17 Tevet, 5774; Dec. 20, 2013

I want to write more about the illustration I’ve chosen for my Yaf Domi. Yes, it is a picture of a man, and yes it is drawn by a man, and yes it is probably a picture of that man and definitely not a picture of me. I guess what it says is that I admire this drawing and the drawer’s ability to capture himself and to capture a scene so Perfectly. There’s little Perfection in life that is man-made, and I like finding it and celebrating it.

Did Al Hirschfeld have bushy eyebrows? I wouldn’t know, but I do believe him through his drawing. I love the pen completing and being in the midst of theatre seats – which Perfectly describes his abiding profession. I love the facial expression he’s drawn within his beard and just the bit of stage (or is it the box in which we might sit?) curtain. The roundness of his sleeves and eyelids and the chairs make one smile, and the soft colors he’s chosen to contrast with the pen and ink. Light-hearted yet deep.  Perfect.

David Leopold, the curator of the most recent and comprehensive exhibit of the work of Al Hirschfeld had this to say about choosing what material to include from Hirschfeld’s vast trove: “It was like saying we’re going to make an exhibition from King Tut’s tomb. You know you’re going to find gold in every drawer and every shelf and then you get to decide which gold is the best.”  

Even the more mundane explanations about Hirschfeld are lofty: “The exhibition also focuses on his influences, including Balinese shadow puppets that he saw while on a 10-month trip to the Indonesian island in 1932. Hirschfeld noticed how the bright Balinese sun bleached out all the color. The shadows and light and dark lines he saw on the landscape were a very important part of his changing from watercolors to line drawings.”[1]

To be Hirschfelded became a verb for the Broadway set and was considered one of the ultimate journalistic honors.  Jack Lemon, in the play Tribute, was Hirschfelded in1972, [2], Leonard Bernstein was Hirschfelded for Shadow Puppets, and there was always a Hirschfelding on the first page of the New York Times Sunday Arts and Culture section.

                                 

                                                                          

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[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/line-king-al-hirschfeld-exhibition-opens-in-nyc/

[2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3020357/18-of-al-hirschfelds-greatest-drawings#10

[3] http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/1227467

YAF DOMI begins

My 2014 resolution is to share some ideas with you. Here’s how it came about.

There is a relatively new tradition in Judaism of studying one page of Talmud a day. It is called Daf Yomi –which I like to think of as my daily page.  Although study and daily discussions of Talmud have been going on for thousands of years (for most of that time, allowed only to males) and continue on today, the Polish rabbi Meir Shapiro first introduced the practice of one page a day in 1925. His idea was to have people all over the world studying the Talmud and reading about the same issue together – a sort of global connection. Of course it would be a lot easier today in the world of the Internet, but still it was a monumental goal and one that succeeded.

Thousands of people (male and female) in places all over the world today continue the Daf Yomi practice. The most recent completion of the 37 volume reading cycle (which takes 7 ½ years) was celebrated by 90,000 people at the MetLife stadium in New Jersey.

One friend here in Denver goes to his Daf Yomi class daily at 5:00 am, before work.  Thousands others access Daf Yomi online, on Tablet, on app., on podcasts.  There are even Daf Yomis in the form of daily haikus.

The breadth of topics covered is literally awesome -- from the ins and outs of the criminal justice system  to an encyclopedic guide on the interpretation of dreams. “Even in just one page, the daf covers a vast amount of terrain, perhaps beginning with the halachic minutiae of how to prepare food for animals on Shabbat and concluding with a story about the laundry practices of Rabban Gamliel from which we learn that white clothing is more difficult to wash than colored clothing.”  Still is, despite Tide and bleach.

Having just been reading about Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (written in the late 1100s) and contemporary writer Dara Horn’s 2013 best-selling respectful rif on it , I was led to wonder if a modern, short, and more secular version of Daf Yomi would be fun. I hope it is.

I don’t promise to write about washing clothes, but I also will not be telling about my picnic lunch in the park, a la too many Facebook entries. I envision it more as a few-times-a -week journal entries by a sort of perplexed 70 year old woman whose usual iconoclastic take on stuff (from food to dreams to tattoos to deceased artists and contemporary vagabonds) might be interesting.

Immediately, the title jumped into my head: Yaf Domi.  At first, it was just my own silly rif on the words Daf Yomi. Then I realized it incorporated my secondary/Hebrew name Yaf-fa.  Sold.  

Yaf Domi, it will be, tomorrow.