01 My soul is torn

מי שאמר עלי כי נשמתי קרועה - יפה אמר. בודאי היא קרועה. אי אפשר לנו לתאר בשכלנו איש שאין נשמתו קרועה. רק הדומם הוא שלם, אבל האדם הוא בעל שאיפות הפכיות, ומלחמה פנימית תמיד בקרבו. וכל עבודת האדם היא לאחד את הקרעים שבנפשו על ידי רעיון כללי, שבגדלותו ורוממותו הכל נכלל ובא לידי הרמוניה

הראי"ה קוק, חדריו מהדורה ראשונה עמ' קטז

Whoever said of me that my soul is torn - said beautifully. Indeed, it is torn. We cannot conceive of a person whose soul is not torn. Only the mute is whole, but man is a creature of contradictory aspirations, engaged in perpetual inner conflict. And the entirety of man's endeavor is to mend the rifts within his soul through a universal idea, in whose grandeur and elevation everything is encompassed and attains harmony

HaRav Kook

When I moved into my first apartment, next to the Shuk, Jerusalem’s food marked, I already had a piece of paper in my pocket on which I had scribbled this quote by HaRav Kook. God knows where I had found it. But even then, at the age of 17, these words had managed to awake something in me I intuitively knew was significant. I was as far away from faith or spirituality as a person can be. I had just lost my job as a postman, knew I would be unable to pay rent, was in a horrible, toxic relationship, ate whatever I found on the ground in the market, smoked way too much weed and was actually not doing much except for waiting to be taken to prison for refusing to enlist in the army.

It was in the void of that chaos that I first thought about this project, which would materialise more than 20 years later.

Two apartments, one prison term and one migration later I had already lost that scarp of paper. But in Rotterdam, when I was 27, I made the first attempt to pour my feelings about this quote into art. I failed miserably and in my disappointment decided to abandon the quote.

It wasn't until years later, when my Rabbi in Buenos Aires mentioned Rabbi Kook, that I remembered the quote, looked it up and scribbled it on another piece of paper, looked at it for a day, folded it, slipped it into a book or poems and forgot about it. 

The next time I opened the book was in Berlin, in 2018. I was 36. Already before unfolding the piece of paper, I knew what it was and that it was time for this piece to come to life.

I had just started playing with the idea of a project of homages to Hassan Massoudy, whom I had discovered at the age of 16 or 17, as well.

And thus, this project was born, combining two profound influences on my life.