Midrash of a Tear

In the middle of the Three Weeks, approaching the twilight of the sixth day of Shabbat Chazon – the evening when Jewish tradition looks straight into the fracture while marking the vision of future comfort – the Manofim Festival invites the public to a communal ceremony that will include performance pieces, singing, and study, accompanying the opening of Yael Serlin’s solo exhibition Four Cubits. The event will start in the gallery space of the Art Cube Artists’ Studios in Talpiyot and continue on the open rooftop of the Studios’ building, facing the skyline of Jerusalem. There, under the sky and accompanied by texts from the Jewish Sources, we will gather together for communal singing, dance pieces that move between rupture and growth, and personal excerpts from mothers’ diaries that will be read aloud. 

At the charged moment of Shabbat Chazon, death and life, exile and longing for wholeness are tied together by the same thread. The event Midrash of a Tear creates a space which invites you to stay inside of it and let the voices of mothers be heard. A voice that echoes Serlin’s private loss over the death of her son Yosef Chaim Tzvi, but is often missing from Israel’s collective mourning narrative. Together, we will experience the shared fate, the community carrying that which has been lost, and the strength that builds up from this loss. The intentional and shared dwelling within the cracks of time brings back to the space the idea of ‘taking care,’ the choice to nourish the body with physical and spiritual food with the intention to heal, and from the great fracture, it marks the opening for growth and the chasm that connects loss with the sacred.