Tell Magazine June 2018 5778

{ART AND SPIRIT}
David Friedman visiting from Tsfat
Rabbi Dr Orna Triguboff
To warm our winter, the mystic and artist, David Friedman, will be presenting
his art and teaching Jewish meditation at Emanuel Synagogue. To get a
sense of who David is, I interviewed him and here is what he said:
I was born in Denver, Colorado
and raised in a Modern Orthodox
family. I developed a talent for art
at an early age, and started to get
serious about art as a teenager. I
liked the artwork of album covers
of 60’s and early 70’s music, which
was an early inspiration for me. I
was also inspired by mandala art of
The Star of David by David Friedman
16
India. I attended the Rhode Island
School of Design in Providence for
a year, and then left to study Torah
and Jewish mysticism in Denver,
with the late Rabbi B. C. S. Twerski.
I emigrated to Israel in 1977 at
the age of 20, and spent two years
studying Torah in Jerusalem, where
I met my wife, Miriam. We got
married in 1979 and moved to
Tsfat. In Tsfat, I mostly immersed
myself in Talmud study and other
classic texts of Judaism as well as
Kabbalah, but I continued to make
art at night. As early as 1980, I
began to produce artwork that
was based on Torah concepts in
an attempt to integrate Torah and
art. I felt that I could make Jewish
mandalas. The first piece I produced
as a print (The Orchard of the
Torah) is based on the design of a
Tibetan mandala, and continues
to be a top-selling print for me.
After a bout with cancer in 1987
(advanced-stage Hodgkin’s disease,
which I received eight months
of aggressive chemotherapy), I
started practising meditation, and
discovered that there was such a
thing as Jewish Meditation. The
books of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan
showed me how meditation is
an important part of Kabbalah,
that has been quite hidden until
recently. I started practising yoga,
developed healthy eating habits
thanks to my wife Miriam, and
focused primarily on the study of
Kabbalah. This combination of
Kabbalah, meditation, and modern
conceptual art produced a large
series of kabbalistic/meditative
paintings, most of which I executed
in watercolors and pen-and-ink.
I developed my own original
system of translating kabbalistic
concepts into graphic shapes and
colours, based mostly on Sefer
Yetzirah (the Book of Creation),
but also inspired from other texts.
I have exhibited in North America