Hayman Bloom - Rabbi Holding Sefer Torah

Alter Vitebsky, AKA Alter Vitebsker, AKA who knows what comments to the The Tree of Life by Hyman Bloom post:

Over the past three years I have spent many hours conversing with Hyman Bloom about his art, childhood, spiritual search, and his relation to Judaism. He believes in Hashem, and has said that if he had been exposed to pnimiyus ha-Torah during his younger years, he would have become a Chossid. In fact, part of his family stems from Kaidanover Chassidim (if I remember correctly).

He told a sad but not atypical story of growing up in a frum immigrant family in a Boston slum with almost no Jewish education. His father, who was a Shomer Shabbos but not learned, took him to an elderly Chassidisheh Rebbe in Boston in 1920 or 1921, when he was seven or eight, for religious instruction. However, the Rebbe (whom he described as having white hair and an extremely pallid complexion) apologized to them that he was to infirm to teach anyone.

In the end, the only person they could find to teach him lashon ha-kodesh was a young maskil, who agreed to teach the young boy Chumash without Rashi -- and without answering any questions of a religious nature! Hyman said that his head was teeming with questions, such as "How could a tzaddik like Yaakov Avinu marry two sisters?" But his teacher remained stubbornly silent (no doubt due to his personal emunah problems).

At age fifteen, Bloom and another great Jewish painter from Boston, Jack Levine, were both given scholarships in the fine arts by the famous Harvard professor of art, Denman Ross (d. 1935). They were star students of Harold Zimmerman, who died while still in his thirties in 1941. By then, Bloom's yiddishkeit was pretty much forgotten.

However, his spiritual search continued, taking him into the realms of Indian music and religion, psychic research, and experimentation under scientific conditions with hallucinogens -- all in the early 50s. Throughout all this, he continued to return to Jewish religious subjects in his paintings, too.

His "Rabbi Holding Sefer Torah" theme seems transparently autobiographical -- the rabbi aging as Hyman ages, and expressing his spiritual yearnings and struggles.