The great 18th century English man of letters Samuel Johnson once wrote that the purpose of art is “to instruct by pleasing.” U.S. born and Jerusalem-based Judaic artist and teacher David Moss apparently follows in that tradition.
“My work is all educational … educational and inspirational,” Moss said in a recent telephone interview from Israel.
He achieves this not only by means of such artworks as his celebrated “Moss Haggadah” (1987), which has been exhibited at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress; but also in the lectures, workshops and artist-in-residence events that he has done throughout the U.S. — including at Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah — for some 35 years.
“I find that it’s a way to share Jewish ideas, texts and values that people are not used to,” Moss said of this part of his work. “So they get very excited about it [and], as a teacher, that’s what you want.”
Reports of the effect Moss can have on a community came to Milwaukee’s Helen Bader Foundation. According to Tobey Libber, the foundation’s program officer for its Jewish life and learning area, an adult child of one of the foundation’s board members lives in Hartford, Conn., attended a Moss scholar-in-residence event there, and reported that “it changed the community Jewishly.”
So about two years ago, Libber convened a meeting about possibly bringing Moss to Milwaukee and consulted with local people who “worked in Jewish arts” and knew Moss’s work, “There was great excitement,” Libber said. “They said they were dying to bring him to Milwaukee, and that he was the most original Jewish thinker one could imagine.”
That planning will bring Moss to Milwaukee this spring, as the community’s artist-in-residence from April 4 to 14. He will speak at area Jewish schools and synagogues as well as at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, discussing both his own work and general issues of art in Judaism and in life.
His appearance is funded by the Helen Bader Foundation and is being sponsored and coordinated by the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning and the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Milwaukee Jews who know Moss and his work say the community is in for a treat.
Jody Hirsh, director of Judaic education at the JCC, became friends with Moss when Hirsh lived in Israel in the late 1980s and also is a fan.
“His work on the surface seems simple, but it is actually unbelievably complicated,” Hirsh said. “His Haggadah, for example, took an incredible amount of research” — to the point that a companion volume exists to explain “all the history and symbolism” in the work.
Moss also is “passionate” about the idea of hiddur mitzvah, the talmudic instruction of “beautifying the commandments,” Hirsh said. This can be seen in the shtender (prayer stand, found most often in Orthodox synagogues) that he created in collaboration with Noah Greenberg and that Hirsh said has compartments in which to keep every Jewish ritual object an individual would need through the religious year.
Moreover, Moss has a capacity to inspire creativity in others, according to Cindy Benjamin, Jewish arts and culture coordinator at the JCC. Benjamin herself has been a maker of ketubot (traditional Jewish marriage contracts), following in Moss’s pioneering footsteps, and has attended his workshops and retreats for artists.
“He would draw out of you creative abilities you didn’t realize you had,” Benjamin said.
All in all, said Kathy Jendusa, executive director of the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning, Moss “covers the spectrum of all the traditions. He has a message for everybody. This is a very exciting opportunity for the community.”
For more information and a complete schedule, contact the WSJL, 414-963-4135, or the JCC, 964-4444.
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