Life

Drisha’s Arts Fellows’ Evening

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen June 9, 2009

Wednesday evening, Drisha’s Arts Fellows are presenting a wide range of kinds of artwork – visual, musical, dance, dramatic and literary – at an event held at the Lincoln Center-area yeshiva for women

Feel free to file this under “blatantly self promotional,” (as an Arts Fellow this past year I’m reading some of my work) but the event as a whole deserves attention, so I’m blogging about it anyway.

The event, at 7PM, is titled “Artists Illuminating Texts.”

The Arts Fellowship program at Drisha is unique, bringing together female artists from a wide range of disciplines and levels of text literacy to study Torah seriously and in depth.

We took classes appropriate for our texts skill level, along with other Drisha students, and came together as a group once weekly for a class with Talmud and Bible scholar Devorah Steinmetz. In the Artists’ Beit Midrash, we looked at several versions in Tractate Ta’anit of the story of Choni the Circle Maker.

Choni is a first century BCE figure, you may recall, who was approached by townspeople in a time of drought. They asked him to intercede with God to bring rain. He drew a circle around him with his stick, and said he would not leave until rain came. Rain came, but not enough, so he demanded more. Then it came down too hard.

There’s more to the story – or the several versions of it in Ta’anit, actually – and you can learn something of them at the Arts Fellows event.

Hope to see you there.

Debra Nussbaum Cohen is an award-winning journalist and the author of Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant. Follow her on Instagram @debranc or email her at [email protected].

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