Interfaith Voices: The Jewish New Year and the possibilities for transformation
by Sari Sapon-White
At sundown on Sept. 15, the Jewish New Year begins.
The first 10 days of the Jewish year, known as the “Yamim Norayim” (Days of Awe), begin with Rosh Hashanah and end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rosh Hashanah (literally “the head of the year”) is a day to look back on the accomplishments as well as the disappointments of the previous year, and to look forward with hope to the new possibilities that lie ahead.
Unlike the secular New Year, it is not marked with late-night parties or resolutions. Jews typically welcome Rosh Hashanah with a festive family dinner, an evening service that introduces the special melodies that are sung at this season, and a blessing over sliced apples and honey in hopes that sweetness lies ahead.
This evening is followed by a full day (or two) of services that include singing, readings from the Hebrew Bible, and blowing the shofar (ram’s horn), dramatically awakening our spirit and readying us for a heightened level of self-awareness.
But that isn’t the endpoint — in one week it will be Yom Kippur, often considered the holiest day of the Jewish year. The intervening days are spent not in communal prayer but in private reflection.
We are to review our behavior over the past year and identify the ways in which we missed the mark or fell short of the morals and values we aspire to uphold.
While the ultimate purpose of this process is to make things right with God and be granted a new year of life, we are told that we cannot ask God to forgive our failings unless we first ask forgiveness of any fellow human beings whom we have mistreated. This process is known in Hebrew as “heshbon ha-nefesh,” an accounting of the soul.
Yom Kippur has an entirely different tone from Rosh Hashanah; it is marked by a complete fast, simple dress (often white) and a full day of services that include many penitential prayers.
It is an intense experience of prayer that urges us to take responsibility for the ways in which we have failed to be our best selves in our relationships with loved ones, friends, community members, strangers and God.
If it sounds hard, it is. It can feel grueling and emotionally painful. What carries me through is doing this in community with other Jews. When we recite long lists of the ways in which we have strayed, we say the words aloud in unison.
Certainly, no one of us has fallen short in all those ways, but by speaking them together we acknowledge our own failings and express support for those standing next to us who have different but equally challenging habits they also yearn to change.
As the sun begins to set, we hear the final blast of the shofar. Standing together, humbled and vulnerable, we hope to move closer to the version of ourselves we most wish to be in the world.
I recently heard a Jewish spiritual leader propose that we also use this time of year to ask ourselves if there is anything around us that is broken that we did not break, and then consider what we might do toward healing this brokenness.
Taking responsibility for social justice is a core tenet of Judaism, but I see tremendous value in adding this question.
The times we are living through are fraught with inequity, injustice and increasingly frightening manifestations of climate chaos; it feels right and timely to bring the focused intentionality of these days to a broader vision of transformation.
Sari Sapon-White of Corvallis is a writer who also tutors children preparing for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah. She is an active member of the local Jewish community.
The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of racism in society.
As protesters called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., activist Shaun King went further, suggesting that murals and artwork depicting “white Jesus” should “come down.”
As a European Renaissance art historian, I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the best-known depictions of Christ, from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were produced during this period.
But the all-time most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from 1940. Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide.
Sallman’s ‘Head of Christ’
Through Sallman’s partnerships with two Christian publishing companies, one Protestant and one Catholic, the Head of Christ came to be included on everything from prayer cards to stained glass, faux oil paintings, calendars, hymnals and night lights.
Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image.
In search of the holy face
The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
Even these texts are contradictory: The Old Testament prophet Isaiah reads that the coming savior “had no beauty or majesty,” while the Book of Psalms claims he was “fairer than the children of men,” the word “fair” referring to physical beauty.
The earliest images of Jesus Christ emerged in the first through third centuries A.D., amidst concerns about idolatry. They were less about capturing the actual appearance of Christ than about clarifying his role as a ruler or as a savior.
To clearly indicate these roles, early Christian artists often relied on syncretism, meaning they combined visual formats from other cultures.
Probably the most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd, a beardless, youthful figure based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Hermes and Apollo.
In other common depictions, Christ wears the toga or other attributes of the emperor. The theologian Richard Viladesau argues that the mature bearded Christ, with long hair in the “Syrian” style, combines characteristics of the Greek god Zeus and the Old Testament figure Samson, among others.
Christ as self-portraitist
The first portraits of Christ, in the sense of authoritative likenesses, were believed to be self-portraits: the miraculous “image not made by human hands,” or acheiropoietos.
This belief originated in the seventh century A.D., based on a legend that Christ healed King Abgar of Edessa in modern-day Urfa, Turkey, through a miraculous image of his face, now known as the Mandylion.
A similar legend adopted by Western Christianity between the 11th and 14th centuries recounts how, before his death by crucifixion, Christ left an impression of his face on the veil of Saint Veronica, an image known as the volto santo, or “Holy Face.”
These two images, along with other similar relics, have formed the basis of iconic traditions about the “true image” of Christ.
From the perspective of art history, these artifacts reinforced an already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length, dark hair.
In the Renaissance, European artists began to combine the icon and the portrait, making Christ in their own likeness. This happened for a variety of reasons, from identifying with the human suffering of Christ to commenting on one’s own creative power.
The 15th-century Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, for example, painted small pictures of the suffering Christ formatted exactly like his portraits of regular people, with the subject positioned between a fictive parapet and a plain black background and signed “Antonello da Messina painted me.”
The 16th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer blurred the line between the holy face and his own image in a famous self-portrait of 1500. In this, he posed frontally like an icon, with his beard and luxuriant shoulder-length hair recalling Christ’s. The “AD” monogram could stand equally for “Albrecht Dürer” or “Anno Domini” – “in the year of our Lord.”
In whose image?
This phenomenon was not restricted to Europe: There are 16th- and 17th-century pictures of Jesus with, for example, Ethiopian and Indian features.
In Europe, however, the image of a light-skinned European Christ began to influence other parts of the world through European trade and colonization.
The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s “Adoration of the Magi” from A.D. 1505 features three distinct magi, who, according to one contemporary tradition, came from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. They present expensive objects of porcelain, agate and brass that would have been prized imports from China and the Persian and Ottoman empires.
But Jesus’ light skin and blues eyes suggest that he is not Middle Eastern but European-born. And the faux-Hebrew script embroidered on Mary’s cuffs and hemline belie a complicated relationship to the Judaism of the Holy Family.
In Mantegna’s Italy, anti-Semitic myths were already prevalent among the majority Christian population, with Jewish people often segregated to their own quarters of major cities.
Artists tried to distance Jesus and his parents from their Jewishness. Even seemingly small attributes like pierced ears – earrings were associated with Jewish women, their removal with a conversion to Christianity – could represent a transition toward the Christianity represented by Jesus.
Much later, anti-Semitic forces in Europe including the Nazis would attempt to divorce Jesus totally from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype.
White Jesus abroad
As Europeans colonized increasingly farther-flung lands, they brought a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting schools that taught new converts Christian art in a European mode.
A small altarpiece made in the school of Giovanni Niccolò, the Italian Jesuit who founded the “Seminary of Painters” in Kumamoto, Japan, around 1590, combines a traditional Japanese gilt and mother-of-pearl shrine with a painting of a distinctly white, European Madonna and Child.
In colonial Latin America – called “New Spain” by European colonists – images of a white Jesus reinforced a caste system where white, Christian Europeans occupied the top tier, while those with darker skin from perceived intermixing with native populations ranked considerably lower.
Artist Nicolas Correa’s 1695 painting of Saint Rose of Lima, the first Catholic saint born in “New Spain,” shows her metaphorical marriage to a blond, light-skinned Christ.
In a multiracial but unequal America, there was a disproportionate representation of a white Jesus in the media. It wasn’t only Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ that was depicted widely; a large proportion of actors who have played Jesus on television and film have been white with blue eyes.
Pictures of Jesus historically have served many purposes, from symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. But representation matters, and viewers need to understand the complicated history of the images of Christ they consume.
Author: Anna Swartwood House Assistant Professor of Art History, University of South Carolina
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