Author: Shelley A. Sackett

Tu B’Shevat: Harbinger of Spring and More

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Tu B’Shevat (the 15th day of the Hebrew month Shevat) is not well-known or widely celebrated. That is a shame, since the holiday has a festive tone and imparts important contemporary lessons. It helps us mark time, it honors our earth and our partnership with its Creator, and it connects us to our biblical Israeli roots.


This Jewish holiday is not one that is mentioned in the Torah. Work is not prohibited and there are no special Tu B’Shevat prayers (in fact, some regular prayers are specifically omitted). The Rabbis, in the Mishnah (oral law), teach that Tu B’Shevat is the Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, for trees. As environmentally sensitive as celebrating trees’ birthdays may sound today, the historical and practical reason was to know when to begin the harvest and when to tithe the fruits for the Temple.

The Jewish people have a long tradition of appreciating trees. There are laws about when to eat fruit and when to let trees rest. There are laws prohibiting the cutting down of fruit trees when a city is besieged. There is a tradition to plant a cedar tree for a baby boy and a cypress tree for a baby girl, the idea being that the children would care for the trees and use them as poles for their chuppahs on their wedding days.

Today, with our changing environment, Tu B’Shevat offers the chance to perform the mitzvah of tikkun olam (repair the world). When we plant trees in Israel (a long-standing holiday tradition), we literally and physically recognize our responsibility to repair the damage we have inflicted on the earth. We also repair the spiritual damage we have done to ourselves and to our environment by taking both for granted. The day encourages us to appreciate the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Tu B’Shevat also connects Diaspora Jews to the land of Israel. It is a holiday deeply rooted in Israeli soil. While our trees are bare-branched and our soil is frozen at this time of year, in Israel the appearance of the first buds signal the beginning of spring. It is customary to eat fruits and grains identified in the Torah. These seven foods or “seven species” (wheat, barley, figs, pomegranates, olives, dates and grapes) are indigenous to Israel (See recipes, page 21).

Finally, Tu B’Shevat is an opportunity to come together as a Jewish community. Thanks to the 16th century Kabbalists, who developed a Tu B’Shevat seder loosely modeled after the Passover seder, we have a ritual that imbues eating the seven species with spirituality and reverence. We gather in celebration, to praise God as we honor the fruit of Eretz Yisrael.

Tu B’Shevat is a day to praise and connect to Israel and the strength and holiness of its soil. It is a day to come together as a community and celebrate and revere the gift of our physical and spiritual environments. It is a day when being called a “tree-hugger” takes on religious meaning.

This originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on January 29, 2015.

A Crusader for Truth and Justice: An Interview with Daniel Mael

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When Brandeis University classrooms reopened on January 13, senior Daniel Mael was free to move around campus without restriction. That is because on January 9 university officials rescinded a No Contact Order on the student journalist, Dean’s List student, pro-Israel activist and athlete. The order forbade Mael from being in the same physical location as another student who had petitioned the university administration to “hold Mael accountable” for comments Mael had posted on the website Truth Revolt.org.

It all started after the death of the two New York City police officers who were ambushed and murdered in seeming revenge for the unrelated killings of two black men by policemen. When Brandeis junior Khadijah Lynch, an African and Afro-American Studies major who served as an adviser to other undergraduate students, tweeted on December 20, “I have no sympathy for the NYPD officers who were murdered today,” and, I hate this racist f******g country,” Mael wrote an article at TruthRevolt.org, a conservative website he regularly contributes to, republishing these and other Lynch tweets.

Previous Lynch tweets referenced the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in August, stating, “the fact that black people have not burned this country down is beyond me,” “amerikka needs an intifada,” and “I am in riot mode.”

The text of Mael’s article is located at truthrevolt.org/news/studentleader- no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers.


“She was a student leader,” Mael said from Jerusalem, where he was vacationing over winter break, explaining why he wrote the article. “I think students on campus deserve to know if there are members of the community who make calls for violence and intifadas in America.

“I write for TruthRevolt because I believe there are important messages to get out. As a journalist, I believe I spread those messages successfully,” he said.

His article, shared widely on social media, had over 500,000 hits and scores of comments maligning Lynch. Lynch’s supporters rallied to her defense. Lynch threatened to sue Mael for slander.

On December 22, Michael Piccione, a Brandeis senior and member of the 2014-15 student conduct board, sent a mass email to Brandeis President Frederick M. Lawrence, administrators, faculty and students.

The subject line read, “VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!”

“Hello to all,” it began. “… The safety of one member of the Brandeis community, Khadijah Lynch, has been compromised by another Brandeis student, Daniel Mael.” The email stated that Mael’s TruthRevolt article “has exposed Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website on which he posts, which has led to harassment, death threats, rape threats and excessive hate speech directed to her personal Twitter.”

Piccione continued, “The most pressing concern ought to be the safety of our students” and ended by calling for Mael to be held accountable for his actions. He claimed that Mael had potentially violated multiple parts of Brandeis’ Rights and Responsibilities, including one prohibiting stalking.

Mael had never met Piccione.

Not one Brandeis faculty member or student leader publicly defended Mael. “I was very saddened, but I think it speaks volumes for the current state of affairs at a modern university where there are certain dissenting views that are oftentimes discouraged. People feel intimidated about speaking freely,” Mael said.

Mael did not think he violated Brandeis’ Code of Conduct when he republished Lynch’s tweets. Neither did Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, jurist, author, political commentator and outspoken pro-Israel advocate. He published an article on December 27 for newsmax.com titled, “Brandeis Student Shows No Sympathy for Ambushed Cops and Her Critic Is Attacked.”

“Mael had the right — and was right — to expose Lynch’s public words for assessment and criticism,” Dershowitz wrote. “Imagine how different the reaction of these same radical students would be if a white supporter of the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) had written comparably incendiary tweets.”

During winter break, Brandeis responded to Piccione’s complaint by slapping a No Contact Order on Mael, forbidding him from being in the same physical location on campus as Piccione. Mael received a phone call and follow-up email from Jamele Adams, Dean of Students, on December 23.

“You are to have no contact with Michael Piccione in any way, shape or form. Please be aware that the same applies to Michael…These measures will remain in place until further notice,” the email stated.

The punishment was imposed without any due process, according to Mael. “My movement on campus was restricted because I wrote an article,” he said.

While the No Contact Order was in effect, President Lawrence wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal in which he stated, “Our university has an unyielding commitment to free speech and expression of ideas. No student would ever be sanctioned for holding a specific point of view. In the spirit of our namesake, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, we will staunchly defend every student’s right to advocate for causes they hold dear.”

Kenneth L. Marcus is president and general counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, an organization he founded in 2011 to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education.

“This is outrageous in so many ways,” he said when he learned about the No Contact Order. “When civil rights principles are abused in this way, the victims are not only the Daniel Maels of the world, but also those people who truly are harassed and whose claims will be taken less seriously as a result of the distortion of legal principles.

“But I do think that Daniel will emerge from this stronger than ever, and that it will increase his national exposure in ways that I hope will be useful to him down the road,” Marcus added.

Mael has been interviewed by over 25 publications, including The Times of Israel and on television by Fox News’ Fox & Friends about the Lynch episode and its aftermath.

He was advised by local and campus police to take precautions and not walk alone. “I know the facts,” he said. “We’re in a perilous time. There is racial tension in this country. There are extremists who call for violence and support cop-killing.”

In a meeting with Brandeis public safety officials to discuss threats made against him, he was advised to consider changing his dorm room and that it was a reasonable expectation that his car would be vandalized. It was also recommended he purchase mace.

“My last semester will be sharply changed,” the May 2015 graduate said. “I’m going to take everything on that basis to make sure I’m safe and able to function as a student.”

On January 9, four days before spring semester classes would start, Mael received another email from Dean of Students Adams. This one rescinded the order. The time of the email was a few hours after The Washington Free Beacon broke the story about the restrictive order on freebeacon.com.

“Thank you for respecting the No Contact Order between you and Michael. As there have been no reported incidents from either side of attempting to contact one another, I do not see justification for continuing the (NCO) into the spring semester,” Adams wrote.

Mael transferred to Brandeis as a junior in 2013 from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, after a 2012 Birthright-Israel trip made him realize he wanted access to more Orthodox infrastructure. He said that “never in my wildest dreams” did he imagine these kinds of events happening to him.

Still, he has no regrets, either about transferring or about writing the article for TruthRevolt. org.

“I’d like to believe from the overflowing level of attention that I’ve been successful in being able to connect or at least give a voice to certain people who would otherwise remain voiceless,” he said, pausing.

“I’m just very thankful for the encouragement and support from the community, especially my mother who has been tested in a trying situation and has done her best to be there for me. I am appreciative and thankful,” he said.

The World Needs Another Dreamer

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“ I have a dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr. famously declared in a speech on August 28, 1963, in which he called for an end to racism in the United States. That dreamer, who spoke of freedom, equality, dignity and respect for all Americans, united more than 250,000 people of all colors and national origins that day.

Last Sunday, on the streets of Paris, 1.5 million Christians, atheists, Jews, Muslims and people of many other fauths stood side by side and marched in a show of global solidarity for freedom, equality, dignity and respect, in response to terrorist strikes that killed 17 people.

Leading the march was French President Franois Hollande, arm in arm with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and a host of European and African leaders.

Although the march did not have any speakers, these leaders spoke volumes by their presence.

Nonetheless, the time is ripe for another dreamer like Dr. King; this time it needs to be a global dreamer with the ability to capitalize on this rare moment when the world is united in its outrage against the recent assault on the very fabric of all that Western civilization represents.

The Charlie Hebdo attack raised awareness that Islamist extremism does not target only Jews or Muslim infidels, but that it aims to destroy everyone and everything that is not in its image. World leaders need to show that they will stand together; communication, cooperation and collaboration are key.

Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Let’s hope someone, somewhere is ready to continue his legacy. The world as we know it may depend on it.

This appeared in the Jewish Journal on January 15, 2015.

A “Second” New Year

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The start of a new year is a time to review, assess and plan. We review resolutions we made a year ago, reflect on how well we accomplished our goals and then wipe the slate clean, planning our list for the year to come. For Jews, the secular New Year is the perfect opportunity to do a first-quarter checkup on how well we are doing with the promises we made to ourselves on Yom Kippur.


Like financial plans, intentions to better ourselves are not meant to be static documents; rather, we should periodically assess, question and revise them. Were the goals we set for ourselves three months ago realistic? Have we or loved ones experienced unforeseen life events that need to be taken into account? Have we somehow gotten off track?

Maybe our goals and priorities have shifted. Maybe a relationship has taken on more meaning or a task more importance. Maybe our physical or mental health demands we change our habits. Maybe a new job requires us to adapt and retool.

Maybe the war in Israel and the rise of global anti-Semitism in 2014 have awakened in us a need to incorporate more Judaism and spirituality into our lives by studying Torah more often, committing to Shabbat observance or experimenting with Jewish cooking. Perhaps we are newly motivated to take steps to strengthen Israel by taking part in pro-Israel activities. Maybe we resolve to take an active role in tikkun olam by making a commitment to social justice.

Or maybe we conclude that we are on the right track and that our progress is on course.

Whichever conclusion we draw or steps we take, we are indeed lucky to have this “second” New Year, this three-month checkup.

This appeared in the Jewish Journal on January 1, 2015.

Let Us Be a Light Unto Our Children This Hanukkah

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Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights and the Feast of Dedication, is a happy holiday, one that commemorates a Jewish military victory and a miracle reflecting God’s intervention on our behalf. It is rich with symbolism and ritual. It is also rich with spirituality, and presents a golden opportunity to teach and show our children what it means to be Jewish.

Like Passover and Sukkot, the majority of Hanukkah rituals take place in the home. We create meaning and memories with our families, taking turns lighting the menorah candles, eating traditional foods and playing dreidel. These activities remind us who we are and where we come from; they link us to each other and anchor us in our Judaism.

These days, it is a challenge to avoid letting Hanukkah become trivialized as a retaildriven, superficial Christmas analog. Our children in particular are under pressure from their peers and the media. It is our job to help them find comfort and significance in the simple act of lighting a candle.

Each flickering flame has the power to connect us to light, the conqueror of darkness and the original source of nourishment. During these dark winter solstice nights, when we place the Hanukkah menorah in a window visible to the public, as is customary in many communities, we go one step further.

Our menorah in the window shows the world that we Jews bring light into the world, that we take seriously and literally our charge of “tikkun olam” (repairing the world). Our menorah in the window shows the world that despite the recent rash of anti-Semitism, we will not be intimidated; we will continue to display our Judaism proudly and publicly.

For Jews, the meaning of light is inspiration, courage, warmth, strength and belief in oneself. This is the lesson of Hanukkah 2014 that we can pass on to our children.

This originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on December 18, 2014.

Passing on Our Spark of Light To the Next Generation

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Our Jewish heritage values community, education and tradition. Yet how often, outside of the High Holidays, do we gather as a community of over 700 Jews with the sole agenda of connecting with each other, and our faith, to share, study and celebrate?


LimmudBoston’s fifth annual day-long celebration of lifelong learning on December 7 was just such an occasion, and it was thrilling for the Journal to be there.

The menu of 85 classes clearly proclaimed that we were part of something bigger than ourselves, and that “something” could only be described as being in love with being Jewish.

Rabbis and scholars explored Biblical, Talmudic and contemporary sources. “What’s So Jewish About the News” looked at the top stories in 2014. Classes in spirituality, prayer, parenting, Jewish identity and modern and historic Israel sparked lively debates.

Throughout the day, common themes surfaced: Jews are inclusive; Jews value diversity; vigorous debate is encouraged, but conflict is not; Jews seek a life of meaning; and Jews look to make a difference.

Common questions surfaced, too. The two most often repeated included, “How do we light the spark of a love of Judaism in the next generation? How do we attract the unaffiliated?”

One way might be to make sure everyone has the opportunity to experience an event like LimmudBoston. It is impossible not to come away feeling energized and hopeful. A smaller version of the event could travel to other communities. Campus Hillels could organize transportation so their students could attend. Synagogues could organize field trips for their members and offer free tuition.

One thing is certain: during these tough times of anti-Semitism and attacks against Jews, it is a challenge to remain optimistic about our future. The task of everyone who attended LimmudBoston 2014 is to keep the spark going by spreading their enthusiasm to their communities, friends and families. Like the Hanukkah candles we will soon be lighting, LimmudBoston is a light in the winter darkness.

This originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on December 11, 2014.

A Perfect Fit: Prosthetics, Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam

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When he travels to Zacapa, Guatemala to provide prosthetic limbs and orthotic braces to amputees, Michael Smerka of Marblehead takes his responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world (“tikkun olam”) literally. 


A clinical prosthetist who makes and fits artificial limbs for patients who have suffered limb loss, Smerka recently returned from his third trip to Guatemala, as a member of the Range Of Motion Project (ROMP).

“The work is transformative,” the native New Yorker said. “If you do it once, you get addicted.”

ROMP’s mission is to provide used prostheses to those without access to care. While studying for a post-graduate degree in prosthetics at Northwestern University in 2004, Smerka met ROMP’s co-founder Eric Neufeld when they were assigned as lab partners. He remembers Neufeld talking about wanting to do charitable prosthetic work in the developing world.

The two became aware that in the U.S., federal regulations do not allow used prostheses to be resold, and so they would go to waste if the original owner needed refitting or passed away. They began asking families to donate the components and Neufeld decided to send them outside the U.S. to places where there is not access to the care (people trained to fit a prosthesis correctly) or to the artificial limbs.

Neufeld and Dave Krupa cofounded ROMP in 2005, and started a clinic as part of a regional hospital in Zacapa. Over the years, they spent time training local residents to be clinical experts so they can continue to care for people even when the Western clinicians have left.

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Pictured from left: Dave Rotter, Marco, Eric Neufeld and Michael Smerka

“That long-term goal is part of the beauty of ROMP,” Smerka said. “We are able to bring them up to speed on current practices, biomechanics and fabrication. We are bringing 21st century technology to a developing country.”

This year, after securing a grant from Grand Challenges Canada, ROMP and University of Victoria engineers collaborated to bring cutting edge 3D printing and scanning capabilities to the Zacapa rehabilitation clinic. Smerka brought the first printer with him on his most recent trip in October, when seven ROMP volunteer clinicians worked on site to fit between 35 and 40 patients with prosthetic feet, legs, hands and arms. The recipients ranged from 8 to 82 years old.

Smerka thinks it is difficult for people in the U.S. to grasp the impact that these limbs have.

“It’s not just a device; it’s life changing for both the amputees and their families,” he said. “What happens is that when somebody becomes an amputee, they become a drain on an impoverished family already in difficult conditions. This helps a child. It helps a father return as a breadwinner to support his family.”

For example, Hilda, a 27-yearold woman Smerka worked with this year, lost her limb in a work-related accident about 18 months ago. She was fit with a first prosthesis, but needed a new one because of anatomical changes to her residual limb. Louisa, a volunteer firefighter, was fitted with an athletic runner’s device donated by the manufacturer Fillauer, enabling her to resume one of her passions.

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Hilda and Louisa 


Candidates for treatment go through a six-month process between the times they first contact the clinic and the time the ROMP team arrives. For follow- up care, or if they missed the opportunity to be treated by ROMP clinicians, they still can be fitted by one of the ROMPtrained local clinicians.

Smerka was one of three Jewish ROMP volunteers on this recent trip. “We didn’t do Shabbos, but we acknowledged it by saying, ‘Shabbat Shalom,’” he said, smiling.

Smerka’s path to his current profession was full of twists, turns and serendipity. After earning a BFA from SUNY Purchase, he followed his artistic passion and tried to make a living creating contemporary fine furniture. Realizing he had to supplement his income, he did commercial custom work, eventually working at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “That was a really fun job,” he said.

A knee injury and four months of rehabilitation brought him to a crossroad. In addition to his physical limitations, the climate of the furniture making industry was changing, making it harder to earn a living in that field. He wanted a profession that would fit his interests and art background. He had enjoyed the process of physical therapy, but he also wanted to make use of his artistic skills. When he looked into prosthetics, he discovered a good fit.

“It looked like a perfect combination of working with people, being in a rehabilitation medical setting and building things,” he said. Not long after, he began as an unpaid apprentice to see if he wanted to pursue becoming a clinical Prosthetist; he did.

He started in the field in 2001. In 2011, he and his wife, Heather Glick, moved to her native Marblehead, where they live with their four-year-old son and 16-month-old daughter. He now works at A Step Ahead Prosthetics in Burlington. Its founder, Erik Schaffer, organized a prosthetic limb drive for ROMP and regularly fits wounded Israeli soldiers through FIDF (Friends of the Israel Defense Forces).

Smerka plans to develop a ROMP in Boston where people can access services through A Step Ahead. He points to the many under-insured and undocumented people who need this help. Again and again, Smerka circles back to his Jewish roots and to his gratification of fulfilling the mitzvah of tikkun olam. “Having that Jewish lens wherever you are and whatever you do is important to me,” he said.

For more information or to make a donation, go to rompglobal. org.

Pictured at top: Michael Smerka with Hilda in Zacapa, Guatemala

Pro-Israel Campus Groups Need To Become A Real Movement

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Once again, articles about anti-Israel groups on U.S. campuses peppered the Jewish and secular press this week, leaving the impression that Jewish and pro-Israel students are being harassed, intimidated and compromised.


The ADL, in a November 20 blog titled, “Anti-Israel Activity Prevalent on Massachusetts Campuses This Year,” listed nine events that have occurred since September, including a “Festival of Resistance” at Smith College that culminated in an anti-Israel rally outside Northampton City Hall.

Haaretz reported that Wellesley College’s Hillel director and Jewish chaplain were fired after they asked for a meeting with Wellesley’s Students for Justice in Palestine leaders. The Times of Israel reported about SJP’s planned illegal activities against Jewish students and Israel.

Divestment organizers at UCLA, representing a wide coalition of students from all backgrounds and sectors of campus, celebrated a milestone victory for social justice with the passage of “A Resolution to Divest from Companies Engaged in Violence against Palestinians” that singled out Israel.

Once again, pro-Israel groups reacted independently and inconsistently. Some worried that generating outside attention might inflame the situation, making campuses even more vulnerable. Some planned Israel advocacy trainings and sponsored thoughtful opportunities for dialogue. Others rose in defiance, loudly defending Israel against unfair resolutions.

One challenge they all faced was how to address these injustices without legitimizing them. David Suissa, in his opinion piece on the facing page, proposes a solution that is both proactive and constructive.

He suggests that all pro-Israel groups unite behind a single slogan so potent that it will reframe the debate over Palestine in a way that can empower all students, Jewish and non-Jewish, to support Israel.

His idea? “Israel can save the Middle East.”

Think about what might happen if the various pro-Israel groups banded together as a true movement that spoke with one voice and one goal: to draw attention away from Israel’s flaws and towards Israel’s position as the only positive and democratic influence in the Middle East and the only hope for transforming the chaotic region.

Who knows what could happen? Maybe someday the articles about pro-Israel activity on U.S. campuses might just outnumber their counterpart’s.

This originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on December 4, 2014.

Finding Hope Against Hope

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Samuel Bak’s new exhibit is a stunning collection of oil paintings in which the letters “H.O.P.E.” appear in various states of prominence and entirety, sometimes hidden amid bits and pieces of broken bottles and pottery, sometimes clearly visible. Bak’s complex, vibrant paintings address, in his words, “the problem we all share in searching for Hope when it is so difficult to find.” 

“Hope — how did I get there?” the child prodigy and Holocaust survivor rhetorically asked in his preface to the show’s catalog. If there are pictures worth a thousand words, he reasoned, “aren’t there words worth thousands of pictures?”

The show at the Pucker Gallery on Boston’s Newbury Street is as rich in allegory and metaphor as it is in color and texture. Huge fruit, mostly pears, appear in bewildering forms and situations. They are made of metal, stone and wood. They are blue, orange and red. They borrow their identity from cups and vases, shifting from the familiar to the unfamiliar. And yet, each remains unmistakably identifiable.

Bak first painted pears when he was preparing for a big show in Paris during the 1960’s. “I suddenly realized that the pear can be used for all kinds of things that bring different thoughts with them,” he said. For example, the pear brings to mind the female form. It also, according to Bak, can symbolize the limitation of human knowledge. “No one really knows what was the fruit of knowledge,” chuckled Bak, who admitted that, as a child, he disliked apples and that the pear was his favorite fruit.

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“I try to extract whatever I can from a single object,” he said, revealing that returning again and again to the same subject allows him to go deeper into a theme, like a composer whose improvisations create new works based on a single musical theme, such as Bach’s “30 Goldberg Variations.” “My imagination is not surreal; it is grounded in reality,” he added. 


An only child, Bak was born in 1933 to an educated, cultured middle-class family in Vilna. By age three, he was a recognized child prodigy painter. “At that age, I wanted to be a fireman or to sell candy, but little by little I got used to it,” he noted, adding he remembers loving painting and making his parents proud.


At seven years old, on the day after his first day of school, Bak and his family were deported to the Vilna Ghetto. At the age of nine, he had his first exhibition, inside the ghetto. When the Russians liberated Vilna, he and his mother were among its two hundred survivors from a pre-war community of between 70 and 80 thousand. They spent from 1945 until 1948 in German displaced person camps, immigrating to Israel in 1948. His second day of school was in Israel, at age 15. “That’s how it was. My times were not normal when I was young,” Bak said, shrugging.

He lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome and Lausanne, before settling in Weston in 1993. The Pucker Gallery had represented him since 1967, when an Israeli art dealer showed Bernie Pucker some of Bak’s work. “It is a kind of marriage,” Bak said, pointing out that such long relationships between artist and gallery are extremely rare.

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Under the Arches

Bak is keenly aware of the role the Holocaust has played in his choices of subjects and themes. His imagery reveals survival and suffering, reconstruction and destruction, hope and despair. His paintings are full of bits and pieces of broken objects that have been put back together in sometimes disturbing fashion. His choice of the theme “bits and pieces” is deliberate.

“After the Holocaust, despite the fact that each one of them was haunted by ghosts, the survivors put up an appearance of a certain normalcy, of something that was almost reconstructed but that was intrinsically broken inside,” Bak began.

He continued, “This became the very big subject of my paintings. It means to describe the reality of bringing up an old memory of something that cannot be completely repaired. My paintings are made out of bits and pieces, like the lives of these people.”


Although Bak has been compared to Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author, he identifies more with writers like Primo Levi, the Italian survivor who wrote, “If This Is A Man” and “If Not Now, When”?

“For me, the Holocaust was more of a universal kind of experience. It was a laboratory of human behaviors that showed the extremes of the destructive powers of humans harming each other…For Elie, it is a more Jewish specific drama,” Bak explained, adding, “We speak of the human condition in very different terms. I speak of the terrible with a greater degree of irony and humor. He goes at it more directly.”

Besides, noted Bak, he speaks in images and Wiesel speaks in words. “I was told, ‘You are the Elie Wiesel of painting,’ but there is no such thing.”

Giving Thanks for Shmita

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As we gather around our Thanksgiving tables with loved ones and favorite dishes, our thoughts turn to many things for which we are grateful. Despite recent outbursts of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments, we are thankful that America remains a safe haven for Jews. Despite an unsteady economy and a widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots, we acknowledge that we have a roof over our heads and enough to eat. Although friends and family may be scattered all over the globe, we appreciate that we have the means and desire to come together as a community.


Thanksgiving 5775 is a “Shmita” year, the sabbatical year of a seven-year cycle mandated by the Torah, and we should also take a moment to be thankful for it.

Shmita (literally “release”) is the mitzvah that commands us to let the land rest and to forgive all debts to fellow Jews every seven years. Any fruit which grows of its own accord is deemed ownerless and may be picked by anyone. After six years of farming, our ancestors were called upon to release control over all they owned and owed.

In essence, Shmita teaches us about social justice and sustainability, about how we can help maintain economic, environmental and social balance in the world. It is a commandment of action and commitment. Our gratitude to God expresses itself in deeds. We feed others, whether they are family members or strangers. We revere the land, granting it a year of rest and replenishment. We acknowledge that God sustains living creatures with lovingkindness by extending the same to the earth that sustains us.

Shmita is also a commandment that we slow down, that we stop and rest and examine our own behaviors and beliefs to see what we want to change. Shmita implies that our thankfulness to God should not remain in the realm of emotions, thoughts or even speech, but should also move us to action. It reminds us of our connectedness to God, to each other and to the land.

And so, this year when we say our brachot giving thanks to God before enjoying our holiday meal, let us recognize that Thanksgiving 5775 is special by including an additional prayer for the gift of Shmita.

This originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on November 20, 2014.