David Moss: Relational Tradition
David Moss was in the first graduating class of St. John’s College on the Santa Fe campus. My mother, Anne Harlan, was also a member of that class. St. John’s has a multi-year, single curriculum in which students engage deeply with primary source texts and each other in seminar, so many of these friendships remain strong. I spoke with David Moss from Jerusalem via a wavering Skype connection, not too long after many of his graduating class had reconnected on the occasion of their 50th reunion. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo: When you were in college, were you making art?
David Moss: I was not. But [Anne] was. At St. John’s she made me the most beautiful calendar, all collage, stunning. I don’t know if it’s still true, but because of what St. John’s was, there was no art [education] there. I had no interest in art so it wasn’t like I missed it.
EHF: When did you start your own artistic work? Was there a catalyst?
DM: The year after college, I went to Jerusalem. I had been accepted to study at the at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. At St. John’s College, I got what is probably one of the best liberal arts education in the humanities and science in the Western world, but I realized that I really did not have that kind of immersion in my own Jewish tradition. I convinced the Seminary, even though I wasn’t going to be a rabbi, [to] let me study in the rabbinic program. I had a year preparing for the entrance exam. It was during that year, I met a contemporary and friend, a sofer, a Torah scribe. He wrote out an alphabet for me of the Hebrew letters as they’re written in the Torah scroll and kind of just handed me the sheet of paper. This totally intrigued me, the letterforms themselves. I started copying them on my own and felt something just clicked. Something about those letters… the lettering and the letter forms and the lore of them. Letters are very important in Jewish culture. And the letters are really the primary intersection between the written word, the spoken word, and the visual, where the word becomes physical.
EHF: Did you grow up in an observant household and was Hebrew something you were very dexterous with already?
DM: Yes and no. I grew up in a very committed Jewish family. I come from Dayton, Ohio, very close to Cincinnati where the head of the Reform movement and the Hebrew Union College is. A lot of the scholars would come up from Cincinnati, so I had a very good intellectual backing. I did go to afternoon Hebrew school and managed to learn probably most of the letters in ten years or something like that, but was certainly not fluent in Hebrew or knowledgeable in traditional texts. My family was very committed, dedicated. Not ritually observant, particularly, but very committed.
The first thing that I started doing when I got fascinated with these letters was I discovered this wonderful old Jewish tradition of illustrating and illuminating a marriage contract called a ketubah. It’s not something that had to be high end, according to Jewish law. The contract itself was instituted to protect the woman’s rights after there was a divorce or death of the husband, so it was basically a legal document, not handmade or decorative. When I started calligraphy I asked around who was doing it and people said no, that [art form] died out a hundred years ago. So I started making these for friends who were getting married and then people saw them and would come to me. This turned into in a real phenomenon, and it started a whole revival of this art form.
LHF Around what year was that?
DM: I did my first ketubah in 1969. It was a time of popularity of do-it-yourself kind of religion. I wrote articles for the very popular Jewish catalog about how to do your own Jewish marriage contract, and it hit at a time when people were looking for alternative forms of religious expression. Fairly early on, I saw how [art] could somehow touch people in a way that maybe classes and lectures and books couldn’t, a spark that this visual expression had. And that really is what started a parallel career of thinking about how the art can be used educationally. I have had a dual career of creating the art and then thinking about how to use the art and the arts in general for Jewish goals: educational, inspirational, spiritual, intellectual.
EHF: We had a copy of [The Moss] Haggadah in the house when I was growing up. When I was looking at your website and the images from the Haggadah came up, I realized I had such a relationship with those pages from looking through it over and over when I was a kid. They felt very familiar to me. When was the Haggadah in the course of your career?
DM: The original was on commission and it was finished about 1983 or ’84. I never envisioned it being printed; it was a one-off manuscript on parchment which I spent three years on. A few years later another family saw my photographs [of the book] and just felt that it was, as [one] put it, unacceptable that there’s only one copy of this book in the world. I said it’s impossible to reproduce this book because since I was only doing one, I did things like real gold leaf and paper cuts and hand-applied mirrors and moving things, and all kinds of special techniques. But this fellow was quite persistent. The Facsimile Edition, [of which] 550 copies were made in a over a period of a year, is an absolute perfect replica of the original. Then a few years after that there was what we call the Trade Edition, which is the one that you probably have seen. That’s in its fourth printing and has done very well. A couple years ago we did what we call the Deluxe Edition. It has the paper cuts and it’s really very beautiful. The three versions of the book allowed it to have more currency and and it’s used by a lot of people. It’s used to teach, it’s used during the Passover ceremony —
EHF: I wondered that, if it’s actually used during the during the Passover meal.
DM: Oh yes, people use it. For each page of the book I wrote an article about how I got to the artwork and how I started with the research. So the way people tend to use it is they’ll take one or two [pages] each year, they’ll read what I wrote about the page, they’ll study the art, and present it at the Passover seder to the participants. And then the next year pick another page or two.
EHF: I’m curious about your process and how it relates to your own spiritual practice. Is your process directly connected to any particular ritual or any prayer life? Or is it more esoteric than that?
DM: I think it’s less esoteric than that! I work in a lot of different media. The medium is is not where it’s at for me — sculpture or furniture or objects or manuscripts or buildings or educational programming — it’s all kind of the same process, what I call Head, Heart and Hand. The Head part is highly intellectual, as is our tradition. It’s study of the text, idea, or value that I want to be dealing with, the or institution or couple or people [who commissioned the work.] It’s immersion in the in the tradition through study. It’s is very important for me to that my work be authentically based in our tradition. Of the three years I [worked on] the Haggadah, probably half of those three years was spent in the library.
The second piece is creative, finding a fresh, new, interesting way to express this text idea or value. Once I figure out an interesting passage or idea that I want to tackle, I’m looking for a way in that is creative — I mean that it’s fresh that it hasn’t been done before, that it’s interesting that it’s innovative. It’s not [about] the aesthetic for me — it isn’t that important. I believe I have a pretty good innate a sense of design and color though I’ve never studied any of that; for me it’s more the idea, and the creativity of the expression of the idea, than the aesthetics. So the first [step] is the intellectual piece and the second is the creative piece and then the third is the craft part of it. And I’m kind of obsessive on the craft, as you may notice. I will just spend whatever time effort and energy is necessary to do the thing well and beautifully and carefully and let it tell me what it needs to be done to make it right. Is that spiritual? I don’t know.
EHF: I did notice, when I was looking through all the different media that you work in, a real pattern of kind of relationship-driven work.
DM: Yes. I’m often working for real people that I have a relationship with. It’s very good that you picked up on that because that’s absolutely true.
EHF: It sounds like, from what you just described, that relationship is a driver in the creative process.
DM: Well, yes. I mean, I don’t have art training and I’m a little uncomfortable self-defining as an artist. But I do make art. The best way I’ve been able to define myself is that I’m a folk artist, but with a caveat. Namely, that I’m a folk artist of a very sophisticated folk! “Folk art” often conveys a naiveté and a kind of primitive style. I consider my work folk art because it’s almost always for people, what you call relational — a relationship. Whether my client is a young couple getting married and I’m trying to understand exactly who they are and what’s important to them and their relationship to Judaism and to Israel and how they met — just wanting to know everything I can about them so that I can create the perfect marriage contract and it will be meaningful to them. Or whether I’m interviewing the board of directors of a school that I’m helping design and talking to the students and talking to the neighbors, it’s almost always people-oriented. So in that sense I feel it’s folk art, it’s not for a museum. I hardly ever do museum shows or gallery shows; it’s really with and for people.
Our tradition is very, very sophisticated, intellectually sophisticated and highly, highly intellectual, highly literate and literary — my whole project, in a sense, is taking a very non-visual culture, and trying to find a way to express it visually. You know, for a Christian artist, almost any object has this long, rich tradition of symbology and symbolism — what is [the meaning of] a lily and what is a dog and what saint is associated with what. And Buddhism is the same way. We don’t have that visual vocabulary. So as an artist, I’m missing that, but on the other hand it gives me huge creative freedom to create fresh and new things.
EHF: Would you would you say that that lack of visual vocabulary or the emphasis on the verbal has to do with being a community in exile for so long?
DM: The traditional explanation of it is the second commandment, right? You can’t make images of God; it is anti-iconic, and there is the strong monotheistic piece. Certainly Islam also has an anti-iconic part to it. I don’t know exactly the reasons or the psychology or the theology behind it. And while it is it is somewhat true, it’s not totally true. There are a lot of visual pieces of Judaism, from the strong visual descriptions of the Mishkan — the Tabernacle, and the Temple, and all the ritual and objects, through the Byzantine mosaics, through the illuminated manuscript tradition into the Middle Ages. So it’s not absent, but I think we are closer in the verbal and sound than in the visual.
EHF: Do you ever do you ever receive pushback against your work because of that [traditional] prohibition?
DM: Virtually no.
EHF: Why do you think that hasn’t been a problem?
DM: My sense is that people embrace my work; they find it fresh and delightful, partly because it’s a new way of looking at it. They may know the same sources, but when they see it expressed in this different modality and in this different medium, it can be very exciting. People see it, get it, and love it across the Jewish spectrum. Which is something that’s not that common. From the Ultra-Orthodox to the totally secular, the same smiles and delight happen when I’m talking about this work and showing it and sharing it. It’s that response that made me think about the educational potential for this.
My main artistic challenge is too many ideas. I have a filing system of pizza boxes where I keep projects that I want to work on and throw in articles and research and sketches and ideas.
EHF: Are they in actual pizza boxes?
DM: They are actual pizza boxes! It’s a great filing system cause I can just throw stuff in and line them up on the shelves. I also have a spreadsheet on my computer that’s labeled “Pizza” and it’s the backup. I felt like I needed a kind of meta-idea to handle these and about seven or eight years ago I came up with this notion that I call a minyan, the quorum of 10 required for communal prayer. I had thought that if I could find 10 people that understand what I’m doing — this integration between the Jewish ideas and values and artistic expression — that would be willing to pre-subscribe, I’d send them [work] 3 or 4 times a year (limited edition signed works, prints, books, whatever.) It would allow me to keep the flow going and work through my pizza boxes. I’m up to about a hundred subscribers, I think. It’s been a huge blessing to have this group of people who believe in in what I do and love it and receive and share it.
EHF: Who and what inspires you, either artistically or otherwise?
DM: I look at everything. I’m not really that interested in art! My wife is a real art person. She’s a guide at the Israel Museum of Art and very excited about looking at Modern art and all kinds of art and I’m not really like that. I enjoy going to museums and I do go, but I’d just as soon go to the Science Museum. Maybe the influence from the outside might have to do with style or techniques or things like that, but I think the core of it comes from inside, trying to make these creative connections to the tradition.
EHF: Is there anything else that you feel like is important to know about your work?
DM: I guess the only thing I’d say is the sense of blessing of all this. I am very, very aware how unusual it is for an artist to be able to have a 50-year career without having to do anything except what he or she wants to do. And that has been an incredible blessing to me and a huge gift I feel that I’ve been given, especially since I don’t have art training and especially since I’m not interested in art. To have been given this gift of being able to create and share joy and understanding and enlightenment with gobs and gobs of people, to be able to have made a living at it for all these years and supported a family. . . There’s a real sense of wonder and amazement that I’ve been given this gift.
David Moss seeks to give fresh expression to Jewish texts, ideas and values through calligraphy, illumination, design, graphics, books, prints, architecture and education. Through Kol HaOt, he co-ordinates the Teacher’s Institute for the Arts. Through his ongoing subscription program he creates limited edition works of ‘teachable art’. Find more of his work at www.davidmoss.com www.bet-alpha-editions.com
All images © 2019 David Moss. Courtesy Bet-Alpha-Editions.com
