that urinary tract (at my age, that’s very important).

Then I get to treasure the simple prizes of life - hot running water, clothing, shoes, belt (with multiple holes for before and after lunch), taste buds that pick up the smallest nuances of flavor from everything I eat. Food! Coffee! Water!

It’s almost too good to believe!

And the best part is I win this lottery everyday. And you know what, it doesn’t even cost a dollar.

No. I wouldn’t trade my prizes for all the money in the world.

All of us experience moments of poetry. These may come from events in our personal lives — a birth, a death, the reuniting of long-lost family. Or these moments of inspiration may spring from our sense of joy and wonder at the creation.

As an artist, however, I am not content to leave those moments of inspiration in the realm of the intangible. I want to give them a physical existence, to “mortalize” them as a photograph.

And once I have made this commitment to clothe my inspiration in earthly garb, there comes the difficult and frustrating process of wrestling with obstinate film and chemicals, to say nothing of the intractable depths of Photoshop®.

Also for the photographer, apart from the basic material constrictions, there is another level of constraint to deal with. As Edward Steichen said, “Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper… The photographer begins with the finished product.” I must coax from this world a spirit that is reluctant to epitomize for my lens. The photographer-as-artist tries to make visible the invisible — “to make seen what without you might never have been seen,” as Robert Bresson put it.

Art is inspiration wrestling with constriction, the constriction of the physical doing battle with the idea as I am try to coax that which is beyond the physical to reside within the physical.

It’s no wonder then that good art is rare.

However, without this struggle there is no art; the mind can dance, but there is no dancing partner. Art exists as a function of constriction, not in spite of it. That dance of the mind and spirit with paper and paint, that exquisite tension between the material and the ephemeral, is where art lives and breathes. Just as a flute only produces music by the constriction of breath through a metal pipe, and without that constriction, that limitation, there is no music, so all the plastic arts rely on the celebration of limits.

And, ironically, the more constricting the medium, the more poetic the product. To this day, black-and-white photographs are esteemed as “more artistic” than less limited color photographs. And photographs themselves are considered less artistically worthy than painting, because they are closer to reality and less restricted by the medium.

“In the image of God, He created him [man]” (Genesis 1:27). This verse in the Torah is often misunderstood as meaning that Judaism believes in an anthropomorphic God; that God has arms, feet, a head, and a back. Obviously this cannot be a correct understanding. God is a nonphysical, nonspiritual Entity of whose essence we can ultimately know nothing. However, whatever ends up in this world as a hand is but the lowest incarnation of something that starts off at the highest level as an aspect of God’s interface with His creation. Thus, to the extent that it is possible, God gives us the ability to know Him from knowing ourselves. As it says in the book of Job (19:26), “From my flesh, I will see God.” On one level this means that by reflecting on the miraculous nature of the body, the most complex and brilliant feat of engineering in the universe, I can sense the existence of a Creator. On another level though, if God created me in His image, that means that by understanding myself, I can understand something about God.

Thus ability to create — the ability to take the material world and make it speak the language of emotion, of inspiration — must be the most distant reflection of some characteristic of God.

The fact that art exists must reveal some aspect of the Divine.

Jewish mystical sources teach that when God created the universe, He “constricted Himself” to allow the appearance of something other than Himself. This concept is called tzimtzum — literally, “constriction.” (Needless to say, a true understanding of this concept is far beyond our grasp.)

In other words, this world and everything in it is God’s Work of Art.

Interestingly, the word for “artist” in Hebrew, tzayar, is related to the word tzar, meaning “narrow” or “constricted.”

This is the connection between being an artist and my religious life.

My life as a Jew is brimful of constrictions and restrictions. Rather than hamper and frustrate me, I find these very restrictions are paint and canvas for my soul. I believe that God put into this world a mystical ‘paint box’ called the Torah. The Torah allows me to turn this world into art. The commandments of the Torah empower me to make the physical world speak the language of the spirit. They are the media through which I can create a partnership with the Ultimate Artist in His artwork.

Pretend you’re 8 years old.

You come home from school one day and nobody’s home. A minute later the phone rings.
“Hi, honey”.
“Hi, Mom. Where are you?”
“Remember that bicycle you’ve always said you wanted?”
“Yeh.”
“Well, I just bought it from Toys R Us. I’ll be home in 20 minutes.”

So for the next 20 minutes, there you are - glued to the front window. Every car that passes, your heart skips a beat. Is that Mom? No she drives a white car, that one is black. Is that her? Maybe that’s her? You stand there watching and waiting with hope and anticipation. You’ve wanted that bicycle for so long and now it’s only minutes away.

Now pretend you’re a grown up.

The Hebrew month of Nisan (corresponding to portions of March and April) represents the time of our freedom. 3,322 years ago we were redeemed from the slavery of Egypt to become a free nation on the 15th of Nisan on the holiday of Passover. Since that time, history has not been that kind to us. First the Amalekites attacked us, then the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Poles, the Russians and the Germans and many more in between. In every generation, at least one nation rises up to try to destroy us.

And in every generation, our forebears cried out to Gd for the coming of the Messiah. This Jewish Messiah will bring universal peace, not just for the Jewish people but for all nations. He will also cause the ingathering of the Jewish people to live in our own land of Israel. And for this, our ancestors cried, “When will he appear and bring us to the final redemption? He seems so far away. We’ve waited for him for so long and now, perhaps, he is only minutes away.”

Our Sages tell us that the Messiah will be born on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av (the day the First and Second Temples were destroyed plus a few other terrible tragedies) and will redeem us in Nisan (that is, after he’s a few years old already). When this month comes, we need to expect him. As we sit in the waning days of this special month we need to wait as every moment passes the same way an eight year old waits for a bicycle for he is surely coming.

We conclude our Passover Seder each year by saying - Next year in Jerusalem! We need Messiah NOW because, after all, at least for most of us, we can’t exactly ride our bicycles to Jerusalem!

“300 years ago, there came to the New World a boat, and its name was the Mayflower. The Mayflower’s landing on Plymouth Rock was one of the great historical events in the history of England and in the history of America. But I would like to ask any Englishman sitting here on the commission, what day did the Mayflower leave port? What date was it? I’d like to ask the Americans: do they know what date the Mayflower left port in England? How many people were on the boat? Who were their leaders? What kind of food did they eat on the boat? 

More than 3300 years ago, long before the Mayflower, our people left Egypt, and every Jew in the world, wherever he is, knows what day they left. And he knows what food they ate. And we still eat that food every anniversary. And we know who our leader was. And we sit down and tell the story to our children and grandchildren in order to guarantee that it will never be forgotten. And we say our two slogans: “Now we may be enslaved, but next year, we’ll be a free people.

. . . Now we are behind the Soviet Union and their prison. Now, we’re in Germany where Hitler is destroying us. Now we’re scattered throughout the world, but next year, we’ll be in Jerusalem. There’ll come a day that we’ll come home to Zion, to the Land of Israel. That is the nature of the Jewish people.”

- Ben Gurion’s speech to the Peel Commission in 1936.

“That was Ben Gurion. He understood Passover. He got it. The only thing is, the task of the Passover seder is to try and pass down those values to the next generation. Tragically, Ben Gurion’s own descendants had no Passover seder to make sure they got it.”

- Berel Wein
(click here for a related article)