PAINT BY NUMBERS PASSOVER (YIZKOR 5779)
Every Shabbat afternoon I try to take a few minutes to read the obituaries in the Town Topics. And during the week, I often read obituaries of figures who have made it into the news. I am one of those people who loves reading obituaries. Reading obituaries makes me feel alive and helps me reflect on the choices I am making in my own life.
Recently an obituary of Dan Robbins caught my attention. He died earlier this month at the age of 93.
Robbins was born in Detroit in 1925. His father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, worked as a car salesman and part-time vaudeville singer. His mother was a homemaker. When he was in high school, Robbins started experimenting with painting. Often, after dessert at a dinner party, he would invite the kids back to the table and teach them how to draw Mickey Mouse on a napkin. During the war Robbins served in the Army Corps of Engineers, and after the war he started working as a freelance artist. That’s when Max Klein decided to hire Robbins for a project. Klein was the owner of Palmer Paints in Detroit, a small company that sold washable poster paints for children. Klein was eager to increase sales, so he asked Robbins to to come up with ideas that would make people buy more paint. He told Robbins to create a coloring book for adults.
But Robbins didn’t like the idea of making a coloring book, so he tried something else. He remembered learning that the great artist Leonardo da Vinci would “use diagrams and number them” when he was teaching his apprentices. Inspired by that idea, Robbins drew an outline of a painting and put a number in each area that corresponded to a particular color. The result became known as Paint by Numbers.
That year was 1949. By 1955, just six years later, Palmer Paints sold 12 million Paint by Number units — and their competitors sold 8 million more. Paint by Numbers kits were as popular as hula hoops and Davy Crockett. Eisenhower hung them in them in the White House. Mad Magazine used one for a cover. Andy Warhol made Paint by Numbers the subject of one of his paintings. As one graphic designer put it, Robbins’ Paint by Number kits went viral before there was viral. The brand was called Craft Master. There were landscapes and seascapes and celebrity portraits. Images of horses were a big hit, as were kittens playing with a ball of yarn.
Robbins’ granddaughter Sarah tells a story about a time when there was a mistake in the assembly process and the the color sets for different kits got switched up. I imagine thousands of people marveling at their psychedelic pony painting, featuring a pastel blue horse with a purple mane standing near a grove of trees with orange bark.
But what really caught my attention while reading Robbins’ obituary was a remark by a faculty member at the Parsons School of Design. She said that Paint by Numbers worked so well and was so popular because “people work best when they have freedom within limits.” That idea — that we need a mix of structure and limits to our freedom to live our best lives — resonates for me in a very Jewish way.
Imagine, for a moment, that someone gives you a blank sheet of paper and invites you to paint a classic image — perhaps a springtime landscape with children flying kites, or a version of Van Gogh’s starry night. Even if someone gave you the paints to use, if you’re like me, you would find the exercise quite intimidating. How can I paint such a scene by myself? But with a paint-by-number outline on the paper, all of the sudden I can confidently participate. I can make the image come to life. The outline creates limits that evokes my creativity.
Now imagine, for a moment, that someone invites you to create an evening to remember the Exodus — to retell the story in a way that your children and your children’s children will remember it and pass it along throughout the generations, long after you are gone. If you’re like most people, you would find the exercise intimidating. How will I tell the Exodus story in a memorable way? But with the rabbis’ Haggadah, with its simple table of contents — Kadesh, Urchatz… — all of a sudden it becomes possible. The contents and rituals of the Haggadah create limits that allow our creative storytelling to blossom.
And imagine for a moment, that someone you love dies, and you are thrust unexpectedly into the chaotic role of mourner, without any structure or guidance. If you are like most people, you would feel overwhelmed and rudderless. How can I deal with this suffocating grief? How can I process all these memories? But with the basic structure of the Jewish practices around avelut, from the rending of our clothes at the graveside, to the rhythmic sounds of the Kaddish prayer recited in community, to the lighting of a yartzeit candle and the recitation of Yizkor, as we will do this morning, the process of mourning is no less painful and sad, but it is more manageable. The structure and limits of the Jewish mourning rituals allow us to process our grief and meaningfully remember those we loved.
While it is certainly an imperfect metaphor, there are ways in which the Passover Seder and the Jewish approach to mourning are a bit like a paint by numbers kit. Both the Seder and our Mourning rituals give us the broad outlines and invite us fill in the picture. They are the Structure that lets Creativity blossom. The Order that brings life to a Story. The Container that lets Tears flow.
The story of Paint by Numbers is a surprisingly Jewish story. The inventor, Dan Robbins, was Jewish. His boss at the paint company, Max Klein, was Jewish. The idea of freedom within limits, as I tried to describe it — is quite Jewish. But you still might be surprised to hear that the Paint by Numbers story even has a connection to Passover. After illustrating the first few sets of Paint by Numbers kits himself, Robbins hired a Polish immigrant and young artist named Adam Grant to create more images for the series. Grant was a survivor of the Holocaust, and had stayed alive in the camps in part by making small drawings at opportune times. Robbins asked Grant to paint renditions of famous art works that could be reproduced in the Paint by Number style. One of Grant’s images became the best selling Paint by Numbers image of all time — it was his version of Davinci’s Last Supper, which of course, itself, was a recreation of a first century passover meal.
Of course, Passover is much more than a Paint by Numbers canvas to tell the story of the Exodus. Passover is a holiday not only to remember the Exodus. It is also a holiday to remember loved ones who are no longer with us.
The day before the first seder, a rabbinic colleague of mine in Chicago [Rabbi Ari Hart] was doing what many of us were doing that Thursday: he was at the grocery store, staring at the shelves of kosher for passover food items, trying to decide what to buy. As he browsed the shelves, he noticed that the woman next to him, who was holding a box of Jelly-Rings, had tears streaming down her cheeks. He decided to ask her, “Is everything ok?” He wondered to himself, maybe she was just shocked and upset at how much Kosher for Passover food costs these days.
The woman said to him, “This is the first Pesach without my mom. She passed away in August. I think I am past all the crying, but then out of the blue it hits me.”
She looked down at the box of Jelly-Rings in her hand and continued. “My mom loved these jelly rings and would always eat them at the seder. They’re disgusting! Everyone else hated them, but we always bought them for her. Mom is the only one that ate them. Now I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to buy them, because no one will eat them… but I can’t not buy them, because what is Pesach without them?” But what this woman in the grocery store was really asking was, “What is Pesach without my mom?”
No matter how many loved ones come to our seder, there is always someone missing. There is always some feeling of emptiness alongside the chaotic joy of Passover. Because there is always someone we wish were still alive to join us on this holiday.
My colleague wondered, as he shared this story, whether the loved ones of our past visit us on seder like Elijah does. Perhaps they do.
What we know for sure is that the memories of our loved ones visit us on Pesach. These memories are triggered by small things, like a box of Jelly rings, or a stained recipe card, or the singing of mah nishtanah by a little girl who will not know her grandfather. Not everyone has Passover memories of those who we will be recalling during Yizkor today. But for those who do, these holiday memory-triggers keep us close to those we dared to love.
This year, inspired by Dan Robbins and by jelly rings, I invite you to use the liturgy of Yizkor to paint mental images and memories of your loved ones who have died.
