Category Archives for portfolio

Shabbat HaGadol: The Big Shabbos

Passover is a week away? Already?? It always seems to come as a surprise, but not if you’ve been paying attention to the subtle calendar clues in our tradition.

The two months leading up to Passover include four special Shabbats that include additional maftir Torah readings from a second Torah scroll:

  • Shabbat Shekalim, the Shabbat immediately prior to (or falling on) Rosh Chodesh Adar; the maftir reading, Exodus 30:11-16, describes the half-shekel census taken in the wilderness.
  • Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat before Purim; the maftir reading, Deuteronomy 25:17-19, commands us to remember (zakhor) the treachery of Amalek and to simultaneously blot out his name from our memory, as we will shortly do on Purim.
  • Shabbat Parah, one to two weeks prior to Rosh Chodesh Nisan; the maftir reading, Numbers 19:1-22, fondly known as the “Holy Cow” Parshah, discusses the arcane ritual of the red heifer (parah adumah).
  • Shabbat HaChodesh, the Shabbat immediately prior to (or falling on) Rosh Chodesh Nisan; the maftir reading, Exodus 12:1-20, starts with the line “This month (ha-chodesh ha-zeh) shall be for you the beginning of the months, it shall be for you the first of the months of the year.” This is when you know you have only 2+ weeks left until Passover and it’s time to start screaming… er, cleaning. This was a week ago yesterday. (Yesterday was plain old Parshat Vayikra, the first parshah in the book of Leviticus.)

This coming Shabbat, the one that falls immediately prior to Passover, isn’t one of those four, but it still gets a special haftarah portion and hence a special name: Shabbat HaGadol, literally “The Great Shabbat”, or as my Tremont St. Shul crowd liked to say, “The Big Shabbos”. It’s not super common for Shabbat HaGadol to literally fall on the eve of Passover, but anytime you have a Saturday night first seder, you’ve got yourself a Shabbat HaGadol double header.

The Haftarah for Shabbat HaGadol is Malachi 3:4-24, and the day takes its name from verse 23: “Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome (ha-gadol), fearful day of the Lord”. I was commissioned some years ago to create a piece from this haftarah as a bat mitzvah gift. The actual eponymous verse didn’t grab me, and it took a little digging to find a passage that would be both uplifting and memorable, but I settled on verses 16-17:

Thus have those who revere the Lord been speaking one to another. The Lord has heard and noted it, and a scroll of remembrance has been written before Him concerning those who revere the Lord and esteem His name.
They shall be to me, said the Lord of Hosts, on the day that I am preparing, a treasured possession; I will be tender toward them as a parent is tender to a child who serves him.
—Malachi 3:16-17

Interestingly, this week’s Torah portion is Tzav, the second parshah in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus). The designated haftarah portion officially paired with Tzav is from the book of Jeremiah (7:21-8:3, 9:22-23). However, because Tzav so frequently falls out on one of the aforementioned five special Shabbats, the “standard” haftarah is very rarely read. It was read in 2022, but it won’t be read again until 2043! I have an art piece for this as well:

Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise glory in their wisdom; and let not the strong glory in their strength; let not the wealthy glory in their wealth.
But only in this should they glory: in knowing and understanding Me, that I am the Lord who does kindness, justice and righteousness in the land, for in these I delight, says the Lord.
—Jeremiah 9:23-24

Let’s not forget to bring that energy into this week, as well.

Wishing everyone a sweet and kosher Passover!

When Adar enters, joy increases

Today and tomorrow begins the Hebrew month of Adar, of which the Talmud (Ta’anit 29a) says, “When Adar enters, joy increases.” The primary reason for this joyfulness is that it contains the holiday of Purim, when the Jews of Persia in the 5th century B.C.E. were almost destroyed by an evil prime minister manipulating a feckless king (nope, not resonant at all), but were saved by the hand of God working through a courageous young Jewish woman. For more about Adar and Purim, I commend you to one of my favorite websites, Jewish Heritage Online Magazine, a rich repository of insights on Jewish cultural themes.

For myself, I have two Purim-related art projects to share with you.

Continue reading →

Judaism 101: JFNWI’s Interfaith Program to Promote Harmony and Understanding

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted anything here, huh?

I have a lot of writing topics built up, but I wanted to note here that yesterday I had the opportunity to serve as a panelist for an Interfaith Program to Promote Harmony and Understanding, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Northwest Indiana (of which I am currently a board member), and hosted by the Indian American Cultural Center near my home in Merrillville. A panel of laypersons representing the Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh communities – plus me repping the Jews – answered questions about our respective faiths, followed by a meet and greet with community members. It was a delightful event and really interesting to hear about the similarities and differences among our religions.

I didn’t work entirely off my prepared notes, in the end, but I wanted to share them here for anyone coming back to take a look. Continue reading →

Free printable Passover cards

I made a new Passover card design this year that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. It’s a seder plate design, but instead of the traditional Hebrew item designations in the center, I chose a word expressing the symbolism of each item.

  • Karpas – Greens – Renewal
  • Zeroah – Shankbone – Strength
  • Maror – Bitter Herb – Suffering
  • Chazeret – Lettuce – Bitterness
  • Charoset – Mortar – Building
  • Beitzah – Egg – Rebirth
Continue reading →

Book project launch: Into a Jewish Holiday Year with Yoga

In January of 2021, I was tagged by some friends into a Facebook thread from the illustrious Delia Sherman, on behalf of a friend looking for a graphic designer to help produce a self-published book with some Hebrew in it. Since that’s totally my niche, I was pleased when the co-author reached out to me the next day for some more information. That was my introduction to yoga teacher Sharon Epstein, her rabbi Tara Feldman, and their book project, which would become a labor of love for me as well: Into a Jewish Holiday Year with Yoga: A Workbook and Guided Journey for Body, Mind, and Soul (2021; ISBN 979-8-9850271-0-5; USD $19.95).

The ikar, or kernel, of the book is that these two delightful and insightful women have teamed up to structure a yoga experience around the Jewish holiday cycle. For each of 12 holidays, they had put together some basic introductory context, then drawn out a deep underlying conceptual theme, and matched it with a set of yoga poses to literally embody that theme. They also provided a guided meditation and some journaling prompts to round out the internal experience of each holiday.

Mind you, I have spent a total of about 2 hours on a yoga mat in my life, but I have a visceral appreciation for the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. We are souls and we are bodies. Bringing together the spiritual and the somatic brings depth to both perceptions. It was a real gift to get to be a part of this project and help Sharon and Tara activate its full potential.

Continue reading →

Free Printable: Grade K-1 “My Book About Chanukah”

Here in Northwest Indiana, my kindergartener is the only Jewish kid in her class. As many of you have no doubt experienced, that makes her the go-to for educating the class on Jewish holidays – even at age 5.

Yesterday, her teacher asked if she would read a book about Chanukah to the class this morning (fully remote of course). No problem, we thought; we have several wonderful books on hand, we’ll pick one out. However, looking them over at bedtime quickly made it clear that there wasn’t one among them that she could read fluently by herself.

So what does Mama do? Get up Friday morning and put one together! I tried to approach it through the lens of what she would tell the class about Chanukah from her perspective.

I made it 8 pages to fit on 2 letter-sized sheets. Adobe’s Acrobat Reader should let you print this on the “Booklet” setting to come out right for folding, but just in case your printer software isn’t up to the task, I also made a PDF with the pages already doubled up (you still have to print it double-sided though).

Little one was very pleased and read it perfectly on the first try. Note that she is (of course) a fairly precocious reader for Grade K, but while I’m no literacy specialist, it would probably work well for any early readers.

I set the type in Futura Book. The illustrations are courtesy of Adobe Stock (#179419911).

Happy Chanukah!

 

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Free Printable Friday Night Prayerbook (Condensed Edition)

This past weekend was the Arisia science fiction convention, which is put on each January by several hundred of my closest friends in Boston, MA. I attended almost every Arisia from 1999 to 2014 (after which I moved back to the Midwest). In 2006, since all my geeky shul friends were attending the convention anyway, I started organizing a Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service at the convention hotel. Those of us who were on the synagogue board borrowed a large (and heavy!) crate of assorted prayerbooks from Temple Beth Shalom of Cambridge every year to make the service happen.

This service, I am happy to say, is still going on, organized by Terri Ash (of Geek Calligraphy) and her family. But for 2017, Terri wanted a pamphlet-style siddur containing only the prayers for Friday night, that could be stored from year to year just for Arisia. But we weren’t aware of any existing siddur that fit our needs, so, what do we do? Build our own (based on the extensive resources available at the groundbreaking OpenSiddur.org website). She asked “Who wants to help make this happen?” and of course I said “Here I am!”  Continue reading →

Website launch: Training Insight

Who doesn’t love a good referral? In this case, Dianna Sanchez was so happy with her new site design, she referred one of her neighbors to me for some website work.

Training InsightChristine McKay runs her own consulting practice, Training Insight, doing custom training and computer setup for financial software (specifically QuickBooks and Sage Timeslips) in Cambridge, MA. She’s been in business for many years, which is great for her clients. On the downside, her website www.trnginsight.com hadn’t been updated since 2004, and it was time for an overhaul. (Skip to the end of this post for the before-and-after slideshow… because, also, who doesn’t love a good before-and-after?)

Christine already has an established visual identity that is serving her well, and she wasn’t looking for rebranding or significant changes to the look of her site. What she mostly wanted help with was search engine optimization, in order to enhance her site’s reach and visibility to potential new clients. However, I told her that SEO would be best served by some structural adjustments to her site: Continue reading →

Invitation design: Watercolor theme

Back in September 2015, one of my dearest friends back in Boston contacted me about doing invitations for her oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah in November of the following year, for Parashat Lech Lecha.

Maya is a budding artist, and the celebration was going to have an art theme. In March 2016 they sent me a draft of Maya’s design concept (shown right; click to enlarge). It’s always helpful to have a client with such a clear vision of what they’d like to achieve!  Continue reading →

New website project launch: DiannaSanchez.com

On Friday, I officially launched my latest website project: an author website for children’s book author Dianna Sanchez, whose debut novel A Witch’s Kitchen is forthcoming in a month from indie YA publisher Dreaming Robot Press. Check out the site!

Backstory: Two months ago, I put out a call to the Universe (via Facebook) for some freelance work. Among the respondents (and there were a few, thank you, Universe) was an old friend from my MIT circles who needed a spiffy new website to go with her first book’s upcoming publication. She had set up a starter website back in April, in WordPress, but it was… rudimentary. (I’d say “basic” but that word has acquired problematic cultural overtones in the last ~5 years.) I never took a screenshot of it, but now I wish I had for posterity, because like most people I love before-and-after stories!  Continue reading →