JOSEPH DORMAN: Deborah Rosenthal is an unusual figure in today's art world: a modern artist whose work is infused with her religious beliefs. Recently, she was asked by the conservative Jewish congregation to which she belongs to create two stained glass windows for its sanctuary. For the commission, she chose two objects drawn from Jewish faith and Jewish history, the first a pomegranate.
DEBORAH
ROSENTHAL (Artist): The theme really comes from the ancient temple in Jerusalem.
The one object that is claimed to remain from the temple that you can see in the
Israel Museum is a microscopic stylized ivory pomegranate. Since a synagogue is
the latter-day replacement for the temple, I thought of connecting the space to
the temple through the pomegranate. DORMAN: For the second window, she chose a tree representing the Jewish Holy Book, the Torah, which is considered the Tree of Life. Like her stained-glass windows, Rosenthal's paintings often focus on biblical or religious themes. Her work draws from her own imagination as well as the world around her, mixing figures and abstract forms in dream-like compositions rich with symbolic meaning.
MS.
ROSENTHAL: The metaphoric process is the key link, really, between the way
I am religious as a Jew and myself as a painter. The bible is full of metaphors.
All of the ways we express our description of God, for instance, in Judaism are
understood to be metaphors, since we believe in a god that has no physical or
material presence. I think the particular kind of truth I'm after does have something
to do with dreams, myths, a kind of level of reality that isn't in the here and
now.DORMAN: Deborah Rosenthal was born into a family of conservative Jews who celebrated Sabbath and the Jewish holidays. From a young age, she felt the pull of her own deep religious impulse. As she grew up, she found herself becoming increasingly observant and by the time she was getting her MFA degree, she was keeping kosher and moving in the direction of Orthodox Judaism.
MS. ROSENTHAL: I grew up along with two brothers in a home that was profoundly Jewish-identified. I went to Hebrew school. I was originally at college in a setting where there were relatively few Jews at Smith and I felt strongly impelled to be very Jewishly involved.
DORMAN:
At the same time that Rosenthal was deepening her involvement in orthodox Judaism,
she was feeling excluded from its many restrictions on women. During the holiday
of Simchas Torah, which celebrates God's gift of the Torah to the Jews, she and
a number of friends decided to lead their own service. It proved to be a profound
experience, which led to the creation of a women's-only prayer group.MS. ROSENTHAL: The idea was for women literally to carry and hold the Torah during the Simchas Torah festivities and it grew into women's reading the Torah for other women and it was a different experience for all of us who had never been called up to the Torah, who had never stood there with the Torah scroll and read it. I believe you can be radical; you can go to the root of a tradition and if the tradition is a moral one, which I believe Judaism is, it recognizes your presence on the earth.
MARK
STEVENS (Art Critic): One of the things that I like about Deborah's art is
that she uses painting itself and the traditions of painting to arrive at her
ends; she bumps up forms against one another and uses colors in such a way to
create a light that seems to escape materiality or suggest some other dimension
to life. She's not just spiritually driven; she's first of all, a painter.
MS.
ROSENTHAL: The image of Eve at Autun is a figure who appears alone, she's
an Eve without an Adam, which was intriguing to me -- the notion of the mother
giving birth to the world. It's one of the most powerful and one of the most familiar
great images of Eve in Western art, and when I saw it in the flesh and I drew
from it, it seemed like a figure who suggested a way of building a kind of metaphor
about a creative, what someone calls, an alpha female. 
DORMAN:
As Rosenthal creates the stained glass windows for her congregation, she is acutely
aware that she is linked to these many traditions of religious art. She also knows
that she's come late to those traditions. In the past, art was created in a world
steeped in religion and in the idea of the sacred. Today, working in a secular
age, her task is infinitely more difficult.
