Elul Project 5781
חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם
Renew our days as in the past or renew our days as in the beginning.
This phrase, which is sung at the conclusion of every Torah service, originates from the 
Book of Lamentations recited on Tisha B’av. It expresses the hope that God will restore our days to resemble a time before the destruction of the Temple. The final word, kedem, not only evokes longing for a past time, but a primordial time, a beginning time, when the world was freshly born, creation. Furthermore, the root letters of kedem, kuf-dalet-mem, yield a number of additional meanings. Derived from kadim, which means east, kuf-dalet-mem also paradoxically points to the future and is used to convey forward motion. Kuf-dalet-mem connects a sense of progress and development not only to the past, but to a time that is essentially new.

We are living in a period of global mourning, uncertainty, transition, reflection, and hope. What have we been through, who are we now, and where are we going?

This Elul, what does it mean to move forward? What role does looking back, remembering, and restoring play in our personal and collective progress? And how might we be guided by the vision of a new world?
Today's Text: Day 19
Amos Imre:
Dreamer, 1938

“Ámos is increasingly concerned with ways to project memory and dream in images. Indeed, the dream appears as the manifestation of desire throughout his work, in which the unconscious never disintegrates into discrete fragments. In these images, dream and reality merge to the effect of raising reality to the higher plane of the mythical.

For Ámos, the dream offers a means to rid himself of the seemingly immutable facts of waking life, a way of casting off the shackles of reality. More than just the protagonist, the painter becomes the director of his dreams. Unlike surrealist painters, Ámos never for a moment disables consciousness and emotion which provide a link between associations. In his paintings, dreams always appear in real-life situations, enriching the gist of the tactile image by a wealth of intimated correspondences.

This complexity of the dream is treated extensively in his Dreamer (1938), which replaces modal unity by a concatenation of contradictory dream fragments. The dream here is no longer simply a projection of childhood fantasy or desire. The objects of the room may still convey the sense of a sheltered home, but the world outside as glimpsed through the window is now teeming with portentous signs as the painter enacts his own double, so to speak. The crown of thorns gracing the head of the imagined painter deep in slumber foreshadows the artist’s persecution and death anxiety.”

-- Katalin Petényi, IMRE ÁMOS, PAINTER OF THE APOCALYPSE, From The Hungarian Review 2016
Question of the Day
How has imagination motivated, grounded, or challenged you over the past year?
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