Atelier TenouaTalk7 October 2024
One year on: can we think through, and tend, our wounds?
1h 21min
The season-opening session of the atelier, held at the MK2 Bibliothèque on the very evening of the first anniversary of October 7: a commemoration built as a class. From open-eyed remembrance to the launch of the book "À l'ombre de l'art," from a teaching on the calls of the shofar to the Rosh Hashanah readings studied in havruta, a crossing of what Jewish tradition knows to do with tears, with what breaks, and with the night. In French.
“There was evening and there was morning: it suggests that you cannot see a new day appear unless you are first able to cross the night together.”
“It happens in our lives that we believe ourselves solid, stable, strong. And then events arise that can break the tekiah into so many shevarim, so many fragments. […] The hope of the return of a form of stability, vulnerable though it may be […] like a tekiah gedolah, a breath that carries on despite the tragedy.”
“Imagine for a moment that the letters, that is, our words and our texts, could constitute a mamad, a refuge, a shelter. […] The text has been a refuge, study has been a refuge.”
“Khet in Hebrew is, literally, the act of shooting an arrow and missing the target. […] A fault is having aimed at a place you were not able to reach.”
“We should beware, it seems to me, of people who have no problem with these theologies.”
“The biblical story begins with the weeping of the other […] the tears of a mother, however foreign she may be, look like the tears of any other mother.”
The session
The session opens on the certainties the year has overturned, then on an open-eyed remembrance: the faces of the hostages, kidnapped three hundred and sixty-five days earlier, over a previously unheard Hebrew song. Then the story of Alex Dancyg, the historian of Nir Oz murdered in captivity, who taught history classes to his fellow hostages, and the map-drawing of the kibbutz by one of his sons: the work of those who have run out of words. The book "À l'ombre de l'art," published that same day for the benefit of hostages' families, answers that failure of language, from the prophetic drawing of a 22-year-old soldier-artist to Agi Mishol's poem "Mamad": letters as shelter. There follows a teaching on the shofar: tekiah, shevarim, teruah, stability broken to pieces and then to dust, and the tekiah gedolah as the hope of a breath that lasts. The havruta studies the two Rosh Hashanah readings: the sending of Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (Genesis 21) and, through the midrash Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, the death of Sarah at three sobs, the origin of the shofar. The responses lead to khet (missing the target), to theologies in crisis, to the verse of evening and morning, to the word ger and to the mothers of the liturgy: Hagar, Sarah, Hannah, Rachel weeping for her children in Jeremiah, and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose dignity now gives the biblical Rachel her face. The close passes through Abraham's intergenerational trauma, Yehuda Amichai's poem of the three sons, art that projects (a cartoonist imagining Kfir Bibas at eighty), a message from the singer Noa, and the song of a choir of bereaved families.