The Lamed Vavniks

 

The lamed vavniks or lamed vodniks are 36 people, who unknown to each other are saving the world.

The legend of the lamed-vavniks has Talmudic origins. Lamedvavnik; a Yiddish term, is derived from the Hebrew word for thirty: 'lamed' and the Hebrew word for six: 'vav'. They combine to make thirty-six, the number of righteous individuals without whom the world would not exist. 

In this time of terrible atrocities I decided that we needed to be reminded of the possibility of ordinary people doing good. Therefore I am presenting thirty-six portraits of ordinary people. Ordinary in that they have no honorific status, such as being an aristocrat, media star or sports celebrity, but of course they are also 'special' in being individual human beings, each one having the potential to save the world. Some of these portraits were made of the same person at different times, a fact that at first I wondered about, but then I realised that each time I see them they are different and the potential they have to change the world, itself changes as they do on a daily basis. 

These people are collected together simply because I have come into contact with them, I am the connection and as a self imposed condition of that connection, I made an image based on how I felt about them at the time, an image also suffused with my feelings about the issues they raised when I was in conversation with them. It is the ordinary people of this world, who keep it sane and who help it to occasionally achieve peace, and without them our world would be a much darker place. The Lamed Vavniks are always 'ordinary'. 

The original story of the Lamed Vavniks is a Jewish one and all 36 of them were men. In these days of equality, I have decided to not discriminate and am suggesting that these righteous people are just as likely to be women as men. 

In portraits the language of painterly and drawn expression can be at odds with the distribution of individual features. These images are fusions of a play with pigmented materials and responses to the flickering moments of awareness we sometimes call perception. I think this is a good thing. It reflects that fact that we are all composites and hybrids, mixes of all the influences we have received over the years, as well as being carriers of the genes of thousands of those who went before us. A decision to stop moving the pigments around is something that comes intuitively and so is a fixing of facial features as they emerge from the morass of paint and ink and other substances. Likeness, in terms of verisimilitude is not important, but accuracy of feeling tone is. 

As these faces emerge from the possibilities that the materials of their making engender, they merge into and out of a dance of pigment, water, paper, moving brushes and pens. Their story is as much a granular tale of ink and watercolour, as it is of sadness, joy, age, youth, sex or attitude. 

These images as they are read through the various lenses and filters through which each of us gaze, are seen by some as candidates for sainthood, and by others as criminal types. 

They are all potential Lamed Vavniks, their actions may be what save the world. One small gesture, made by any one of these people, like the butterfly disturbing the air in its flight, may eventually become the thing that makes the difference, the tipping point that prevented disaster.

We should never know these people, they must remain anonymous. This is their power, by being potentially anybody they are everybody and everyone must pull their weight if we are to save this world from the ravages of consumerism and myopic individualism. 

So these people are the possible Lamed Vavniks. Is one you? Is one that woman you saw yesterday waiting for a bus? Is your uncle one? Is it that person being interviewed by the news reporter? Is it the anonymous soldier in the background of an old photograph? We are all guilty, all conflicted and responsible for the damage our kind inflict upon the Earth. Whether it is 36, 36,000 or 36,000,000 people, does not really matter. Just one might be enough, just one act, one thing done that triggers another act, starts another process and in so doing leads towards a brighter future, rather than an ending. 

I'm sitting in a house in Glasgow, surrounded by the work of a painter who I used to know really well. Her portraits surround me and I wonder if I knew the people she drew. I probably did as we worked in the same city and the art community is not a very big one. Her drawings are very personal and are like many artists more touched with the mannerisms of her hand than the individuality of the sitter. No matter how hard I try, the same happens when I make drawings in response to the presence of other humans. I try to channel something unique about the person I meet, but when looked at later, each time all I see is myself. Perhaps that is the real secret of the Lamed Vavniks. They are all possible versions of ourselves. We may be good, we may be bad, we may be bold, we may be shy, we may be whatever version of ourselves we see in the eyes of others. Sometimes I feel constructed as I speak, my voice an echo of others, my body language changing as I mimic the movements of someone I respect. Sometimes I'm unconsciously mirroring the shape of a friend and at others I'm consciously blocking the movements of a person I distrust. My boundaries keep shifting, I am a permeable membrane, a hybrid form, parts of myself carried by others, just as I carry others within myself. 

Who are we? If we are Lamed Vavniks we would never know, unknownness is a condition of their existence. It is the actions taken by people who do those actions not for profit or individual gain but for the fact that they are simply 'right' actions; that lead to these people becoming Lamed Vavniks. But they don't even know they are undertaking 'right' actions; their lives unfold as possibilities, their agency in the shaping of their lives being somehow suffused with grace, a grace that emerges from the habitual character of lives created by the gift of grace from God and there but for the grace of God, go I. I'm now confusing a Christian term with a Jewish myth, perhaps a natural consequence of my upbringing. We are all possible Lamed Vavniks, which is why we should never judge the actions of others too harshly, as we may find we at the same time condemn ourselves. 

I contradict myself with these portraits, as I do with each and every portrait I make. On the one hand I try to say that human beings are not special, that they are just a part of the endless complexity we know as what is out there, or nature, or the world. But, no matter how hard I try to be aware of everything else as being just as important, I still find myself making images of the very thing that I try to suggest should not really need any more images being made of. 

So name them ink or brush or pigment. Name them sticks and stones and bones and paper, but never John or Mary, Kevin or Jean, or even Sally or Michael or Jim. Avoid Ahmad, Fatima and Amir, never use Ezra, Leah or Aaron, and stay away from Imani, Kwame, or Omari. Fang, Jing and Yan are to be avoided, just as Mehmet, Osman and Emre. The unknown soldier has no name, and in this case no number either. These are the Lamed Vavniks and in their anonymous actions they save us all. 

See also:

Drawing and spirituality 

Drawings for Easter

Portraits and time

What is a portrait?