The BEST: Kuma
“The BEST” series is a bi-weekly feature in which writers consider what things “out there” make us think and feel. What elements in our culture still inspire us to live better? We seek to share what we find that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said.” Click here to read about “The BEST” and to see the index of all columns in this series.
The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is known for its collection of Near Eastern antiquities from the Biblical period. Yet amidst its galleries stands a startling cultural artifact of far more recent origin.
Kuma—meaning “Rise”—is a nearly ten-foot-long scroll depicting a dense, vivid, intellectually rich, and aesthetically stunning account of Jewish history. Its full title, “Kuma, Mei Afatzim ve-Kankantum,” refers to the materials used to prepare ink for Torah scrolls and other sacred texts. Evoking an unfurled Torah scroll, Kuma is the high-school senior project of a brilliant young yeshiva student, artist and poet named Eitan Rosenzweig הי”ד. Staff Sgt. Rosenzweig, an Alon Shvut native and student in the Yerucham Yeshivat Hesder, served in the Givati brigade and was killed in Gaza in November 2023, at the age of 21.
[Click to enlarge.]
My own encounter with Kuma began during a visit to the museum last Hanukka, though it was cut short by hungry children in need of lunch. I continued the journey later through a pamphlet I purchased in the museum gift shop, written by the exhibit’s curator, Porat Salomon—himself a prominent visual artist and Rosenzweig’s teacher and mentor. It offers a guide to the painting which identifies some of its many artistic and literary allusions based on Rosenzweig’s own explanations. My reading draws on Salomon’s helpful commentary, though there are many details in the scroll that have yet to be identified or explored.
The journey of Kuma begins, like the Torah itself, with a bold letter Bet in the upper right corner of the scroll—the Bet of Bereishit, the opening of Genesis, which launches the sweep of Biblical and Jewish history that follows. After this, unlike in a traditional text, it’s not clear where precisely to begin “reading.” To the left of the Bet appear the words Lekh Lekha, God’s command to Abraham to journey to the Land of Israel, accompanied by an eagle flanked by two Israeli flags. Below, we see images from the Garden of Eden—a serpent and forbidden fruit—hinting at a more universal narrative of humanity. The opening portion of the scroll is lush and fertile: birds, sheep, and ripened fruit fill the space. Yet as in the Garden of Eden, this fruit comes with ethical weight attached. A large cluster of grapes evokes the spies who maligned the Land of Israel; stalks of wheat recall Joseph’s dreams and the beginnings of Jewish diaspora. In the lower right corner, a tiny inscription of the iconic first Rashi on the Torah addresses the question of why begin the Torah from Genesis—in order to explain to the nations of the world that God created the entire Earth and bequeathed the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. This Rashi not only serves to offer a telos to the journey, a hint toward the fact that it is headed toward the Land of Israel, but also suggests a kind of dialectic that is raised elsewhere in the painting as well. This dialectic relates to the question of how we read our own history—internally, as the fulfillment of our own longings and destiny based on our scripture, or externally, as it interacts with broader artistic and philosophical traditions
Kuma teems with references to such traditions, some of which are more recognizable than others. In a portion of the scroll which focuses on destruction and exile, we see a reference to an ancient Assyrian wall-relief which depicts the King Sennacherib. A Roman patrician-like face gazes out from the painting which Salomon suggests is the Emperor Titus, destroyer of Jerusalem’s Second Temple. The serene animals and flowers of Genesis now coexist with darker imagery: the face of a goat, perhaps the biblical scapegoat, symbolizing the Jewish people’s suffering in exile. As an artist and yeshiva student, Rosenzweig creates a unique visual vocabulary reflecting his sophisticated Torah knowledge. There is some semblance of chronology but certain images collapse time and space, like the reference to a famous 1908 illustration by Ephraim Moses Lilien, that depicts the Biblical Moses with the distinctive features of Theodore Herzl. Indeed, both were great leaders who only discovered their identification with the Jewish people later in life. The repeat motifs and patterns we see over the course of the painting don’t only lend it aesthetic continuity, they identify repeat patterns and themes in Jewish history.
Yet even in a painting where past and present exist simultaneously, Rosenzweig’s choice to frame this scroll as a journey with a beginning and an end suggests a distinctly positive movement. If you look at the piece even from afar, you will notice how he plays with light and shadow over the course of the scroll. The far right is brighter and lighter, featuring mostly images from the natural world. The second quarter of the piece is considerably darker, as if a shadow rests on the section that deals with destruction, exile, and Jewish suffering over the time. Looming over this darker section is the Hebrew word “Eikha”—which opens the book of Lamentations and can be mournfully translated as “alas.” It can also be read as “ayeka,” “where are you,” the question God challenges Adam with after the forbidden fruit is eaten in Eden. The dual meaning connects humanity’s earliest sins with later national suffering. Curiously, Rosenzweig encircles this somber word with a radiant medieval-style halo. Perhaps the implication is that heavenly light can be found even during these times of suffering. Or perhaps, the very act of framing this suffering within the context of Jewish tradition serves to transform it.
The first two quarters of the scroll transition into a third section which is rich in geographical shapes and designs with Eastern provenance, like mandalas and arabesques, all oriented around a large Temple Menorah with seven branches. This section is bookended with the face of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the aforementioned Herzl in Egyptian princely garb. It also includes Levites playing trumpets, flutes, and lyres, which offers a kind of visual symmetry and harmony absent from the previous sections. It’s unclear if this refers to a specific point in history—the building of the first, second, or even third temple in Jerusalem might all be possibilities—or whether what we are seeing is the emergence of the harmonious blending of East and West that is represented in the reemergence of the nation of Israel on the historical stage. In the spirit of the journey represented in this piece, Rosenzweig quotes the Talmudic dictum: “Rabbi Yitzhak says: One who wishes to become wise should turn south … for the Menorah stood in the south” (Bava Batra 25b). His menorah evokes the Bible’s flowery description, with petals and calyxes shaped out of gold (rather than the unadorned version from Rome’s Arch of Titus). The floral imagery of the Menorah is often understood as a reference to the Tree of Life or the Garden of Eden, and by emphasizing the Menorah in this way Rosenzweig again maintains continuity throughout the scroll. This continuity is both aesthetic and conceptual, and we see right before us the way Judaism transforms the earliest stories of the Bible into a rich, lived culture that continues unfolding across history.
One might expect Kuma to end with this idealized, integrated vision of Jewish worship in the Temple, but it continues. The final section of the transitions from Levites blowing horns, to a tallit-clad man blowing a shofar. The final section of the journey mixes ancient and modern imagery related to the return to the Land of Israel. We see the twelve stones of the priestly breastplate, and twelve flags held aloft, symbolizing the journey of the twelve tribes to the land of Israel, alongside more modern allusions. There is a Sephardic Jew from the “East” clutching a Torah scroll. And there is a bearded Hasidic Rabbi from the “West” holding a sickle and a rake (Salomon proposes that he is the famous “pioneer Rebbe,” Rabbi Yeshaya Shapiro). One recognizable face is Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the first Chief Rabbi of the IDF. We also see the artist’s own great-great grandfather, Nahum Weissfish, another pioneer rabbi who was murdered on the farm he established Zikhron Yaakov in 1938 during the Arab riots. Interestingly, like the Herzl-Moses chimera depicted earlier on in the piece, these figures occupy a liminal space between religious leader and secular liberator or pioneer. Rosenzweig is clearly interested in these figures as models of integration. In this sense he also channels the spirit of Rabbi Kook whose visage emerges from the center of the scroll.
The “end” of Kuma does not contain a proper conclusion, it features the same two Israeli flags held aloft that flank the beginning of the piece, perhaps representing some modern incarnation of Judah and Ephraim, the religious and secular forces that are both necessary to bring about the final redemption. The procession feels ongoing, as if the story continues beyond the frame.
In the two years since Rosenzweig fell in battle, sanctifying God’s name, Kuma has found more of an audience in Israeli society. It’s used as the central illustration for a collection of writing about the war titled Bi-Et Barzel, and forms the cover art for a book of poetry called U-Netaneh Tokef by Yonadav Kaplan. Our family hung a print (available through the artist’s website) at the entrance to our own home, and each new guest who enters stops for a moment, or more, to examine the piece. Nearly everyone is drawn into the painting as we were.
There’s something unbearably sad in contemplating the brilliant mind and talent that created a work of art like this at age 19, and what a loss his early death represents, not only for his loved ones but also for the Jewish people and our culture. There’s a way in which his intricate drawing can symbolize all of the rich potential, the brilliance, the bravery and the talent, that was both realized and lost in the current war.
Yet even if the scroll fills one with a sense of sadness and loss, it also strengthens and consoles. Though I did not know Rosenzweig personally, I can imagine that a creative and sensitive soul like himself, if planted in any other Western society, would be wandering around a college campus with a stack of books clutched to his chest. His parents describe his voracious reading habits—the exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum also includes selections of his poetry and clippings from a newspaper article written about an archeological discovery he made at age fourteen. When such a person takes up arms to defend his country in an existential war, the result is a kind of integrated personality that rarely emerges in modern society. This is precisely the type of movement we see over the course of Kuma—a swirling, dynamic, multivalent push toward integration. The culmination of the painting presents figures who defy binaries: rabbis and pioneers, poets and fighters. The imagery is that of the convergence of opposites: blending East and West, nature and art, light and darkness, even the black and white color scheme adds to this effect. Rosenzweig, may God avenge his death, is part of this story in both his life and his death. The gift of his scroll allows us to appreciate that the difficult chapter in which we find ourselves is part of a larger saga of national integration and renewal.
Sarah Rindner Blum is a teacher and writer living in Israel.