Edition 36
Feb.-March 2001   Adar 5761 Vol. 4 Edition 2 		HOME | letter from the editor | readers' forum | shoot - Q&A | classified ads
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COLOR Table of Contents

Adding Color to Your Life

Dear readers,

In his fascinating book An Anthropologist on Mars (Knopf, 1995), Oliver Sacks relates seven paradoxical tales of unusual neurological conditions and how the patients who suffered from them adapted mentally and emotionally. In one of these narratives, he tells of a successful 65-year-old artist who had lost his ability to see color.

"Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people (‘like animated gray statues') any more than he could bear his own appearance in the mirror...He saw people's flesh, his wife's flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent gray... As the months went by, he particularly missed the brilliant colors of spring – he had always loved flowers, but now he could distinguish them by shape or smell. The blue jays were brilliant no longer; their blue, curiously, was now seen as pale gray... He could no longer see the clouds in the sky, their whiteness, or half-whiteness as he saw them, being scarcely distinguishable from the azure...

Fixed and ritualistic practices and positions had to be adopted at the table; otherwise he might mistake the mustard for the mayonnaise, or, if he could bring himself to use the blackish stuff, ketchup for jam... Red and green peppers were also indistinguishable, because both appeared black...."

Then many colors [hues], new colors, shall you adjoin to the many colors [hues], new colorsIt is hard for us to fathom how radically our lives would change without color. The great Hebrew writer N.H. Bialik, reminds us, however, that beyond our physiological ability to capture the different hues via the cones of our eyes, we have the power to add color to the canvas of our lives - in the way we observe the world around us and in the way we live out our days. "Then many colors [hues], new colors, shall you adjoin to the light in your life."

As the spring flowers begin to bloom, we celebrate color in this seventeenth edition of the Jewish Heritage Online Magazine. You may enjoy the following articles:

The ashes of the red heifer, by Jerome Malino
Tekhelet: color of the sea, the sky, and the throne of glory
The kaleidoscope of human emotion: colorful Hebrew sayings
Earth's embroidery: a medieval poem by Solomon Ibn Gabirol
Judas' red hair and the Jews in the visual arts, by Ruth Mellinkoff
The custom of burying the dead in simple white shrouds, by Anita Diamant
Blue and white: The evolution of the Israeli flag
A Hebrew lesson: Rootword z-v-a (painters, pigment and hypocrisy)

In celebration of Israel Independence Day, this Iyyar edition of JHOM also features: Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel 1890-1933 (Magnes Press and Jewish Publication Society, 1998) -- the first comprehensive book to chart the origins and development of local photography seen through the eyes of Jewish photographers. We include ten unusual photographs and an essay from Documentors of the Dream, as well as an audio webcast interview with the author, photographer and photo historian Vivienne Silver-Brody.

In commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, our bookshelf features  The Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld.  Submit your questions or comments to Mr. Appelfeld, listen to an exclusive audio webcast interview we conducted with him recently in Jerusalem, and enjoy several excerpts from his novels.


COLOR Table of Contents

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