Over Every Blade of Grass: My New Painting

Last week I completed a painting I’ve been working on for many weeks. Its name comes from the text written on its face: “Over every blade of grass an angel hovers, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.'”

This isn’t even close to an exact translation of the Talmudic text from Bereshit Rabbah 10.6 on which it is based, which recounts that “R. Shimon said: There is not a single herb but has a mazal [constellation] in the heavens which strikes it and says, ‘Grow!'” Nor does it reproduce the many slightly differing versions you can find by googling, which prefer angels to constellations and touching and whispering to commanding. But the liberties I’ve taken express what I wanted to say, which is more akin to Dylan Thomas’s passionate poem that begins “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.” All of us must pass from this life, but while we live we are sustained by a force of selfless love that wishes only the well-being of the beloved. Even a single blade of grass.

Some time after I’d finished a painting of my father (huge for me, as he’s been gone these nearly seven decades and I barely knew him), I began to despair of having a new subject. My paintings are idea-driven, I suppose, and they come to me in a flash rather than emerging from a process of planning or research. I think of myself as receiving ideas rather than generating them, and I hadn’t heard from their source for months.

One morning, out walking the dog, the sky was anything but ordinary. From an intense blue apex, rows and folds and cascades of clouds descended through softer and softer blues to the horizon. It made me dizzy to look up, but I steadied myself and took a bunch of pictures. All at once, I knew I wanted to paint them and that the painting would feature the text that I used. But who would be the angel and how would I depict that person?

I tried out many answers until I received another transmission informing me that this angel would be Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank of blessed memory, who was the most important teacher of Jewish wisdom in my life, and who died in an accident in 1998. His life and death had a profound impact on my own path. I hope this image has done justice to his sweetness, his interest in and caring for the world, and the largeness of his heart.

I have given David eagle’s wings as an allusion to the text in Exodus 19:4, where the voice of the Source of Being tells the people that “I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me,” reminding them of the covenant that emerges from being freed from slavery. 

The painting is large, 36″x48″ and one thing I really like about it is standing a few feet away and gazing at the upper part of the sky. I feel a little dizzy again and remember what is so easy to forget in times like these, that the earth with all it holds leads us to what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “radical amazement,” a state of wonder which is the true human condition, so easily obscured by conventional notions and explanations that can only approximate reality, only point to the mystery of existence, but never encompass it.

“Eagle Wings” by Jack Schechtman Gabriel.