Cameras
The invention that has intrigued me most is the camera. To this day, I do not understand how it works, but I think it is a magical invention. Things are “out there” – in space, on the street, or in the house – and by pushing a button on a once rather bulky, now svelte black or silver “box,” that “thing” can be transferred onto a piece of paper or computer screen. Tooth fairies and superheroes may be stretches of the imagination, but a camera with its lenses seems to be the ultimate miracle.
I once met the remarkable photographer, essayist, and teacher Susan Sontag, who explained that photography is as much about the person taking the picture as the picture itself. A photograph depends not so much on the “thing” out there, but rather on the person holding the camera, the spot where he or she is standing, and the angle from which he or she is shooting.
The educationist Parker Palmer has said, “We cannot see what is out there by simply looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we see the world. By putting on new lenses, we see things that otherwise would be invisible.”
Responses
One of the course-corrections we seem to be attempting in the early twenty-first century is to re-weave together the strands of science and art, prose and poetry, halakha and aggada. While these existed side by side in the Talmud, somewhere in the modern period they became unraveled. Barry Chazan's idea of lenses or narratives, which temper history and science with legend and art, is an important expression of this vital trend.
The notion of snapshots and photographs resonates with me having grown up in the era of LIFE magazine. The reality for those of us working in Jewish education today is that the images, although even more readily available, speed by, barely giving the viewer pause to reflect, think and absorb the content.
The roadmap laid out by Dr. Chazan is the right place to begin. It enjoins us to bring Israel to our students in ways that support them in becoming a part of the Israel story. Like a map in a shopping mall with an “x” identifying “you are here,” we need to meet them where they are and help them navigate, grow and create their own Israel stories.