Mel and Miriam Alexenberg

Interview

Mel Alexenberg: Artist and Educator, 72

Hometown: Queens, NY

Miriam Alexenberg, Artist, 68

Hometowns: Paramaribo, Suriname and Hibat Tzion, Israel

Current residence: Petach Tikvah, Israel

Date of interview: July 14, 2009

Mel: I was giving a talk in Queens at Long Island Zionist Youth Commission where my friend met

Miriam’s sister Channa. When he asked Channa out for New Year’s Eve, she said she would only go out with him if he found a date for her sister. I was that date.

Miriam: I had just arrived from Israel and had never heard of New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know English well; Mel taught me English.

Mel: Miriam was 17 and I was 21.

Miriam: I was not happy living in America; I missed Israel terribly. I fell in love with America only through Mel; he stood for everything America represented. Americans are free and open. He didn’t have any of the fears I had from the Holocaust and the wars with the Arabs.

Mel: Miriam to me was different from the American college girls I had dated. She had a delightful freshness and vibrant newness. She liked the clicking sound of the car’s turn signal—something we take for granted. I loved her adventuresome mom who rode a motorcycle in Israel. Miriam was anxious to get back to Israel, and I was a Zionist. She met my parents on my birthday, Feb 24, less than two months after we met. I told her I wanted her for my birthday present.

I grew up in a religious Zionist family. My grandfather left the Telz Yeshiva in Lithuania where he was ordained as a rabbi to be a delegate to the fourth Zionist Congress in London. Instead of returning to Lithuania when the congress ended, he immigrated to Boston and later moved to Brooklyn where he opened a Hebrew bookstore.

As someone whose cognitive style is visual, my Orthodox family and my yeshiva education was a poor fit; I had no place in their verbal and auditory Jewish world. Synagogue-centered community life made me feel left out. In Queens College, I tried to detach myself from the Jewish world until the Hillel director gave me a copy of Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization. Through Kaplan and my strong Zionist commitment, I became reattached to the Jewish community and was elected president of Hillel.

Miriam: Mel told me he was an atheist, and I grew up in an Orthodox home. My father said, “He’s a very nice young man, but you can’t marry him.” But he was so Jewishly connected!

Mel: I had told Miriam that I was an atheist in the sense that I rejected the juvenile image of God as some all-powerful being in the sky zapping us if we step out of line. This is an alien concept in Judaism promoted in American yeshiva education. A mature Judaism teaches that God does not exist in reality. God is reality itself and beyond. God is called Hamakom (The Place). God is the place where everything is happening.

Miriam: After our New Year’s Eve date, Mel told me that he had tickets for us for an Israeli dance festival next weekend. We started out seeing each other once or twice a week. Soon it was three times, then five times a week.

Mel: It took ten months to convince her father that we should be married. I promised her father that I would put on tefilin every day. Having grown up in a religious Zionist family, my parents liked her parents and were enthusiastic about our love for each other. We were 18 and 22 when we married. My uncle Morris, an Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, officiated.

Miriam: The marriage vow is part of Jewish observance. “According to Moses and Israel,” how much more ancient can you get? It’s our roots.

Mel: Miriam’s connection to Jewishness is emotional. Mine is intellectual.

Miriam: I grew up in Suriname that was then a Dutch colony in South America. My family’s having left Holland saved my life. We had photo albums of aunts, uncles, and cousins who stayed in Holland and were all murdered. My mother’s parents were murdered in Auschwitz. My mother’s grandfather was the Chief Rabbi of Holland. Thinking about the Holocaust is very emotional for me.

Mel: After I met her, I believed in a beshert. But statistically most people do not meet their bashert. We were very lucky.

Miriam: The root of the word for love, ahava, means to give. One’s beshert is the person to whom you can give all you have to give. That’s how bashert happens.

Mel: It was the right time to get married. I had finished college, earned my master’s degree, and started to earn a living as a science teacher.

Miriam: I’ve never felt I had married too young at 18. I wish I could have married Mel a year earlier.

Mel: We had a baby girl Iyrit the first year we were married, a boy Ari a year after that, another boy Ron two years after that, and our fourth Moshe Yehuda, also a boy, 18 years after the third. Miriam was a grandmother at age 38; our daughter followed our example by marrying and having kids at a young age. Until a few months ago when my mother-in-law passed away at 102, we had five generations, from Miriam’s mother to our great-grandson.

Miriam: My parents sacrificed everything for our Jewish education. Their whole life was to help the Jewish community; they met refugees at the docks in Suriname, and would take them home and feed them and find them homes. In Suriname there were two synagogues. My mother was the local Hebrew teacher. My mother taught me my the alef bet. When I was nine, our family made aliyah. In Israel, my father lost a fortune and returned to Suriname. We stayed in Israel and saw him on holidays when he returned home. But my parents had a good marriage. When I was 16 we moved to New York.

Mel: My parents had a love affair with each other. It was a very loving accepting relationship. My dad had his realm, his store, and my mom had hers, our home. After Miriam earned her MFA in ceramic sculpture at Pratt, we worked together in creating monumental works of public art. With us the boundaries between the professional and domestic are more diaphanous.

Miriam: This past week we had 20 children, grandchildren, and a great-grandson at our Shabbat table. I can’t do that alone. Mel helps me with shopping and in the kitchen.

Mel: We’ve worked together on installation art projects and on raising our kids and babysitting for our grandchildren and great-grandson. We have a very rich and demanding family life. Raising kids we had to decide how religious we would be. I became Orthodox in observance, but from an intellectual point of view that’s not where I’m at. I refer to myself as an observant Jew or a religious Zionist Jew rather than as an Orthodox Jew. Orthodox Judaism is a European invention to counter Reform. Synagogue centeredness that is uncomfortable for me. I continually study Torah which is reflected in all my artwork and my teaching. I follow the teachings of Rav Solovietchik, the Lubavicher Rebbe, and Rav Kook that Judaism emphasizes the sanctification of everyday life and creative dialog at the intersections of humanity, nature, and Torah in tikun olam.

Miriam: But I go to shul. I love to hear people sing. The contemporary prayer for the IDF captives speaks to me.

Mel: I have other forms of community in Israel beyond shul. I have vertigo and physically get dizzy in shul, but also in museums. I can’t sit still for any length of time. It was important to both of us to give our kids opportunities to develop creatively.

Miriam: In 1970, we started the first open school in Israel, the experimental school at Haifa University. We wanted our children to have a Jewish education but were not happy with what was available in either Israel or the USA.

Mel: All our four children are now adults deeply involved in Jewish life. Three of our kids are in Israel. Ari is in Boston where he’s the director of the Israel Action Center. Our son Ron is a rabbi and biologist who teaches Torah and science and their interrelationships at the Yeshiva High School for Environmental Studies in Mitzpeh Ramon. Moshe Yehuda is a university administrator who teaches about Israeli society and politics at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Our daughter Iyrit studied coaching at Bar Ilan University.

Miriam: What does being Jewish mean to me? Being Jewish is who I am. It’s an impossible question.

Mel: It’s an irrelevant question.

Miriam: It’s like asking what one’s gender means to one. It’s what I am.

Mel: I was drawn to her Jewishness and Israeli background.

Miriam: I was drawn to his intellect, which compliments my tactile approach.

Mel: My art is high tech and Miriam’s is high touch.

Miriam: I like all kinds of music, but Mel only likes classical. I enjoy singing and Mel can’t sing. But our kids sing with me. My mom used to play piano and we would sing children’s songs. Now I wonder how she did that knowing what was happening in Europe to her large family who were being brutally murdered. In Israel, she performed a Hanukah piano recital when she was 101.

Mel: Since the 1960s, I had a dialogue with the Lubavitcher Rebbe who pointed out that the word for spirit, RuaH, is the word for material, HomeR, spelled backwards if you omit the mem. It’s the same word depending on your perspective. The essence of Judaism is the transformation of the material into the spiritual through a shift in perspective. ‘Wine, women, and song’ is an expression of crass materialism in Western culture. However, Jews say kiddush over wine, kiddushim is holy matrimony, and the Song of Songs is considered to be the holiest book of the Bible. In Judaism, ‘wine, woman, and song’ are sanctified. Judaism invites us to transform all aspects of everyday life into spiritual expereinces? Judaism invites everything we do, from cooking to raising kids to sex, to be transformed into something spiritual.

Miriam: Our sex life? We love each other, and that’s it.

Mel: Sex is an awesome way to integrate the physical with the material.

Miriam: He’s brilliant, and that’s what made me fall in love with him.

Mel: Play is an important aspect of divine creation and an integral part of Judaism. The very first Midrah Rabba on Genesis relates how God played with the codes in the Torah to create the universe. There’s playfulness in our relationship. We enjoy whatever we do together; even going to the supermarket can be a date.

Miriam: I don’t see as well as I used to, so I need him to help me shop. When I travel without him, I never come home to a sink full of dishes; he keeps a spotless house when I’m away. I make my life harder by being a vegetarian. We’ve been vegetarian for 30 years.

Mel: I’ll eat chicken at our daughter’s house, but Miriam won’t. We’re pretty involved in our kids’ lives. We see our youngest, his wife, and baby several times a week.

Miriam: He keeps in touch with the older kids and grandkids on the internet, but I don’t see well enough to do that.

Mel: Infidelity isn’t relevant to us. I’m madly in love with my wife.

Miriam: It’s a non-issue.

Mel: In Israel, I feel less of a need to go to shul than in America. Here, I am totally immersed in Jewishness through my teaching, creating art, writing, blogging, and just everyday life. I taught the course ‘Judaism and Zionism: Values and Roots’ to hundreds of students at Ariel University Center and teach “Art in Jewish Thought’ at Emuna College in Jerusalem where I head the School of the Arts. My book in Hebrew Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art was published in Jerusalem this year and my book The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness was published last year by Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.

Miriam: We’ve moved back and forth between America and Israel. We made aliyah after ten years of marriage. Then we returned to America four years later and went back to Israel four years after that.

Mel: New York is the center of the art world. But we moved to Yeroham in the Negev and stayed there for seven years. We founded a college there. Our youngest was born there. From there, we went to MIT and stayed in USA for 16 years. We’ve been back in Israel nine years now.

Every time we moved, we had to rethink our relationships to each other and our communities. We had to reorient ourselves as a couple in each place we lived. Now through Facebook all of our communities merge.

Miriam: We were surrogate parents to our students in Yeroham. With them and with our own children we’ve had to set boundaries. Our youngest and his wife wanted to live with us. I told them it’s not a good idea. But they sleep over on Shabbatot.

Mel: We have three daughters-in-law from different Jewish ethnicities -- one Persian, one Hungarian, and one whose ancestor was a Jewish sheriff in Arizona.

Miriam: I took my son Ari’s girl friend Julie to lunch and I asked her what she would say if my son proposed. She said, “I would say yes.” I went home and told my son, “Go propose, she said yes.”

Mel: Our oldest son is 21 years older than our youngest son and would take him to kindergarten, and wound up dating and marrying the teacher.

Miriam: We have a great partnership. When you are in touch with your Jewish roots you have a respect for each other.

Mel: Everything we have together is Jewish.

Miriam: We’re best friends.

Mel: And playmates. We respect each other’s differences and see them as complimentary. It’s been a 50 year honeymoon.