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YOSL TEITELBAUM DREAMS THE ALEPH-BEIS |
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This piece uses the actions of reading to explore the detail and meaning of writing. It looks at the mystical traditions and religious significance of the Hebrew letters and tells a story of their mystery, beauty and power.
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The Hebrew Alphabet, the Aleph-Beis, is presented in a series of flick books whose imagery details the formation of each letter according to the Ashkenazi ritual script for writing sacred texts. As the reader turns the pages they create the letter, a role normally reserved for the trained scribe. They are able to look intimately at each letter's development.
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As the reader pulls out the flick books to read, elements of a narrative hidden within the structure, are revealed. These pages tell a love story: of the relationship between the eponymous Yosl, the printer's son and Dvorah, a scribe's daughter. Their fathers' actions have alienated both characters from the Hebrew letters. Through their relationship with each other they relearn the mysteries and positive spiritual values of writing the letters. Their backgrounds provide a framework to look at the relationship between writing and printing.
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The story is illustrated not with pictures but with three-dimensional objects, in particular three gifts the lovers exchange (pictured below). In this way the reader not only empathises with the characters but directly shares their experience.
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| Hand-set extracts from a Talmudic tractate (Shabbat 104a) concerning the moral teachings of the Hebrew letters |
Eyshet Chayil - A Woman of Valour, in the traditional script |
Hebrew type spelling the name Dvorah |
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The printer's tray, which contains these objects, is the realm of the real. The staircase structure that emanates from it, is that of dreams and the metaphysical. The search for God and meaning compasses both.
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When Yosl... has been exhibited, like the children of the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the reader begins their association with the Aleph-Beis, with honey cake, for learning and the letters themselves are sweet. But the rest of the journey is harder and more complex. The structure is designed with hidden elements so that the reader has to seek out objects and texts, for their own experience of finding a path of understanding. They are able to move back and forth between the narrative, flick book and object elements, as you might between different texts. Each element illuminates another to build a unified whole: just as a letter is built from individual strokes, a word is created from individual letters, a sentence from words, an idea from sentences. Being a small part of a whole is how we are involved with humanity.
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The piece draws on Kabbalisitc teachings that view the contemplation of the letters as a way of approaching God, who in Jewish belief is One. The narrative follows the idea of the first Hasidic Master, the Baal Shem Tov, who compared the sacred union of the letters into words, to the union of man and wife. Included in the work is a copy of a letter he wrote on the subject (see left). Being a small part of a whole is how some may be in a relationship with God, emulating and approaching His 'oneness'.
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