Beginning
in the spring of 1884, the artist Georges Seurat traveled to a bucolic retreat
at the very gates of Paris to draw and paint.
Over the course of more than two years, he created his masterpiece,
“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte.”[i] Perhaps, you’ve been lucky enough, as I have,
to have seen this work in person at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat was
avant-garde on the canvas, in contrast to the painters who came before him as
well as the Impressionists of his day.
They were about the fleeting moment, while Seurat focused on permanence.
His used
a technique called pointillism. At a
distance the painting is beautiful; shimmering and luminous in the light. But as you come closer and closer to the
canvas, the images disappear and all you see are dabs of color.
What you
might not know is that pointillism came about because of the scientific work of
French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul.[ii] In the late 19th century, Parisian
tapestry makers wanted to improve the vibrancy of their colors. Chevreul realized that the problem wasn’t the
dyes being used to make the tapestry, but the ways that the hues were combined. Most important to provide a vibrant tapestry
was a thread of color. The thread was
central to make the tapestry come together.
This is what Seurat did in his painting, finding a juxtaposition of
colors, blues and oranges, just as the chemist had found with the thread.
Every
year, it seems that we need this moment of Kol Nidre to reflect, to reframe,
and to step back from our canvas of life.
But, even more so this year. So
many of us worried, fearful, and plum exhausted. We’re standing way to close to the
painting. Our focus is on the dabs of
color. We’re worried about tomorrow, the
to-do list, and keeping ourselves and our families safe,
Tonight, we
search for that thread of color, that is found across our canvas of life. The thread that is central to who we are, and
to who we wish to become.
Author,
educator, and activist, Parker Palmer shares this metaphor so beautifully in is
poem “Everything Falls Away.”[iii]
Sooner or later, everything falls away.
You, the work you've done, your successes, large and small,
your failures, too.
Those moments when you were light,
alongside the times you became one
with the night.
The friends, the people you loved who
loved you,
those who might have wished you ill,
none of this is forever.
All of it is soon to go, or going, or
long gone.
Everything falls away,
except the thread you've followed, unknowing, all along.
The thread that strings together all you've been and done,
the thread you didn't know you were
tracking
until, toward the end, you see that the thread is what stays
as everything else falls away.
Parker
Palmer describes a thread that continues from birth until death. A thread that connects all the different
pieces of our life. The thread encompasses
our failures and successes, the known and unknown. This Yom Kippur, I urge you to take some time
and reflect. What matters most to
you? What drives you? What connects you to those who came before
and those who will follow? What is the
thread that weaves continually through your life?
The memoirist, Pauline Wengeroff, wrote a two-volume book about Jewish life in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. She shares there a beautiful story[iv] about how the Jewish women in her village would prepare for Kol Nidre to arrive. Sara, the entrusted matriarch, gathers everyone together to recite T’chines, the Yiddish prayers and supplications that were recited by Jewish women in the old country. Sara also brings forth an enormous ball of wick thread and a large piece of wax.
The women
begin their work of candle making for Kol Nidre. Sara places the ball of wick thread in her
pocket. She and Pauline’s mom stand
three feet apart and pass the thread back and forth. As they do this task, they speak about family
members who died long ago, recalling their acts of goodness and kindness. A thread is added for each person that they
remember, until the wick is good and thick.
And then, living members of the family are remembered for life. The threads of the dead and the threads of
the living joined together to form the wicks of the Yom Kippur candles.
Our thread is multi-layered and is interwoven with the threads of our family and friends. We know that those who came before us, our loved ones who are longer with us, and our family who continue to strengthen us, shaped us into the people that we are today. It is the values, the history, the cultural framework, and even their mannerisms that give us our persona, our thread.
When a
family member dies, we take a black kriya ribbon and we cut it until the
threads are shown. The ripped ribbon
serves as an outward expression of the torn grief and the broken heart that we
feel on the inside. Yet, even with the
torn ribbon, our thread is not fully separated from the rest, reminding us that
we are always connected to our past. On this Yom Kippur, we have the gift of
time, to remember where we came from and of those extraordinary individuals who
provided us with the thread that we carry forward.
Now, not to get too morbid, but tonight we do focus our thoughts on death. Yom Kippur is considered a rehearsal for our passing. Many of us don’t eat or drink, focusing on spiritual matters. The Aron, the Ark, is also the Hebrew name for a casket. Earlier this evening, after we removed the Torah scrolls, we looked inside the empty casket. And tonight, many will wear a tallit, a prayer shawl, which traditionally is the garment worn when buried.
The tallit
consists of four tzitzit, four fringes, four threads on each of its
corners. The tzitzit are to serve as a
reminder of the 613 mitzvot, the commandments of living a full and meaningful
Jewish life. These tzitzit help us to
recall our sacred obligations: to our Jewish practice, our moral commitments,
and our observance of holidays and acts of loving kindness. Those threads, the tzitzit, that we hold in
our hands during the shema, should awaken us to follow a path of sacredness: our
life mission.
One
person who found his thread, who lived out his life mission, was Cleve Jones,[v]
a gay activist. Cleve lived during the
early days of the AIDS epidemic. In
1985, 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS. Our leaders and governments officials ignored
the crisis or at worse, didn’t care. Our
country wasn’t responding. And so, a march
was planned. Cleve asked all those who
attended to create placards for friends and loved ones who had died of
AIDS. They taped those placards on the
wall of the San Francisco Federal Building.
Cleve realized that placed together, the placards looked like a patchwork
quilt.
And so,
with fabric and thread, Cleve and others set out to create a memorial for those
who had died of AIDS, and to show the devastating impact of the disease. Two years later, in 1987, a beautiful and
haunting quilt of 1,920 panels, larger than a football field, appeared on the
National Mall in Washington.
Mike
Smith[vi]
was one of the co-founders with Cleve Jones of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial
Quilt. Mike believed that the quilt was
a cry for help to reach Middle America.
Not something threatening, but warm and comforting, like your
grandmother’s quilt.
Mike thought that they’d work on the quilt for a little while, a few months, and then be done. They weren’t prepared for the beauty. They weren’t prepared for the mothers all over the country who sent panels for their dead sons to preserve them in perpetuity.
The quilt
has become Mike’s life work. It began as
a protest banner and became a National Treasure. From that first fabric and thread, it has
become the largest communal art project in the world. 54 Tons in weight, 50,000 panels. Hundreds of thousands who’ve worked on the
quilt. But, it wasn’t just fabric and
thread. The making of the quilt inspired
people to do something, to express themselves, to tell their stories, and to
turn their grief into action.
Over the
course of their lives, Cleve, Mike, and so many others, found their thread,
physically and metaphorically, to express their life work, to turn their grief
into action. We are living through another
pandemic. A time of mourning and sadness
and grief. It’s so easy to be bogged
down, to be exhausted, to be transfixed by the blur of colors, unable to see
the thread that connects us to what
matters most and to each other.
This Yom
Kippur, step back from your canvas, take stock in yourself: who you are, what you
stand for, what you care about. Step
back from the dabs of color and find your thread.
As Parker
Palmer concludes in “Everything Falls Away” -
Follow that thread as far as you can
and you'll find that it does not end,
but weaves into the unimaginable
vastness of life.
Your life never was the solo turn it seemed to be.
It was always part of the great weave of nature and humanity,
an immensity we come to know
only as we follow our own small threads to the
place
where they merge with the boundless
whole.
Each of our threads runs its course,
Then joins in life together. This magnificent tapestry—
this masterpiece in which we live forever.
Amen.
[i] https://mymodernmet.com/georges-seurat-a-sunday-afternoon-on-the-island-of-la-grande-jatte/
[ii] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Eugene-Chevreul
[iii] I’m
in gratitude to Rabbi Jordi Schuster Battis for sharing this poem at our CCAR
High Holiday Sermon Seminar. As well as a
thank you to other colleagues for their thoughts and inspiration on the topic
of thread. Special thank you to my
husband Brian ten Siethoff, who constantly reads and lovingly critiques every
High Holy Day sermon and is my best editor.
[iv]
Mishkan HaNefesh, Yom Kippur, p.8
[v] https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt-history
