| Four
Aspects in Each of Us: Dan
Reisinger (Israel, 1982) |
While the Middle Ages offered a world view with clear types — wise and wicked — the contemporary view is dubious about stereotypes and judgmental categories applied to human beings. Each person is a somewhat chaotic mixture of all the categories. The artist has used a collage of torn colored papers whose outlines are not sharp, which overlap haphazardly and whose colors and nongeometric shapes interact in complex ways. It is probably impossible to label these four collages according to the four categories of the Haggadah.
Perhaps Reisinger was thinking of the famous quote from Rabbi Yisrael Salanter (19th C, Lithuania and Germany): "Each of us contains all aspects of all four children" — each of us is a unique and changing collage."
These images are a featured part of the Rabbinical Assembly (U.S.A. Conservative movement) haggadah, "A Feast of Freedom."
