About The Artist and The Work: Shoshannah Brombacher was born in Amsterdam in 1959, and currently works in Brooklyn, New York. Educated in Semitic Languages, Ancient Middle Eastern Culture and Codicology at the University of Leyden (Holland), Brombacher is an Orthodox Jew, an ordained maggidah (professional Chassidic story-teller) and considers herself a self-taught artist. Brombacher’s works are reminiscent of Russian-French artist Marc Chagall, whose work is “unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors.”Cogniat Raymond, Chagall (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1978). Brombacher’s play with color and line evokes the waters of the canals of her native Amsterdam: the deeper you look into them, the more you see. In her pieces, Brombacher includes themes and techniques from the Dutch seventeenth-century masters, German expressionism, Russian art and medieval miniatures.
Brombacher’s background allows her to straddle the uneasy divide between the academic and the artistic. Her familiarity with ancient Hebrew texts (which she studied at the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam) informs her artistic meditations on the Old Testament. Brombacher considers text (and The Text) an integral part of her artwork, saying, “my art is not complete without text and letters, it is writing come alive.”
The piece, Yaakov Blesses Efrayim and Menasheh in pastel and ink, is based on Genesis 48:14–21. The vibrant lines echo the story of the coat of many colors that Jacob/Israel gave to Joseph, playing with the themes of blessing and redemption. Brombacher intentionally calls to mind Rembrandt’s classic painting, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, playing with the ancient themes of patrilineal inheritance. “Did Jacob remember that long ago he himself took the blessing of the first born instead of Esau?” the artist asks. “The children and Joseph look puzzled, but the old patriarch Jacob knows what he is doing.”
It doesn’t go without saying that age confers wisdom; from King Lear to Captain Ahab, literature offers us images of old men who make colossal and foolish mistakes. “Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men,” T. S. Eliot writes, “but rather of their folly.”T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets 2: East Coker.” Poetry X. Jough Dempsey, ed., 13 Jul 2003. His reminder not to sentimentalize the archetype of the wise elder, or to reduce it to cliché, reiterates an ancient truth: that wisdom and folly often look strangely alike. Joseph’s effort to correct Jacob as he reaches to confer his blessing on the younger grandson is the kind of intervention any of us might attempt when we witness the momentary confusion of an old person whose vision or memory or clarity of mind is unreliable. We redirect them. We lead them back into the safe bounds of propriety, trying to cover over their unruly and wayward behaviors. We give them diagnostic labels that sometimes serve only to relieve us of the more subtle and arduous effort to interpret the logic of the dreams they inhabit. Certainly clinical evidence attests to the literal, tragic loss of brain function that afflicts many elders. But it behooves us, if only to err on the side of dignity, to honor the humanity and inquire into the hopes that underlie their foolish mistakes. Some of them speak more than they know. Some of them know things that cannot be contained within the limits of convention.
So Joseph intercedes on his elder son’s behalf: “Not this way, my father; since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head” (Genesis 48:18, ESVScripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The, ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.). Jacob’s response is the key to this story, and a harbinger of the long history of God’s curious, counterintuitive, disruptive grace toward a people learning to be free: “I know, my son, I know” (Genesis 48:19, ESV). He promises greatness also to Manasseh, even as he blesses Ephraim, but the choosing of the younger son remains a clear, defiant, obedient, unambiguous act of election that challenges the hegemony of human rule and ritual. It reminds us of the deceptive and disorderly way he received his own father’s blessing, stealing it from Esau, who settled for a “mess of pottage.” It also presages other odd elections— of David the youngest son to be king of Israel; of Peter, the rough laborer, to lead the apostles; of a child born in a stable out of human wedlock to bear the weight of God’s own light in mortal flesh.
Shoshannah Brombacher’s striking rendering of this consequential moment makes its emotional intensities visible in the vibrant whorls of color that seem almost to subsume the four figures. Matter and mortal flesh give way to energy that looks something like a refining fire or a burning bush, rising from the two boys, caught in a story they can’t possibly understand, to lick at the bodies of the old man and the younger, intimately caught up in their cross purposes.
It is not easy, recalling the story through the lens of this image, to settle our sympathies on one or another of these actors in divine drama. Joseph’s face makes perhaps the most poignant appeal. Eyes wide, gaze trained on the old man he seems to support with one hand while reaching with the other to stay his confusion, his look of loving concern suggests something in him, also, that remains open to the wildness and wideness of God’s own blessing. He is vigilant, protective, suspended, and, we may imagine, aware of something at work in this crossing of hands that deserves to be honored, since it cannot be stopped. Visually aligned with his father in the tilt of their kippahs, the curve of their beards, the size of their powerful hands, and in the live, encircling air, he is more awed witness than adversary. Even as he reaches to stop his father, something suspends his hand in midair, and not in a gesture of restraint but rather one that might offer support.
Jacob’s eyes are closed. His eyes, we read, were “dim with age, so that he could not see” (Genesis 48:10, ESV). The archetype of the blind prophet appears in many traditions—a reminder that not all knowledge comes through the fallible physical mechanisms of sight; some things we can know only when the distractions of the physical order give way to an inner awareness and immediate apprehension of one who speaks from another dimension. The story tells us he had to ask who the boys were. This is not a tale of an affectionate grandfather playing favorites. It is about the way, in messy, unmanageable moments of human encounter, God’s purposes are served by us, through us, and in spite of us. Eliot, in the same prophetic poem cited above, speaks of that mysterious intersection of divine and human intention in a way that offers a powerful gloss on Jacob’s story:
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding.” Poetry X. Jough Dempsey, ed., 13 Jul 2003.T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding.” Poetry X. Jough Dempsey, ed., 13 Jul 2003.
Jacob insists he knows what he does. He may not know why. He may not fully understand—or need to understand—God’s purposes. But he knows what he must do. His radical obedience to something more compelling than custom and legal claims aligns him with Abraham on Moriah and with David eating forbidden sacred bread and with the boy Jesus who already at twelve challenges his anxious parents to imagine that he and they inhabit a drama much bigger than the one played out on village streets: “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49, KJVScriptures marked (KJV) are from the King James Version of the Bible and is in the public domain in most of the world.). The unfolding of the Father’s business continues. It is what we are about. “Bidden or unbidden, God is present,” Desiderius Erasmus wrote, and Jung inscribed those words over his doorway as a daily call to humility and awe. Aware or unaware, we participate, like Jacob and Joseph and the two unsuspecting little boys, in a story whose scope is beyond what we figure, even in our dreams.
Those little boys, of course, are also actors in this story. Foregrounded in Brombacher’s painting, they cannot be consigned to an incidental role in their father’s and grandfather’s moment of parabolic conflict. Ephraim, over whose head Jacob’s right hand hovers, seems scorched by the ambient fire that reddens his cheeks and the hand he lays trustingly on his brother’s chest. His gaze, softer than his brother’s, is directed toward the old man; he seems receptive; he waits and watches. Manasseh, by contrast, looks sharply up at his father, left hand raised as if in appeal for protection of his rights. The intentionality of his appeal looks very different from Manasseh’s quiet attentiveness. And how would we not sympathize with him—the child who had every right to expect a blessing now being conferred elsewhere? It isn’t fair. This is one of the hardest recurrent features of the biblical story—that God is not, by our rigorous and self-limiting standards, fair. That again and again divine intervention in human affairs shakes and sometimes cracks the foundations of law, order, family values, personal piety, political stability. Lines of inheritance, apportioning of property, assignment of talents, opportunity, health, and resources are entangled and inequitable. But faith calls us to reach beyond those troubling inequities for a hand that, when we cling to it, offers us assurance as confident as Julian’s: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Grace Warrack, trans. (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2014) 55, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xiv.i.html.
The invigorating disturbances in the magnetic field of Brombacher’s painting invite us to consider a God whose mercy burns, whose presence is like tongues of fire, who permeates the air we breathe, and who also surrounds us with an immanence and a radical intimacy we can barely begin to fathom.
Marilyn McEntyre is a Fellow at the Gaede Institute, Westmont College, and teaches medical humanities at UC Berkeley. Her recent books include Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out, and Reading Like a Serpent: What the Scarlet A is About. Her new book, What’s In a Phrase: Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause, published by Eerdmans in 2014.