Essays and articlesThe Blue I Did Not Choose
On blue, tekhelet, and a culture that may have chosen this color for me long before I ever did.
I like the color blue. As a child learning to form letters, as early as five, I reached for it without thinking. Forty years later I still paint and draw mostly in blue and the tones that sit beside it.
People notice, and they ask, especially when they are weighing the palette for their own tattoos. When I was younger the answer was simple. That is what I like. I like blue.
Later I began to see that blue was a Jewish color. It was the color of my tallit, of the flag of the State of Israel, of a surprising number of wedding invitations, of kippot, of Torah mantles.
It took a client, and a book she handed me, to make me face something I had never named. My attraction to blue was never only mine. It formed inside a culture with a long and charged history of this one color.
Reading it felt like learning that a path I had walked my whole life had been mapped centuries before I reached it.
In that history blue is far more than a color. It is tekhelet, the dye that colored the Tabernacle and, later, the fringes of ritual garments. It belonged to the sky, to the sea, and at last to the divine throne. The rabbis taught that a person who gazes at tekhelet is carried upward, from the thread to the sea, from the sea to the sky, from the sky to God. 2
What held me was not the beauty of it. It was the identity in it.
The knowledge of how to make the original dye was lost for centuries. The longing for it was not. Mystics wrote about it. Scholars hunted for it. Communities kept it close. Blue became a bridge between memory and hope, between a past that had slipped away and a future not yet arrived. It survived in prayer shawls, in ritual objects, in folklore, and finally in the flag of a modern Jewish state.
Blue, the book argues, became one of the ways Jews came to understand themselves. 1 That idea moved me more than I expected.
Maybe we choose our favorite colors far less freely than we believe. Maybe they choose us.
I no longer read my pull toward blue as a private accident. It runs back through dreamers and immigrants, through mystics and rabbis, to the dye makers of the Mediterranean coast, and forward again to the work on my table.
For forty years I thought I was painting in blue.
Now I wonder whether blue was painting through me.
NOTES
1. Gadi Sagiv, Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), ISBN 9781512823370. The book argues that, through a long process, blue became a means by which Jews have understood themselves.
2. Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 43b. The teaching traces the gaze from the blue thread to the sea, the sea to the sky, and the sky to the Throne of Glory. A parallel version, attributed to Rabbi Meir, appears in Sotah 17a.