 And we are dedicated as a center, not just as a gallery space, but as a center to feminist arts past, obviously, present and future. And our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to educate a whole new generation of people about the meaning of feminist art. And to maintain in this space a very dynamic and welcoming learning center. And to present feminism in, I think the museum likes to feel an approachable way. I've never quite understood the need to say that, because I think feminists and feminisms having to do with equality is very approachable. But in any event, here we are. And what it allows us to do and allows me to do is to invite visitors, writers, artists, cultural and social critics and scholars in to provide lectures for an audience such as yourselves. And it is really wonderful that Professor Lauren Rakin has joined us today to speak on his gender, women and gender in Jewish thought and art. And it's part of an ongoing series. And this is actually the first program of the autumn season, if you will. And next weekend, there is, by the way, in the back of brochure, which has programming up through December. And I think you'll be very excited by a lot of what is going to be available here. Next weekend, Grantswell Community Mural Project is coming to do a panel discussion. And they're discussing voices heard. I don't know how many of you live here in Brooklyn, but you may have seen some very beautiful large murals on the sides of buildings. And these are the product of a most incredible organization that was begun by a young woman named Amy Samman. And it's called Grantswell Community Mural Project. And the young women who come not only learn about art and the creation of public space and information, but actually do an enormous amount of research and discussion library work. So it's a full educational opportunity for people who are really mostly from disadvantaged areas. And it has been enormously successful. I think they've done almost 200 murals in Brooklyn. And so they will be coming here to talk to us about that. On the 28th, that'll be Saturday. On the 28th, there's a panel discussion called the American Hero and the American Dream. I like to think of it also hero and sheroes. But it's academics, journalists, and comedians explore the ways in which the two presidential candidates have been framed by the media. And they need to add that this little blurb was written before the Republican National Convention. So I suspect that this is going to be a really rousing thing. And I think, you know, a panel discussion. It is including an associate professor of culture and communications, Charlton MacKillin from NYU. And also leading women's activist, best-selling author and commentator, Gloria Feld, who's also has been very involved with the Planned Parenthood for a number of years, and producer of The Daily Show, Ryan Hadyat. It is going to be, the panel was assembled and moderated by a very brilliant young woman, whom perhaps Professor Rayken knows, Courtney Martin. And she's the author. She's young, and she's overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly effective and brilliant. I think she actually received a MacArthur. My wonderful assistant, who I consider to be quite brilliant and wonderful, said to me, this can make one feel like you haven't done anything by the time you've reached 28. She has recently written, Courtney Martin has published a book called Perfect Girl's Starving Daughters, The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. And Courtney has been honored with the Ellie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, the Joan Cook Scholarship from the Journalism and Women's Symposium. And she has also been a woodhole feather and fellow, and she's part of the first class of Progressive Women's Voices, which is a project at the Women's Media Center. This young woman has not reached the ripe old age yet of 30. She has a BA from Barnard, but she says in her bio, it's quite lovely that she has an MA from Gallatin School at NYU, which is, of course, the home of our today's speaker. She says in writing and social change. And then she puts in parentheses, yes, this really exists. She writes that, and it's wonderful to hear her say that. And also to acknowledge that the reason that exists is because of our wonderful Lauren Reakin. And he has, over the years of the last decade, almost has graciously and very generously invited me every semester to come and speak to his master's class in social transformation. And it's always an honor, but it's always a pleasure. And so it's a very happy moment for me to be able to welcome Lauren Reakin into my home to speak to us today. And I'd like to read to you a little bit about Lauren. He's a sociologist of art and cultural historian. He's a founding member of the Gallatin faculty and the founder and current chair of Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Programs. His teaching and research interests include sociology and political economy of the arts, arts management and cultural policy, arts community and social change. Native American studies and the relationship between Kabla and art, and activist in the social world, Professor Reakin, was founder and president of the foundation for the community of artists. And he worked in various government positions in arts and cultural policy. The list is very long and incredibly impressive. And instead of taking all the time, unless there's something that you feel particularly strongly that I let everybody know, he did graduate with Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University, which maybe feels to him like a long time ago. But I suspect when we all think about the way time is going, it feels like yesterday. So without further ado, and a great pleasure for me to introduce to you, Lauren Reakin, and to welcome him and thank him very much for giving us his time. Thank you all so much for coming this afternoon. And I have a few introductory words. First, I would like to say good afternoon and to thank Elizabeth, to thank my friends and colleagues. And I hope you know how much your friendship and the dialogues over the years have guided me and led me to the doors of research and speculation that have brought me here today. And hopefully to continue this work into the future. I want to thank my teachers, especially Leo Bronstein, and I'll be talking about Leo Bronstein, a good deal this afternoon. And I just mentioned because Elizabeth mentioned Elie Wiesel, that Elie Wiesel wrote a little critiqued review of some of the material that I'm going to present today. And he thought very, very highly of Leo Bronstein during his lifetime. I want to thank my dear friend, Michael Dinwiddy, Josephine Decaro, and all of you here today. I want to thank, particularly thank Elizabeth Sackler for giving me this wonderful opportunity this afternoon. And I want to thank my former student, good friend, and research collaborator who's here this afternoon, helping me out, Christina Kim Yang. I hope that you will indulge me today and be tolerant of some very controversial things I hope to present. What I am undertaking this afternoon is a probe and introduction, a brief overview, of a vast field of many interrelated realms. An investigation and an experience, a study which deserves a lifetime, many lifetimes. I will talk about Kabbalah, art, Shechina, the female image, the feminine, and the feminist in Jewish imagery and art, past and present, its hiddenness, its emergence, its reemergence, and new evocations, why it has been or may have been hidden, why it is going through a rebirth, and hopefully these last two questions I will also ask for your help in beginning to answer. If I am lucky or blessed, I will try to jump from ascent to ascent, from small hill to small hill, lightly, to begin to illuminate what is already woven in reality, and to reaffirm what the scholar anthropologist Gregory Bateson has called the pattern which connects. In this brief discussion, I cannot prove or fully demonstrate the depth and deeply rooted long-time connections that I'll try to present. All of these are quasi-speculations, but I believe if we follow some of these leads, we will come upon the depth, the deep rootedness, and the long-term existence of some of these connections. And for what end do I hope to show these connections? I hope that it will be an affirmation that one dimensionality in art and gender was never necessary, should never have been a social imposition, has been, is being overcome given the nature of a universe that Kabbalah had understood since at least the 1100s in Provence in Southern France, that the imposition of a so limited view of what would be allowed in the imagery of Jewish art and of women's art and of feminist art should never have been the case, that even the past, despite its overwhelming patriarchal suppressions and subordination, always went against a long-term view of being and that such oppressions need not and cannot ever be the case again. I want to explain a teeny bit about the handout that you've received, and I have a few more if someone is here that hasn't gotten it yet. This, as I said earlier, is for you to engage in later because it's dark in the room, it's too complicated. I'm gonna present a couple of thousand years of enormously complicated material and go over it with enormous brevity which is radically unfair, but I'm trying to just touch, taste some of these possibilities and connections for you and there's much reading and further work. There's enough material here for my lifetime, many lifetimes. So the first side of the page is of the Sephirot of Kabbalah and I'll talk a little bit of what the Sephirot are with some comments to my print alongside that you'll see and the back page is a series of definitions of the Sephirot from scholarly text. The next page is what Leo Bronstein, one of my great teachers, calls the history of ideas through the visual. This is something else I hope you'll look at later and on the back of that page, further more of his ideas concerning moments of seeing and certain principles. Third page starts with Proverbs 31, an excellent wife who can find, who can find for her worth is far more than jewels with some notion of who may have written it and the last page, which I would have loved to have time but won't have time today to discuss is the extraordinary revelations of 20th century physics into the 21st century, even now, most recent discoveries, which in physics parallel the story of creation told by Kabbalah since the 11th century and particularly since 1280 when the Zohar, the major text of Kabbalah was written to see as I said, well you can read it later because it has to do with the unbelievably surprising parallels between Kabbalah's notion of creation and the Big Bang. And by the way, although I've been looking into this myself, wonderful brilliant scholar who has the Pritzker Prize to translate all the works related to Kabbalah and Zohar, Daniel Matt out in San Francisco has written this very special book called God and the Big Bang. Okay, first I wanna speak about the ubiquitous goddess and perhaps we can have the first slide. So you can see, I'll be talking mostly about Asherah, I'll be talking mostly about the general issue of the goddess, but you can see some examples of early Canaanite goddesses from the Middle East who were incorporated, believe it or not, although we're not often taught that's incorporated into a Jewish worship. Goddesses are ubiquitous, this in a nutshell is the conclusion that one reaches from a perusal of the voluminous and still growing literature on the history of religion. The earliest role of the goddess therefore was that of the numinous mother who endowed her worshipers with her own mysterious qualities. It was out of the body of the primordial goddess that the world egg emerged or that the earth was born or alternately it was the goddess body itself that provided the material from which the earth was made. The workings of the goddess archetype can be traced in rites, myths and symbols throughout history as well as in the dreams, the fantasies and creative works of both the sound and the sick of our own day. Among the biblical Hebrews there were powerful attractive religious trends in which the worship of the goddess played an important role. The female deity of the early Judaic monarchic period did not disappear over time but underwent many transformations and succeeded in changed form to retain much of their old sway over religious sentiments through a great deal of history. Particularly down to the very end of the Hebrew monarchy the worship of the goddess played an integral role in the religion of the Hebrews. The prophetic denunciations of these idols and we can look at the next two which is Asherah. This is Astarte, again Astarte, the next Asherah. The prophetic denunciations of these idols had very little effect on practice. The devotees of the goddesses could not be swayed to give them up and to concentrate instead exclusively on the worship of a male god. There can be no doubt that the goddess to whom the Hebrews clung with such tenacity down to the days of Josiah was a Hebrew goddess. She survived and underwent astounding metamorphosis. She manifested herself later as the female cherub and later became the manifestation of God's present, the Shekhinah. She also assumed the form of a divine queen and bride who joined the people every Friday at dusk to bring them joy and happiness on the sacred Sabbath. I think she is strongly reemerging and reemerged in the new presence and popularity of Kabbalah and the world of the Jewish artist, male and particularly female. And I would say as an underlying foundation to all of this, although I don't think this has been much discussed or written about, but I think the reemergence and popularity of Kabbalah only took place because of the birth of the second and third phases of the women's movement and a feminist thought experience and practice. The beginnings of the period we are dealing with here go back to the time following the arrival of the Israeli tribes in Canaan. For about six centuries thereafter, that is to say down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, the Hebrews worshipped Asherah. Shekhinah is thus, if not by character, then by function and position, a direct heir to such ancient Hebrew goddesses of Canaanite origins as Asherah and Anath. Shekhinah, the female presence of God who I'll discuss throughout this afternoon's talk is a Hebrew abstract noun derived from the biblical verb shachan and meant and means literally the act of dwelling. Now I also want to give an example of this and briefly discuss the goddess as she made her appearance in the Dura-Europus synagogue. Excavations conducted in northern Syria unearthed the remains of the town of Dura-Europus. This was, and we could move on to the next. Okay, and this is another example of early work. Sometimes, and I mentioned this, sometimes this was discussed as potentially, still under debate, as a column from Solomon's temple and the goddess appears in different segments of this pillar, and next please. Okay, I'm gonna keep this for a while. This town of Dura-Europus was a Roman frontier post for about a century, and in 256 AD, or in the common era, it fell to the advancing Persians. Up against the town's protective walls stood a synagogue. An inscription found in the synagogue itself gives the date of its construction to 245 AD. One of the largest and most elaborate murals flanking the ark from the left and having the rescue of the infant Moses, as you see there, is centered upon the naked figure of a woman. The Dura discoveries, thus occasioned, not only a correction in the traditional view of the Jewish historical attitude on representational art, it had to be, no, go on from there. Who then is this goddess? Figure. Into whose arms the muralist placed the infant Moses. Our answer, based upon a great deal of material, which I don't have time to go into today, but I'll mention just briefly, our answer is that she was the shekhina. And by the way, I don't know if that spelling is there, it's S-H-E-K-H-I-N-A. This conclusion that the goddess is shekhina, startling though it may seem initially, can be supported by numerous considerations. And one of the main ones is that the midrash establishes a very close connection between Moses and the shekhina. In fact, no other human was represented as having such an intimate relationship with the shekhina as Moses. In the desert sanctuary, excuse me, the desert sanctuary, this gives you a little bit more understanding of what shekhina means, the desert sanctuary of the Israelites was called Mishkan, or dwelling, because Yahweh was believed to have dwelt, that is shachan, in it or over it in a cloud. It is this idea of the dwelling, shekhina, the dwelling of Yahweh that in time developed into the concept of shekhina as the dwelling or presence of God as a separate feminine divine entity. The nude woman in the Moses mural is shown raising her right arm over the ark. This is how with a kind of ingenious simplicity, the artist illustrates the mystical concept of shekhina hovering over the tabernacle. Already, excuse me, I don't need that. I've been working to edit down this so that I can cover a great deal of material jumping around over time. What ultimately emerges from this is that contrary to the generally held view, the religion of the Hebrews and the Jews was never without at least the hint of the feminine in its God concept, and I know that's extraordinarily controversial. I want to next discuss what has been called in the recent literature of the past decade or so, Jewish and iconism, in other words, anti-against icons and imagery. And, an iconism refers to the historical myth that certain cultures, usually monotheistic or primitively pure cultures, have no images at all or no figurative imagery or no images of the deity. Jewish and iconism implies that the Jews are people of the book and not the people of the image and proponents of Jewish and iconism deny the existence of authentic Jewish traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture. They claim that Jewish attitudes towards visuality and the visual arts range from indifference to suspicion all the way towards hostility. Paradoxically, when speaking about this hostility, I'm speaking primarily of the late 19th and much of the 20th century and the 20th century attitudes. Earlier in the medieval period, the attitudes were much more open and did not overinterpret the second commandment. It appeared that Jewish and iconism, hostility toward the image, crystallized simultaneously with the construction of modern Jewish identities. Empirical evidence indicates the existence of authentic Jewish art throughout history. So why would Jewish and iconism have persisted so tenaciously throughout the 20th century or so much of it? Ironically, this Jewish and iconism turns out to have been the partisan opinion of antisemites who disparage Jewish culture and certain diasporan Jews in Western Europe and America who refused to acknowledge this existence. And iconism eventually became the complete conventional wisdom for general scholars, art critics, art historians, historians in general who were unable to overcome the dogmatic lessons of their education. So I think the quite extraordinary scholar and author of a book called The Artless Jew, a gentleman named Kaman Blan, B-L-A-N-D, correlated the modern perception of Jewish art with antisemitism and with the struggle for Jewish identity rather than the vague appeal to an externally or eternally fixed Hebrew spirit or any ancient biblical prohibitions against fashioning images of God. In fact, as icon, and iconism never acknowledged, the prohibition against imagery in the Second Commandment and against iconography is really only against one image that is God. For instance, an example of the antisemitism in the composer Wagner's opinion, Jewish aesthetics amounted nothing to nothing more than historic Byzantine, Judaic oriental notions of profitability. This Jewish focus on profitability said Wagner has ruined the free-spirited art of ancient Greece and Western Europe. In 1850, Wagner substituted modern German culture for the victimized ancient Greeks and he added biological inferiority to the list of Jewish socioeconomic defects and he issued a racist scathing attack against Judaism and art, objecting to and calling it the deuification of modern art. Wagner and the antisemites had claimed that Jews were unable to produce genuine art steeped in any kind of communal awareness of divine mythic beauty because Jews were forever yoked, quote, in insidious commercialism. Supported by modern and postmodern philosophy, the denial of Jewish art achieved unimpeachable status in 20th century American thought. Even without the help of philosophy, the notion was enshrined in textbooks and in museums up until today with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Almost ineradicable, the denial of Jewish art was certified by countless international authorities from across disciplines, intellectuals who deny Jewish art were supposed to have known better. For as early as 1897, the British author David Kaufman had urged the scientific world to renounce this fable and at last to succumb to the overwhelming evidence of facts and documents, but that many succumb to an iconism is obvious. Jewish an iconism therefore became to the world a self-evident certainty. The most scrupulous writers and the most conscientious editors at the most demanding presses and particularly university presses took Jewish an iconism for granted. So the three little elements that I've just briefly introduced and now I want to go into perhaps the most complicated and difficult part, which I hope you will listen to as a poem and not as a typical discursive presentation. I'm going to introduce this with fragments from a forward. Written, this was actually a forward to Leo Bronstein's book, Space in Persian Painting, An Introduction to Islamic Art, because the scholar I'm going to talk about now, Leo Bronstein, who I'd like to tell you the story at the end in the question discussion period, how he came upon ultimately writing about the relationship between Kabbalah and art. But this is a few quotes from former professor, I mean, Professor Talat Said Haman, who at the time he wrote this was chairman of the Department of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern Studies at my university, New York University. Talat Haman was also the secretary of culture on the cabinet of the Turkish government, the founder of a new university today in Ankara in his retirement and a poet and novelist. Talat Haman wrote, once in a while, a remarkable intellect erupts on the scene to transform the substance, the strategy and the entire style of art history or criticism. Leo Bronstein, who died in 1976, stands as a paragon of a visionary critique of the creative process. Few art historians surveyed and wrote about a broader range of topics than did Bronstein, from Greece to Japan, from Spain to Iran. One could think of him as the Marco Polo of art history in the vast geographic areas he roamed. The way Bronstein looked and saw and showed is unique, revolutionary, millenarian. He viewed art poetically and wrote about it passionately and prophetically. He gazed, embraced, interacted, joined, took active part, coalesced. He became an integral part of the creative act. Visually, emotionally, passionately, in this he was probably the greatest and the ultimate romantic. Perhaps the term epiphany best summarizes the impact of his poetic wisdom on the visual arts. Significantly, Leo Bronstein himself, and I'll often refer to him as Leo, the French pronunciation of Leo, in this book calls his search for the essence of artistic truth, calls it adventures. In another book, which is one of my favorites, which I had republished recently, is titled Fragments of Life, Metaphysics and Art. Leo's divine eyes captured its quintessence that few others have ever been able to do. He was an extraordinary intellect and spirit dedicated to the discovery and the reinvention of art. The Talmud says, where there is the book, there is no sword. Imagine, please, try to feel when I offer you these fragments, this fragmented dance from Leo Bronstein's book, the last book he wrote before he died, called Kabbalah and Art. Imagine that I am reading from a poem rather than a proof. Leo begins by telling us that ancient wisdom's invention is that everything, oddly, is nothing, has nothing in it, for without this nothing, everything would not be anything. Leo wrote, and isn't it true that the way great human historical collectives or tiny human creative individuals compose their productive and distributive deeds, their exchanges and changes, their life, this is the very way that they compose their way of seeing, their way of hearing, touching, creating things, their art. And in developed, what he calls braided cultures and arts, we find the multiple oneness, a plenitude, a continuum, the woman via man, the man via woman. And this is true also in the tradition of East Indian art. You could look at the Siva temples, the Elephanta Caves. My teacher, Leo Bronstein, from the depths of his childhood, developed a grasp from having had a presentiment as a child that beyond or beneath any object which emerges suddenly and very ancient and erotic, that there he might begin to try to seize his certitude of the possibility or the potential of infinity. Leo once wrote, the elemental spot of our innermost self, we call it sensation, and I have some material that you can look at later in one of the handouts. Sensation or the immediate direct reflex of flesh, body, and mind's awakening. It is unseasable because it is unretainable in experience as a presence, unretainable. It is infinity because ironically, infinity becomes exhaustible in the very attempt to seize it physically. Sensation therefore being immediate is always lost. It can be retained or approximately reconstructed by an approximate semblance, by the meditative activity of our memory, and then once memory comes in sensation transforms into impression. But human beings in our freedom and perhaps in our folly choose to possess or seize the unseasable wholeness, the thatness of a sensation, the unseasable totality by the power, by our spontaneous arbitrary choice of a substitution, what Leo called a substitution testimony. And we try to do this in an object or any possible or immediately witnessing object. So in art, this substitution testimony is the choice for the substitution for the unseasable totality, the choice of this flower, this broken line, this geometry of a configuration, this sound, this smell, this visual touch, obviously this any artifact, this any object of art. But another way, this is substitution, but another way Leo says is open to us and he calls this impression. This he calls the way of correspondence of solidarity and added sense through the use of the memory of sensation and he calls this correspondence. Correspondence that is a continuation into the world outside, not a break with the world and the need to substitute it by a fragment of that totality, but a continuation of that which is remembered reconstructed then as an impression, a memory. Impression is always a form of correspondence, a continuing into the world. And what we call naturalism in art is always more or less an impressionism, an impression correspondence. But we human beings, we want certainty. We want the actual presence. We want as close as we can get. In fact, no, we want certitude. That is, we want total identity with a present sensation. Identity, this total identity with the immediate sensation Leo says is folly because it's impossible. Because sensation as immediate total presence is impossible. It can't last. The minute you start to think I want this sensation to last, you're already in the realm of impression and memory and restatement. But nevertheless, human beings want this identity and the impossible and the unceasable. Come what may at almost any price, at almost any risk. This is our humanity's essential, Leo calls metaphysical despair, but it's also the source of creativity. Sensation and idea are reversible. The only lecture we have ever recorded because Leo wouldn't allow himself to be videotaped, he only, we only have one tape from 1950, 52 in an old, obviously the old tape recorder where he tried to elucidate. And someday I hope to edit this tape and publish it, elucidate the possibility of the inter-translatability of the visual and the verbal. And he says, sensation and idea, the visual and the verbal are reversible in the depth of what he calls our visual labor. The entire poetry of our world, visible and invisible as yet, is there in the depths of our visual labor. All the meaning of beauty, therefore, of meditation, thought and history is there. Leo Bronstein discovered, and this is a story I might tell afterwards, a similarity, a relationship between his lifelong ideas about art and Kabbalah. Both contain what he calls minds, two ways of search and penetration. The way that leads to the immediacy of touch and the way that leads to the immediacy of concept. For Leo, in relationship to art, Kabbalah is the transfer of the world of medieval, sacred, what he calls cosmogenes, that is theories of creation. The transfer of that medieval world of sacred theories of creation into our world of profane ways of knowing, profane epistemologies. So he read an enormous amount of Jewish thought, the legalistic, halakic, traditional, Hasidic, and he focused in a way upon the creation written by Isaac Luria, from 1534 to 1572 in Sfat in Israel today, what is called the Lurianic, L-U-R-I-A-N-I-C, the Lurianic Kabbalah. And he looks at the Lurianic Kabbalah's concept of Ein E-Y-N-Soph, Ein Sof. Ein Sof means infinity. He looked at Ein Sof's act of manifestation, not as expansion, but as in the Hebrew word, by the way, all the original Kabbalah writings, Zohar, were written in Aramaic, and they were written first in Southern France and Provence, but mostly fascinatingly enough in Spain. So what occurs is what we call Tsimtsum, Z-I-M-Z-U-M, that is a contradiction, excuse me, a contraction, a concealment, creation's mysterious instantanity of contraction and of growth and then of achievement. Kabbalah's great absolute, that is Ein Sof, infinity, is the unseasable totality which is totally transferred and thus partially seized into the act, the primeval first act, the never-growing but ever-growing, you see these inexplicable mysteries, the never-growing but ever-growing, never-achieve but forever-achieve act of infinity's self-contraction, that is the act of Tsimtsum, an act of divine contraction that preceded all emanation, that preceded all creation, that preceded Ein Sof's, that preceded infinity's self-reduction to the infinitesimal point and the concept contains the even more daring doctrine of the cause and effect even of primeval era. It was Leo's interpretation which is sometimes argued that there is no such thing in Jewish thought as sin or original sin. There is era which can be redeemed. The era that Kabbalah explains is in the very act of creation but in Kabbalah is also the modalities of correcting and redeeming this era and this era, the primeval man's era is, according to Leo's interpretation of Kabbalah, the primeval era is of not yet being as Ein Sof is both simultaneously male and female, male via female and female via male and then simultaneously with this act, simultaneously with this act of creation, the second act of creation out of nothing unfolds when the light of is manifested, the light of tsum tsum is manifested itself and the light's radiation and weight becomes a new kind of corporeality, a new weightiness and so that the recipients of this light, the vessels called kilim, K-I-L-I-M, broke, some of them broke under the pressure of the weight of light so that then there is the third and last act of this simultaneous drama in Isaac Laurier's vision. It is the vision of Tikun, sometimes spelled T-I-K-K-U-N or T-I-Q-Q-U-N. Tikun means the redemption of the primeval era, error, the sin was that of separation, rather the era was that of separation, the era was that of discontinuity and of disruption. For Kabbalah's vision of possibility, even of necessity, was to be part of a dynamic continuum of man via woman, of woman via man. So Tikun, the repair, the redemption can be achieved by the loyalty to the origins, that is, the loyalty to the presence, the presence within, particularly within any righteous person or righteous persons, the within-ness of Shechina. So Leo says, with the West, Western Europe, the United States in the 19th and 20th century begins a kind of self-liberation and a new dignity begins to develop to what Leo, using the ancient Greek word called tehne, that is the new capacity to think, not just not only with concepts in the mind, but to think as the artist thinks with the body. This new thinking with the body rose up to meet already the advanced development in Western culture of thinking with the mind. So that Leo says for Jewish people and for Jewish artists, the creation, there was a creation of a new, what he calls the simultaneity of touch, smell, taste, vision, pose, abstraction and painting and sculpture, dancing and their equalization, all this body-creating art and their equalization with what had already achieved a great assent in Western thought that is scientific thinking. And so this new body-touch language began to be exuberantly achieved at the start of the 20th century. In this way, the American, mostly Chicago-based, but there's a building on Blico Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street of the late great architect Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan gave a good example of this when he spoke of the dignity of human thinking via the body as, quote, the 10-fingered grasp of reality. So Leo feels that Kabbalah touched Western culture and Kabbalah believed in the concreteness, the fleshiness of abstraction. This also seems to emerge in the thought and art, which I'll discuss in a moment, of a Picasso, Leo thought, of Jean Miro and of Paul Clay. The idea in these artists and in Kabbalah that cosmos is equated with mind is pure creation. This thought and this art were joined by the thought and art that created soul with the interaction and the continuum of male-female with a balance of judgment and mercy, of judgment via mercy and mercy via judgment. So Leo Bronstein found these two orientations joined along with a moral imperative that gave birth and energy to the Jewish 20th century artists, such as Chaim Soutin, there we go, and Leo said of Chaim Soutin that his painting is all of this soul structure painted in harmonies, distortions and plenitudes. So Leo found this in the work of 20th century Jewish artists such as Chaim Soutin, Max Weber, Jack Levine, Ben Sean, Mark Chagall, Jack Lipschitz and Sir Jacob Epstein and many others who are still coming in this sudden flowering, particularly women artists. From Gershom Sholem, the great scholar of Jewish thought and Jewish mysticism and his editing, translation and editing of Zohar, which is translated as the book of Splendor, basic readings from the Kabbalah we learn, quote, and this is from the Kabbalah, when one, when a person is one, when this is said of a human being, when he is, when he or she is one, they are only one when male is together with female and thus when they're together, highly sanctified. Leo asks, through which underground channels came the possible Judea influence on our West, on the presence, how did the presence, Chikina in Leo's mind come into the daring imagery of the West and so now I wanna find, if I can find, yes. I want to, I don't have this unfortunately on the PowerPoint but, and I didn't make enough copies but please pass these three examples around so you can at least take a quick look at it. The first example I'm going to discuss is Picasso's La Danse de Bonnerie, so if I pass it back, this is a black and white drawing that can come out very well, but you get the point and Leo interprets this in the quick look at it. Leo interprets this in terms of his understanding of one of the elements of Kabbalah. Leo speaks of the daring imagery of Kabbalah and the daring imagery of Picasso's La Danse de Bonnerie where he says the great initial event here is the cosmic creation and a graceful woman hovers, pouring into the male the seed of creation and procreation. She, according to Leo, this female figure which he interprets as Shekinah, and this is why I say the presentation is very controversial but think of it poetically, that she holds Picasso's whole secret and here Picasso's whole secret, Leo says, is similar to Kabbalah, unity comes, oneness comes only through the man via woman, the woman via man, through light and through light as presence of the Shekinah. I need this order, thank you. For the man, Leo, Picasso, the philosopher, the poet of art, the artist, there's a certitude of infinity, brought him, and this certitude of infinity brought him into contact with the secret woman, the secret woman who is plentitude, who's the return, who's the rebirth, who is the redemption, redemption without redeemer, the woman, the soul, spirit, in Hebrew, neshama, the light, all included in the understanding of Shekinah, the indwelling. And Zohar continues and says, it behooves a man to be male and female and it is she, Shekinah, the female, it is who obtains for the male heavenly union without whom, without her there is no heavenly union and the only stability that we can find in life, the only aspiration, Kabbalah says, is the balance between man and woman of oneness. So Leo felt, Zohar, he touched that in this union, a very ancient, very majestic, very ancestral feeling emerges from this oneness of man via woman via man and this he called the presence of tondres using the French word, the presence of tenderness. He imagines, for instance, in the scene that's written about of the betrothal, of the betrothal of the embrace of the union, of the night of their marriage between best, the Baal Shem Tov, who was the founder of Hasidism and his wife to be, his wife, Hannah, that Hannah, this is Leo's interpretation of this betrothal scene, that Hannah in the embrace, in the union, sees tenderness, thereby she sees the secret woman, thus present at the creation, the creation ex nihilo from nothing, the creation of man, of the world, of mind, of woman and this creation, this sensation, this seeing on Hannah's part was the poignant recognition of tenderness and this notion of tenderness is at the core of Leo's lifelong theory of all art but he finds this also, he sees it in Kabbalah and for Leo, his understanding of language and of living action is seen in what could be described if I had this on a whiteboard, blackboard as an interconnecting aesthetic continuum which connects in a way that uses dash between tenderness, solitude, solidarity of human beings and shekhina, all of one continuum and he calls her the secret woman, shekhina, remains still to this day the most mysterious and central image word in Judaism. Here I wanna offer a brief reprise of Kabbalah's view of creation which is uncannily similar to the theory of Big Bang in advanced physics. We are, in the before creation, we are at the beginning, before the beginning of the beginning, we are behind what in Hebrew is called tehiru, T-E-H-I-R-U, behind the vacated space, the vacated space point where Tsimzum takes all that might have existed in this line which in God's universe and contracts it to a point into the nothingness. It's infinities withdraw into itself. This is Kabbalah and this is also physics. Withdraws infinity into a no-thingness and then emerges the memory of a pure existing presence. There comes the first spark and the first spark is also interpreted as the innermost woman, shekhina. It continues into the visionary world of image via touch, the conceptual world, image of correspondence and beyond both the perfect what Leo calls the perfect finite circle which I think you'll see in some of the later slides we'll show, the finite circle which represents human's correspondence and solitude with the cosmos and the never-ending final multi-directed continuing line and Leo calls this the human solidarity with the cosmos and he says again to repeat that immediate sensation is unceasable. The unceasable is hidden in infinity, in Ain Sulf. Now what I handed out one of the first handouts is the pictures of the Sefirot. The Sefirot as I think I've also, that's also there in that footnote. I think it's on the Sefirot imagery is on the first page and the second page is the definitions. These are the metaphysical numerations of the divine aspects. Sefirot are the divine aspects and the principal keys in Kabbalah to the mysteries of life, universe and the world. They form a tenfold hierarchy and their names are enumerated from the highest downward and from downward upwards. So you have there just as an example, keather at the top, which is the crown and keather, K-E-T-H-E-R in its pure and absolute essence has no aspects. It is the eternal mysterious reality. Thus the Kabbalah calls keather in itself, A-I-N, A-Y-I-N, nothingness, non-being or super-being, non-cause of all causes, no end, infinity. In the origin stories of both Kabbalah and Leo's theories of art, through his experience of solitude and solidarity with the world, there is ultimately experience of a union, self and soul that Leo calls, as I mentioned, tenderness. For Leo, tenderness is the last, the 10th Sefirot. 10th Sefirot, which is called as you see in the second page, Sefirah Malkuth. The 10th Sefirot contains all the Sefirot. And Sefirah Malkuth, the 10th, produces and circles and penetrates all the entirety of all creation. And it is she. It is she in the end that joins the beginning, the mother, the presence, Shekhina. Malkuth, the 10th Sefirot, is the secret woman. It is Shekhina's home. And Shekhina contains tenderness, tenderness, that makes man via woman, woman via man, that makes judgment bend towards mercy and binds and balances them into judgment via mercy and mercy via judgment. Down and via this path is, again, tenderness, is the moral imperative. The spirit made body is Shekhina. And Leo Bronsting writes, "'Art is the shelter of justice. "'Art is the point, the spark, hidden in the rock. "'The finite circle and the never-finished line "'of Kabbalah's meditation. "'And the finite circle and the never-finished line "'in Paul Clay's spark.' "'In the drawing that he created, Paul Clay, "'the noted European artist, "'called the Formation of the Black Arrow.' "'And almost literal, Leo notes in this drawing "'of Paul Clay, almost a literal Kabbalah expression "'of dissent on behalf of the ascent "'that is from itself to itself, "'from nothingness to nothingness, "'where iron has created the opposition "'and correspondence of two directions, of two curves, "'more tension, more tension, more white in the drawing, "'more of its opposite, more black "'till the resulting final mixture of two opposed "'about-to-be bodies, that tense white, "'the tense black culminate in the full-bodiness "'of a new, a first thing, the first thing of creation, "'the Black Arrow.' "'This is Clay, Paul Clay's primeval, "'infinity substituting point, "'the Tsimzum, the withdrawal, "'the root of all roots, of all his manifestations, "'the concentrated and manifested universe of discourse "'in Clay's line, in his color, in his meaning, "'in his imagery.'" So Leo wrote at one time, as an example of this substitution process, a painter paints what she or he does not paint, that what a painting wants to say, its beauty, its truth, its goodness, is not expressed merely in the conduct of a line. That is the story that the line would tell in relationship to other elements in the painting, or the structure of the color. That is the promise of a painting's narrative. An artist does not paint this deeper meaning in the narrative itself, in the material or technical elements. And I have this written on this, I think the fourth page of your handout. The meaning of the work is in the very line itself. Leo speaks of the what level, which is the storytelling of the painting, the how level, which is the technical material. Then he speaks of the what of the how, which is the deeper inner meaning or style told in the very essence meaning of the style. And Leo then refers to, that is that the line itself, the color itself, the composition itself has the meaning. What he calls, as I said, the what level, the what of the how level. I know it sounds a little silly, but think about it and repeat it to yourself, the what of the how. And Leo recalls the philosopher, mathematician Bertrand Russell, who when speaking about the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great 20th century philosopher, Russell says every language, every human language has a structure concerning which in that language itself, and it cannot say what it wants to say. So there is another language which has a new structure, and to this continuous creation invention, when a language cannot say what it wants to say in its own language about a reality or about its meaning, we discover immediately or hopefully immediately that there's another language that can say. And when that language becomes inadequate, there's yet another language on into infinity. That is the loss or the non-presence of something in one language, and I don't mean verbal language, I mean any language that we human beings have created, and the artistic language, any movement, any tool language, any technical language. When there is a loss or a non-presence of something in one language, it is transferred and present in still yet another language and a new awareness almost done with this part. So into every artist, within every artist, transferred from the what level, the narrative story, into the how level, that is the technical material, the transfer level, we learn the what of the how level. It's, this is the artist's secret, the what of the how level. It's their central obsession, their secret presence, their substitution for the unseasable totality, and Leo calls this substitution, their metaphysical tenderness. That is in all art, he says, is the secret woman, unbeknownst maybe to the artist, exists the shekinah, the shekinah in you, in me, in everyone's creation out of nothing. It is the secret of poetry, for instance, examples, it is the birth of the dark pearl in Rembrandt's painting, of the miraculous birth of a porcelain in the earlier Goya, the birth of the rainbow in Renoir, the birth of the white in Winslow Homer's Waves, and of the red in Thomas Eakins. It is the simple, banal, and ponderous weight in Cezanne's substitution for infinity when he constantly paints and repaints Mont-Saint-Victoire. And then all of a sudden, Leo recalls the phrase in French, L'art ne s'élargit pas, il se résume. Translation, art is not expansion, it is reduction. Leo says immediately, it's reduction. That's Tsim Tsum, reduction to the infinite smallness. And then Leo asks, who said this? Why, it happens to have been Edgar Degas, the rabid professional hater of Jews. Who always remained ignorant of the Jews, he despised. And Leo says, despite himself, this realist painter of Parisian scenes, his little ballet dancers, his bathing women, his portraits of women, he too, Leo says, was a painter unbeknownst to himself of the secret silent, invisible presence. One example, I'm sorry I don't have this, but I'll refer to the painting, you can look it up sometime. From, he says, Leo says, what Degas is doing from reduction to reduction, from transfer to transfer, Degas concealed and manifested, painted another presence, painted what he calls the invisible, yet corporeal presence of an astral body in his paintings. A body surrounding a painted living being, an aura of a person's action. So for instance, there's a painting of the young woman in a millinery shop, trying on a hat. The young woman is facing a mirror. You see her face in the mirror and the mirror is nothingness, it doesn't exist, it's flat, it's a reduction. It is something else, it's an absence. Leo calls it, in her presence, she is concealed, reduced. Okay, so now in concluding this section, Degas, the Jew-hater, was despite his conscious hatred, a painter of the Jewish mystical vision of creation out of nothing, creation through the act of reduction. The mystery of, like Kabbalah says, of Tim Tsum, la nuse la jipah il se resume, art is not expansion, it is contraction, it is reduction, the theory, the ideas of Kabbalah. For Leo, Degas, even Degas, by painting this off-centered act of Kabbalah's primeval divine era and its redemption and its correction, how, Leo says, did Degas correct the primal era? Leo says, by the will of Tandres, which is in the very line, Tandres, which is in the very color structure, there, there in the color and line structure, he painted his secret, the secret tenderness, the metaphysical woman, the shekhina. And I'd like to conclude this little section with a little quote from Goethe's The Tragedy of Faust. Goethe wrote, all of mere transient date as symbol showeth, here the inadequate to fullness groweth, here the inevitable wrought is in love, the ever-womanly draws us above. Okay, now into my last section of this talk, which will bring on some of the slides. Okay, let me, without dropping this, just as I'm moving into a new element here, jumping, we can move to the next slide, please. I just wanted to show, as part of Jewish art, which we can talk about later or at another time, how works of various 20th century, mid-20th century Jewish artists begin to include actual elements that come as symbolic or direct symbols from Kabbalah. And this is Adolf Gottlieb, The Enchanted Ones. Next is Mark Rothko's Untitled, and I'm here not to talk about men's art, but Barnett Newman's One Mint, all of this with direct reference. And it is known that Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman particularly did know about. And the last one of Newman's, this is the name, number two. I was once, by the way, mentioned in parentheses, one of the reasons I'm so delighted to be here this afternoon is because when I was an infant, my mother used to bring me here, teething on a little crust of rye bread to see my father's paintings, which were exhibited, God knows when, in the early 40s, in the community galleries here in the Brooklyn Museum. So one time I was riding up an elevator in the Fuller Building to an exhibition of Hans Hoffman's paintings, and Hans Hoffman was my father's painting teacher, and we were riding up in the elevator, and who gets on the elevator? But this extraordinarily awesomely tall man and a man of average height next to him. And who was it? The tall man was the critic and writer, Harold Rosenberg, enormously impressive. And next to him, dressed in a three-piece business suit with a nice gray mustache and a strong presence was Barnett Newman. And what indeed were they talking about? The relationship in Barney Newman's art, as Harold said, of Jewish mystical tradition. So I want to show, in this emptiness, iron, nothingness is related to that. Next slide, please. And the last slide of any mail that I wanted to show is Jacques Lipschitz's Mother and Child. I wanted to show this because this work, which might be the most bittersweet of all responses to the Holocaust anywhere and by any artist, Lipschitz's Mother and Child. In this sculpture, the woman who is missing her hands carries a child on her back. The work exists in several versions, but it's most poignant to be in the presence of, is the one on the grounds of the Israel Museum, located on one of the hills of Jerusalem. When one looks at that sculpture and that location, I can imagine a voice saying softly, I have been maimed, I have been bloodied, but I am here. I am in Israel. I am of Israel, and I am carrying the future generations within me. Okay, next, please. This is a work that represents, it says, rubies and rebels, Jewish female identity in contemporary British art. It also included some American art, and the exhibition was dedicated to the memory of the artist Sandra Fisher, the wife of the distinguished artist, Kitaj. Okay, so I wanna show a few examples of the work. Next, please. This, again, is showing that the an iconism that was accepted throughout all of our history, history in Jewish life and non-Jewish life did not recognize. Even in the 20th century, this 20th century work of Jewish women's art of themselves, here's a self-portrait, Hanaglook. Okay, next, please. This is particularly interesting, Jane Logerman's Kaddish, because here you have broken into the multitude of letters the Hebrew prayer for the dead, which is only a prayer, it doesn't mention death in this prayer, as you know, it mentions only praise of the existence of universe and of God. One of the reasons this is so interesting and connected to Kabbalah, because something I didn't, of course, have time to discuss in Kabbalah at all, is that Kabbalah is deeply engaged in the numerical representation of letters. And through both the interpretation of the meaning of letters themselves and of the numerical representations, it is that's one of the ways in which they reinterpret the Torah. In other words, Torah is at one level and the deeper level says Kabbalah, all the writers of Kabbalah from Spain, from France to Spain to Israel to Sfat to Jerusalem, is through the vision and ideas of creation through Kabbalah's notion by interpreting the words. And it's often said that every single Hebrew letter has embedded in it some place the tiny yud, that letter yud standing for the holy, the almighty, Yahweh, God, the infinite, et cetera. Ain Soth, that is infinity. Okay, next slide, please. Here, Gillian Singers, untitled 1996, has a multitude of imagery, many of which directly refer to the Tensefirot, embody the Tensefirot, Sefirot, and beyond in multiple interpretations an imagery of the Sefirot in Kabbalah. Next, please. Here, Carol Berman's, one would hope and a certain way I would that you'd see the man be a woman, the woman be a man, but I think there's the implication of this in the multiplicity of both bodies and certainly for Jewish art, this is an example of the lack of fear of presenting the body itself and of the expression of meaning through what Louis Sullivan calls the Tenfinger Grasp of Reality, the capacity of Jewish art, particularly in this case, Jewish women's art, which I would call feminist art, expression of these multiple meanings also referenced through Kabbalah and Shekinah. Here, Angela Baum's, Rachel, for me, is a visual presentation of the very act of creation, ainsuf of infinity creating through its reduction and withdrawal into the single point, then the explosion of the big bang creating the universe. My interpretation, it's the way I feel it, the way I see it, and my, what have you, okay, next slide please. Here, Kitty Clayman, its initial reading is that of her memories of the attic in which she and her family hid away during the Holocaust, but it also represents through the explosion and the encapsulation, the encapsulation and the explosion of light, for me, not only survival through the Holocaust, but creation. Next, Alice Locahana's Jacob's Ladder. Of course, Jacob's Ladder is one of the most extraordinary and well-known visual, verbal imagery from the Bible here interpreted by this Jewish woman artist in this marvelous visual, which is, for me, the steps ascending from Sefirah Malkuth, from Shekinah to top and bottom, the constant creation from Sefirah Malkuth to Kether, the crown, and there can be no crown unless in the so-called lowest Sefirah, Sefirah, which contains all the other Sefirahs in order to give them the energy through the woman, through the mother, to emerge back to the ascent to the crown. Next, Lillian Legion's My Body, Myself. To me, this is, to me, an example of the capacity to return without fear and to emphasize and manifest the capacity of the body in its different forms. And here, one might say, isn't there restriction through the wires, through the spines? But to me, rather than being the wounding, but wounding is also connected to redemption and healing and recreation, there is, particularly through the head, the notion of birth and emergence and of creation in my understanding of this. Finally, next, Susan Schwab's Creation. And there is a great deal to say about Susan Schwab. Let me just refer back to a moment to Klaydman's work, which you saw earlier, and you don't have to see it. It was the attic imagery and the light. Such works fall on the border between the representational and the abstract and they exist between, and this is something that when Kabbalah speaks about judgment through mercy and mercy through judgment is also speaking about the process of, with mercy and tenderness, the process of healing the pain of the past. One other next slide, I wanted to. Now Susan Schwab here. Susan Schwab was born in 1944 and she has and implies that different ongoing questions about Jewish art, her concern about creating Jewish art, women's Jewish art within a non-Jewish world. And she has a series of tryptics using the traditional Christian Catholic modality of the tryptic that she calls creation. Here she's inspired by the opening images of that most famous medieval Jewish illuminated manuscript, which is the 14th century Sarajevo Haggadah. Her creation has been revisioned in the abstract geometry, which is so close and in depth part of Kabbalah, of iron, excuse me, of iron self, infinity. She discusses the notion of infinity in the modalities and moods of the circles, of the moons, that is she says that they are without beginning and without end. And the image of God is not presented, is not represented, but sun, moon and earth are clearly rendered in the same circular form of creation. Certain of Schwab's work add to the arc circle configuration of the downward pointing triangle with vertical lines from mid base to apex. This symbol of femaleness is traceable all the way back to the Hebrew goddesses, Astarte, Asher and others. It is the role of the artistic creatrix, so long suppressed for women, is now in her work and other Jewish woman artists restored in the very textures of the silver point surfaces she works with and the watery wave-like lines of her silver point surfaces within the luminescent frames recall for her the verbal and visual images of the primordial water mother goddesses of ancient Hebrew thought. And finally, amongst the issues raised by Jewish American women artists in the last few decades has been the question where do I as a female artist fit into Judaism and the images that are part of Judaism's history scores of American women artists since the early 1980s have wrestled with the question of where and how as women they fit into the Jewish tradition and the tradition and the artistic tradition. Some like the Israeli artist who I don't have a slide of Helene Ilon and Carol Hanoi, excuse me, Hanoi have created installations particularly in the 1990s rather than paintings and sculptures and what they have created is new versions, new reimagining, imagining from a feminist perspective of Torah scrolls, prayer books, talitot, the material elementals of Jewish spirituality are used and transformed from their feminist perspective. Many have contributed to the development of a new ritual object and new ritual universe as in Judy Chicago's dinner party so magnificently exhibited outside this door which reintroduces particularly they've created something called the Miriam Goblet which reintroduces the sister of Moses and Aaron to the Passover table side by side with a cup of Elijah. And that is all that I have to say about this. Thank you very much indeed. I'm sorry if I went so long. I don't know if we have any time for questions, a few comments. Elizabeth says we do. Maybe put the... I mean, I apologize for going so rapidly over so much material but I wanted at least to give you a kind of poetic jump dance taste of what I've just started to look at and I hope to have the time to look at it for a long time. Frank Menusen. Right, right, right. And then to look at the moment David, you have intertwined triangles and Robert Mabel for a specific triangle is the base of creation. And they have two intertwining and like a male and a female triangle. And then you have this accounting, the numerical, the numericals if you count with the six triangles that comes to 18 which is the number known as life or high that in the triangle... Absolutely, absolutely. Again, it's the male and female connected to green light. Yes, I agree very much so. And Leo would say from Kamala that the point, any point of the triangle was the process of Zimzum reduction of iron self which is infinity to that point and only through the reduction to the point. And this is exactly, I mean, this sounds peculiar, does this sound from another dimension? It is the notion of reduction to the point that is the basic theory in not only Einstein's theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, it's in the special theory of relativity, it's in quantum physics and it's even now in the new notion of string theory that the reduction through the smallest possible point is the of infinity's reduction is the only possibility thereby of the big bang, the explosion, the creation. So there in the triangle is the point leading out to the creation of the endless growing universe. Dina, okay. Okay, well there are two things I'd like to say about the Hasidic and Hasidic. Yeah, about relation. In the beginning of the early years of Hasidic experience, the early teachers, all the early holy men, revs, were particularly pointedly, focally trying to create a popular access of and for Kapala to their people. It's only in the more contemporary period of time when, this is not answered your question but it's one element of Hasidism where they have more or less turned their back on aspects of this and become in my mind, let's say much more structured, in some ways, perhaps slightly rigid. But it was a traditional notion that within Kapala, because of these challenging, massively controversial ideas, particularly of that most central idea of Shekinah the female, God as female of male, including female, female, including man, but having a female numeration and nomination name that it would be so threatening and potentially dangerous that one had to achieve a certain maturity, which obviously now in order to begin this study. Obviously now it's completely beyond all of this but I think there's obviously now a totally new Las Vegasization or Hollywoodization of Kapala but there's also I think on the whole a very serious study of this. Leo did it through the arts, I'm trying to continue to do it through the arts and women's art, it's only the beginning of the rest of my lifelong study. But as I said earlier, this popularization I think could only have happened with the feminist movement. The idea that there is now openness, license and capacity to look in this realm is available to us because of feminism in general movement and in the arts. Yes, please. It was so much larger to me. No, I know that. And I know it has to come very quickly. It's like a turning inward to a small point and then a manifesting outward. And you know, something I had absolutely no time to do. There are multiple Kabbalahs, all coming from the original Zohar written in Spain between 1280 and 1284 in, I forget the name of the town, same town in the same city in Mexico, Guadalajara, Spain. There's also you come across quite frequently books that all of my references are Kabbalah with a K which is the traditional translation from the Aramaic to the Hebrew to the English. Then there you see books and discussion Kabbalah from the sea. That is the Christian reinterpretation and version of Kabbalah. Now Kabbalah, you say, how does this man say? How did Leo say, how do I say that there's this undercurrent that brings Shechina into the late 19th, 20th century Western and American world? I mean, isn't that a little far-fetched? What's that underground stream? Well, there wasn't an underground stream starting with the initial creation of the earliest books and writings in France, mostly in Spain, in the Mediterranean, and then into Judea, Israel, it's spot in the 16th century on, noted Christian, Catholic, particularly scholars, Renaissance humanists became totally engaged in the reading and study in the original languages. Pico de la Morandola, pronounce it properly, was a great Kabbalah scholar and many others since then, scientists, philosophers, humanists, what have you. When I asked Daniel Matt the great contemporary translator through the Pritzker Fund, where are the most special or unique copies of the Zohar, he said most of them are owned by the Vatican and you can see them in the Vatican Library. So this is not something that is so arcane or esoteric or non-present, it's openly present for those who have wanted to look for it. Any other comments or questions, please? Let me thank you so much for attending. Coach Lauren, this was just, this was really outstanding and I'd like to invite you as you continue to refine and reflect, to come back again, perhaps next year and do a second part to this. Thank you, thank you very much. Because I think it's extremely, extremely important. Please, I hope you have an opportunity to enjoy the dinner party, the Gada Amir Show, Gada is an Egyptian-born feminist artist is going to be up only for another two weeks. We open on October 31st, an exhibition called Burning Down the House, Creating a Feminist Art Collection, which will be a group show of some very famous and wonderful feminist artists. So please join us with that. And also we have Women Votes, which is a marvelous exhibition in the Herstory Gallery. And we have some wonderful pieces there of memorabilia during the suffragist movement. And I think you'll enjoy that. That's going to be up until January. And then after that, we will have an exhibition based on the fertile goddess plate of the dinner party. And that I think could tie in again next spring to some more of some additional thinking that Lauren Reakin may have for us. Thank you all for joining us. It was really wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, really. I appreciate so much being here.