My Painting: The Windows of Heaven

March 24th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

My painting, The Windows of Heaven, 2007 (18 x 24, Acrylic and collage on canvas) appears in the exhibit Of Doors and Keys, opening tomorrow at the Baltimore JCC. The accompanying text appears below.

Jewish theology conceives of heaven in many aesthetic ways from a place jam packed with angels (how many can dance on a pin head?) to a castle-in-the-clouds, in which God looks down upon the world from atop
a fantastic throne. But two of the most interesting and bewildering images of heaven feature quite familiar interior decorating.

One Talmudic text, from within the Rabba bar Bar Chana ‘aggaditah’ (Baba Batra: 74a) narratives, tells of Rabba’s trip to the point where heaven and earth meet with an Arab merchant as a guide. Rabba finds heaven full of windows. He puts his basket on one of the sills, and the two set off on a heavenly stroll. When they return, Rabba’s basket is missing, and he ask the merchant, quite shocked, “Ika ganvei po” (Are there thieves even here?!). The merchant tells Rabba that his basket sits in the same window where he left it, but the heavens rotate (take that Copernicus!) and he must return at precisely the same time on the next day to retrieve his basket.

According to a second model, he might have also encountered heavenly
doors. Psalms, quoted in the morning Shacharit prayers, refers to the many doors of heaven, including the famous Gates of Prayer, which open to let prayers in, and shut on Yom Kippur when the deadline to “pass” the holy test arrives.

Why is heaven made of openings? What can it mean for the place that has teased the hopes and imaginations of religious people of all faiths to be made of empty spaces?

My painting explores these questions by singling out three of the important doors in Jewish history: the infamous door over Auschwitz that declared ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and the iconic gate that occupies the title page of books of the Talmud. The painting shows how doors and windows—essentially frames without art inside them—are perhaps the greatest models for Jewish art. Indeed, through the opening of Jaffa Gate (decorated with patterning from the Dome of the Rock, because surely there is room, even in the Jewish heaven, for all, especially as it took an Arab merchant to help Rabba find the heavens), several Rothko paintings peek through, plucked from the artist’s collection of catalogs and old issues of Art in America and Art News.

In heaven, the lucky inhabitants have no need for doors and windows, which are solely useful in the domain of the material. Movement in heaven, presumably, will be of the spiritual sort and not the physical, which is why Rothko’s work surfaces. Like no other painter before him, Rothko the Jew painted forms that carry immense weight, and yet they loom in the air, floating like Chagall’s kissing couples. Rothko’s rectangles occupy both positive and negative space—that is they live nowhere—and they are the windows and doors of my heaven, which bring viewers through space, deeper and deeper. In heaven, one can simply circumvent the harmless windows and doors, but who would want to?

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