The Jewish Federation of St. Louis presents an exhibition of photographs by Todd Weinstein entitled “Legends of the 36 Unknown”. According to the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, the world requires a minimum of thirty-six righteous individuals in order to exist. These individuals, known in Yiddish as “lamed-vov-niks,” live among us with their identities concealed, though they make themselves known in times of great peril.
In 1995, photographer Todd Weinstein traveled to Poland, visiting Cracow and Auschwitz. The artist began to photograph images of figures and faces he found in rock formations, natural forms and detritus. The 36 images in this series emerged from these “ghost” pictures. According to Todd Weinstein, “Finding these images….continued my search for wholeness. My “36 Unknown” brought personal healing. “The 36 Unknown was my attempt to restore and update the rich Jewish lore and to help deepen the context of a renewed society.”
The Hidden and the Revealed
This is how I came to understand the legend of the thirty six, of the lamed vov-niks, as a story about redemption, through the implied question, the shadow story: what if there were not thirty six? What then?
And these pictures. What is redemptive about the pictures? The human forms? Thirty six pictures of sticks and bricks and stones and wire that intimate human form? No. It’s the subtext. I realized this as I sat in a hallway of the museum where the thirty six photographs were hung. It is the shadow and the subtext, all the hidden qualities of this show and its metaphor.
Each picture has a name: Hands, Lovers, Face, and a place, beneath the title, in a caption. What is redemptive was in the caption:
Berlin, Auschwitz, Dachau, and I realized that was the redemptive part, not hands praying, trees that look like faces, what is redemptive is the silent subject and place names underneath each picture:
The Scribe, Torah returning to Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Poland
Mourner, Cracow, Poland
The Thirty Six, Dachau, Germany
Cantor, Berlin, Germany
The Lovers’ Farewell, Block 11, Auschwitz, Poland
That’s the redemption in the pictures, and that completes the myth for me. That and the realization as I had researched the individual stories of the tzaddikim, of the righteous ones, that they were identified not only by being anonymous, or secret, but because they were all agents of making the hidden revealed. That was their purpose: to make the hidden revealed. Sometimes it was secret, hidden, sometimes completely conscious and expressed.
I sat and felt the redemptive possibilities in these pictures, these places, the sadness and the possibility in the legend of the thirty six, the importance of the myth, the necessary confrontation with its shadow question, the possibilities of redemption if only to stand in our sadness, to be with our suffering, as if we were revealing something that was hidden, as if these lovers in Auschwitz were indeed both stones and bones, an idea and a picture, both.
Rabbi James Stone Goodman
United States of America
EXHIBITION
The 36 Unknown
From April 3rd to May 31st, 2016
The Jewish Federation of St. Louis
12 Millstone Campus Dr.
St. Louis, MO 63146
United States
http://www.jfedstl.org
