Rosh Hashanah 2020: Letterform Apple

I created this design back in 2016, and have had it up on Zazzle ever since, but have rarely or never gotten any orders for it. However, a few weeks ago I got a notice that someone had ordered several copies (l’shanah tovah, friend!), and that reminded me I had never actually used it myself. So I decided to dust it off for 2020, both to send as my personal card and to post for sale on Etsy.

One of the most popular Jewish New Year customs involves eating apple slices dipped in honey, sometimes after saying a special prayer, signifying the hope that the coming year will be sweet. The apple design on this Rosh Hashanah card is formed out of the phrase “Tikatevu v’teichateimu l’shanah tovah u’metukah”: May you be inscribed and sealed for a good and sweet new year. The word “metukah” (sweet) is set off in yellow to represent a drip of honey.

This is a small A2-size notecard (folded size approximately 5.5″x4.25″). Unprinted white A2 envelopes are included.

Click through to view on Etsy.

Clean hands and a pure heart, or, Greetings from Coronaland

In Jewish tradition, Psalm 24 is recited as the Psalm of the Day (“as the Levites used to recite in the temple”) for Sundays, and is also recited when putting away the Torah at any morning service that is not on Shabbat. Verse 4, though, is probably one of your mom’s or grandma’s favorite proverbs just on general principles:

“Who may go up to the mountain of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place? One with clean hands and a pure heart.”

Psalm 24:3-4

I’ve always liked this psalm, and after playing with this particular verse for a while, I released the design below on Etsy exactly one year ago today. Click through the images to see the listings.

Verse 4a by itself
Framed by Verse 3 in a circular format.

Needless to say, however, with the sudden cultural emphasis on frequent and effective handwashing, this verse has been much on my mind in the last month. I venture to suggest that singing through the first 4 verses of the psalm is as good a way as any to time your 20-second handwashing.

L’David mizmor:
LaShem ha-aretz u’meloah, teivel v-yoshvei vah;

Ki hu al ha-yamim yesadah, v-al neharot yechoneneha.

Mi ya’aleh b’har HaShem, u-mi yakum bimkom kadsho?

Neki chapayim u-var levav, asher lo nasa lashav nafshi,
v-lo nishba l-mirma.

(Note that Jewish tradition discourages reciting prayers or blessings, using the name of God, or speaking of “matters of Torah” while in the bathroom. However, this isn’t strictly a prayer nor from the Torah, and we elide the name of God anyway in casual use, so I personally think it’s within bounds. As always, consult your local rabbi.)

Bishvili Nivra HaOlam, or, The two pockets

In October of 2018, an Etsy customer commissioned from me a design of the quotation Bishvili nivra ha-olam: “The world was created for me”.

This phrase is a quote from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 37B), but it is most famously incorporated into a Chassidic story about Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa (the Yiddish name for the town of Przysucha, Poland).

Rabbi Simcha Bunim teaches: Every person should have two pockets. In one pocket should be a piece of paper saying: “I am only dust and ashes.” When one is feeling too proud, reach into this pocket and take out this paper and read it. In the other pocket should be a piece of paper saying: “For my sake was the world created.” When one is feeling disheartened and lowly, reach into this pocket and take this paper out and read it. We are each the joining of two worlds. We are fashioned from clay, but our spirit is the breath of Adonai.
—Martin Buber, Tales of The Hasidim Later Masters, pp. 249-50

At the time of the original commission, it struck me that I ought to create a two-sided wallet card with one saying on each side.

Zazzle annually offers its Pro members (ProDesigners) a free batch of business cards (FYI!). So when it came time to order this year’s set, I finally sat down and designed the other side.

The cards arrived last Thursday and I’m quite pleased with them!

At that point, I also realized that by a happy coincidence, that week’s Torah portion was Vayera, the source of the “dust and ashes” quotation. It occurs in Genesis 18:27 when Abraham is bargaining with God over Sodom and Gomorrah:

כז  וַיַּעַן אַבְרָהָם, וַיֹּאמַר:  הִנֵּה-נָא הוֹאַלְתִּי לְדַבֵּר אֶל-אֲדֹנָי, וְאָנֹכִי עָפָר וָאֵפֶר. 27 And Abraham answered and said: ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the LORD, who am but dust and ashes.
כח  אוּלַי יַחְסְרוּן חֲמִשִּׁים הַצַּדִּיקִם, חֲמִשָּׁה–הֲתַשְׁחִית בַּחֲמִשָּׁה, אֶת-כָּל-הָעִיר; וַיֹּאמֶר, לֹא אַשְׁחִית, אִם-אֶמְצָא שָׁם, אַרְבָּעִים וַחֲמִשָּׁה. 28 Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous; wilt Thou destroy all the city for lack of five?’ And He said: ‘I will not destroy it, if I find there forty and five.’

—Genesis Chapter 18

Granted, there’s nothing like entering a battle of wits with the Eternal Creator to make a person mindful of their own base humanity. But the point is, maybe Abraham would also have benefited from keeping one of these two-sided cards in his pocket. After all, in a very real sense, the world was also created for him.

 

Further reading:

 

Follow me on Instagram!

The way I originally joined Instagram, personally, was quite by accident. Since I have a gmail account under my maiden name, I get a lot of “doppelganger” email for other users named Erica Schultz (who apparently can’t remember or type their own email addresses correctly, or else other people can’t). In June of 2015, I got an email from Instagram addressed to the username “aleishaphippen4p” with a link to reset my password. I ignored it at the time. But in July of 2016, I got another reset link for the same username at my email address, and I thought, why not?

Note that these types of emails are frequently phishing attacks, but I checked the original message and all its headers and URLs, and everything seemed legitimately linked back to Instagram.com. So I reset the password associated with my email. Then, since Instagram lets you do this, I simply changed the username to @eschultz72. Easy-peasy.

So I guess, thanks, Aleisha, whoever you are.

I used it very sporadically. (If you want more pictures of food, sunsets, performative Judaism, and my toddler-now-preschooler, that’s the place to follow me.) But fast forward a couple years and I’m now working for the Jewish Federation of Northwest Indiana as communications director, including social media responsibilities. So this fall when they said “we need to get on Instagram!” I had to get up to speed! Check them out at @jewishnwindiana.

While I was at it, I decided that my Judaica line also needed a dedicated Instagram. I had set up a Facebook page for Schultz Yakovetz Judaica in April of 2016 (admittedly as a Gen-Xer I’m much more native on FB than on Instagram). But it struck me that I could use Facebook to showcase new designs (and link to product listings) and still take advantage of Instagram to present more real-life product shots and behind-the-scenes takes. Which brings me to today and the newly minted @schultzyakovetz. You know what to do. :-D

“To Bigotry No Sanction” Buttons

August 18 was the anniversary of George Washington’s “Letter to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport, Rhode Island”. The letter itself can still be seen on display at Newport’s Touro Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the United States.

To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance

The original square button design.

Back in 2016, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, I designed a pinback button quoting a phrase from the above letter by George Washington: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”

The typeface I chose is a font called Trattatello by James Grieshaber (then provided by Apple as a system font). I set the quote against a backdrop image of the U.S. Constitution.

The design has gained a certain following in the intervening years. It’s available in quantity from my Etsy shop (free shipping!), but also on Zazzle as individual buttons and even adapted to magnets and yard signs.

I was recently interviewed by Rabbi Mark Hurvitz as to how these buttons came into existence. For the full story, including a history of the Washington letter, please check out the blog post below.

To bigotry no sanction

 

The best CMYK match for Cadmium Orange

Spoiler: There isn’t one. But read on to understand why.

Perfect for Halloween: a post about orange!

I had a request earlier in October from an Etsy customer in Brooklyn who wanted a custom print created of the phrase בשבילי נברא העולם (“The world was created for me“), with “for me” in orange “to match Moully’s ‘Orange Socks’.”

*Note: she didn’t ask me for ואנכי עפר ואפר but now I feel perhaps I should create this as a two-sided laminated pocket card. :-)

I wasn’t familiar with Moully, but Rav Google quickly brought me to Yitzchok Moully, the Pop Art Rabbi, and his popular little painting [Hasidim in] Orange Socks.

"Hasid in Orange Socks" by Yitzchok Moully.

“Hassid in Orange Socks” by Yitzchok Moully.

I saved down an image of the painting from his website, sampled the orange color directly from it, designed a layout of the text, and sent a proof to my customer. She approved it, so I output a color laser print and shipped it off to Brooklyn. Easy-peasy. Right?

On Tuesday, I got another message: She was unhappy. Why? Because the printed version was a “burnt orange” rather than the “true orange” she had approved onscreen.

While it hadn’t occurred to me ahead of time that this would be an issue, I should have known better. Bright orange (along with bright green) is notoriously difficult to produce in a CMYK 4-color system, such as commercial process printing—or a conventional laser printer.

In fact, industry leader Pantone developed an entirely new 6-color printing system called Hexachrome that addressed this problem by adding actual orange and green inks to the standard process palette of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. One year at the Bookbuilders of Boston book show, I saw a book on tree frogs printed in Hexachrome, and it was utterly stunning, so much so that it’s still fresh in my mind. You couldn’t invent a better use case to showcase the capabilities of Hexachrome (which, sadly, was discontinued in 2008, no doubt due to a dearth of scholarship on tree frogs).

But all this wasn’t helping my Brooklyn customer, who just wants a print that will match what she sees onscreen. It sounds like a simple request!

I was not at all sure how to overcome this discrepancy remotely, so the solution I offered was to work up a few variations with alternate shades and send her prints of all of them. As I got started, however, I thought: Why not go to the source? Maybe the artist has already dealt with this issue and could make a suggestion? So I returned to Rabbi Moully’s website and submitted a contact form inquiry, explaining my situation, and asking if he could recommend the best settings for a CMYK match.

Not 5 minutes later, my phone rang with an unknown New Jersey number, and it was Yitzchok Moully calling from his cell, stuck in traffic while driving the carpool. “I figured I might as well call!”

He let me know that the original painting used straight Cadmium Orange, which is pretty classic… and thoroughly unreproducible in 4-color process printing. However, there are several possible spot-to-process conversions cited as a “true orange”. So, starting with the first shade my customer had rejected, and lightening up from there, I ended up with 8 possibilities.

These are the 8 shades I sent her:

#1: RGB 230-75-9
This was my original offering, but when I printed it off, I could definitely see why the customer thought it was too red.

#2: RGB 253-84-5
This is a second shade I sampled from Moully’s JPEG image. It looks good onscreen, but still looks dark when printed in CMYK. (The CMYK conversion is done on the fly by the printer driver, so I don’t know the exact conversion values.)

#3: C0 M75 Y99 K0

#4: C0 M62 Y97 K0
This was the one I liked when printed, and what I’ve chosen to use going forward. Approximate hex color match is #FF6108 (255,97,8).

#5: C0 M43 Y81 K7

#6: C0 M51 Y100 K0
To my surprise, this was the one my client picked as her preferred match. It’s a shade that I had found published as an equivalent of Pantone 152 (although Pantone officially recommends C0 M61 Y100 K0, which has 20% more red [that is, magenta] in it).

#7: C0 M48 Y95 K0
A possible equivalent of Pantone 151.

#8: C0 M35 Y90 K0
A possible equivalent of Pantone 137. Obviously this is the most yellow (or rather, least magenta) of the selections.

Option 2: RGB 253-84-5
Option 4: C0 M62 Y97 K0
Option 6: C0 M51 Y100 K0

Moral of the story: It all depends what you think a “true orange” really is! … And also on your screen vs. printer calibrations, but that’s a topic for another day.

Rosh Hashanah Apple Papercut

The Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, starts tonight at sundown. Happy 5778! And this month, despite being too busy to blog much of late, I did manage to create a new Rosh Hashanah card design.

I did a custom Etsy order earlier this year for a text design in a faux-papercut style, which got me interested in doing one for myself. Papercutting is a traditional Jewish art form, and this piece incorporates a traditional Rosh Hashanah blessing: “May it be Your will, our God and the God of our ancestors, that You renew for us a good and sweet year.” These words are recited over the apples and honey that are so emblematic of Rosh Hashanah.

For my personal sending, I ordered 4.25″x5.5″ double-sided flat cards from OvernightPrints. But I’ve also posted a 5×7 version (customizable) on my Zazzle shop:
Rosh Hashanah Apple Papercut Card

Shanah tovah u’metukah! A good and sweet year to all my readers.

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Selected poems from Sappho

As part of an ongoing (if halfhearted) decluttering effort, I’ve recently been posting some more books to PaperBackSwap.com… including a bunch of my old college books. (Goodbye, The Faerie Queen! Goodbye, Aristotle’s Poetics!)

One that I am shipping off tomorrow is a book of Sappho’s extant poetry and fragments, as translated by Mary Barnard in 1958. Leafing through them again, I am still struck by the luminous haiku-like quality achieved by these particular translations. I looked up other renderings of some of them, and they were just dead on the page by comparison. Much κῦδος to Ms. Barnard (1909-2001). (Better scholars than I am can peruse the Greek fragments here.)

I had dogeared a handful of pages in my copy, probably from my freshman humanities class in 1989, for the poems that I particularly enjoyed. So I wanted to record them for posterity before I send the book to its new owner.

3.
Standing by my bed

In gold sandals
Dawn that very
moment awoke me

9.
Although they are

Only breath, words
which I command
are immortal

12
It’s no use

Mother dear, I
can’t finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is

she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy

24
Awed by her splendor

Stars near the lovely
moon cover their own
bright faces
when she
is roundest and lights
earth with her silver

47
I was so happy

Believe me, I
prayed that that
night might be
doubled for us

48
Now I know why Eros,

of all the progeny of
Heaven and Earth, has
been most dearly loved

61
Pain penetrates

Me drop
by drop

and my overall favorite:

64
Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Then there are a few later in the book that have an absolutely Dorothy Parker feel:

73
Yes, it is pretty

but come, dear, need
you pride yourself
that much on a ring?

84
If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the
beach rubble

Wishing much enjoyment to the next reader!

The time my custom webfonts stopped working in Chrome and Firefox

When I last rebuilt erica-schultz.com back in 2012, I decided to incorporate a custom webfont in my Design and Judaica sections. In the interest of cross-browser compatibility, I used FontSquirrel’s free Webfont Generator to export EOT, SVG, and WOFF files, which I then called in my CSS @font-face declaration.

Fast forward to late 2016: I discovered that while my font still looked nice in Safari, it had stopped working in Chrome and Firefox. They had apparently gone and changed their font rendering in a way that broke my site. THANKS DUDES.

This week, I finally did a little research into the issue.  Continue reading →

The Jewish Advocate interviews me

My writer friend Michael A. Burstein sometimes writes for The Jewish Advocate, which is the local Jewish community newspaper in Boston. He is also a regular attendee of Arisia, so he pitched an article to the Advocate regarding the Friday night davening and the new siddur, and he interviewed me for it.

Observant Jews ‘daven’ long, prosper at area sci-fi con

The article made the front page of this week’s paper (!), but like all their digital content, it’s behind a paywall. (Boston locals please note: If you’re not an Advocate subscriber, you can still pick up an individual copy at the Israel Book Shop in Brookline… if the snow emergency ever ends!) So rather than the article itself, I give you the (slightly edited) text of my interview answers instead.

Continue reading →