Hope: Dance in the Shadows

By Tali Lavi 

Tali Lavi is a Melbourne-based writer, critic and public interviewer. Her essays and reviews have been published in publications including Garden Among Fires: A Lockdown Anthology, The Jewish Quarterly, The Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and The Monthly (Online). Tali has written a play titled ‘Tales of Ash’ and is currently working on a longer form work. She has interviewed writers for various writers’ festivals and worked as part of the programming team for Melbourne Jewish Book Week for over a decade. This speech was written for the celebration of Mark Baker’s legacy with the congregation he helped found, Shira Hadasha, during the exhibition Mark Raphael Baker: The Things You Cannot See. 

In this section of Mark Raphael Baker’s In Love With the World: Photographs and Words, the presence of children is deeply felt. Here, amidst the dilapidated township of Khayalitsha, Cape Town, is the simultaneously tender and uncomfortable clasp of probable siblings.

Here, adorned in brocaded synthetic twin costumes in Williamsburg, NYC, are Queen Esthers unimpressed by the camera lens directed towards them. The penultimate image has us held, somewhat uncomfortably, in the inscrutable but knowing gaze of a baby – Mark and Michelle’s child, Mark’s youngest – as she is, in turn, held in the loving cradling motion of his own mother Genia. The miraculous present in this photo is refracted beyond its suggestion of mirrored realities, particularly for those of us familiar with her story of becoming and her grandmother’s story of survival. With time’s passing, veins of tragedy have coagulated around this scene for it was taken by Mark before he became sick. The future of Genia burying her second son was not yet written. In Shira Hadasha, the shule of song which Mark helped to establish, the liturgical prayer Unetaneh Tokef had not yet been intoned on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) for the coming year, nor had we fervently sung Leonard Cohen’s riff Who By Fire. And still, tragedy does not obliterate the beautiful audacity of life before us. 

In ‘Hope: Dance in the Shadows’ there is a joyousness of bodies in motion as children play in a courtyard in Pushkar. A handstand on a Havana street might be expressing ‘look at me’ or ‘how good life is upside down’ or something altogether different. People are seemingly in flight on the Scenic Railway of Luna Park. There is a vivid presence of self during rituals of faith, in Pretoria, in Cambodia. Classrooms and chalkboards come into view with words and numbers, we have the impression of meaning being carefully, even lovingly, inscribed. And always, there is an interplay between light and dark made more apparent by the use of the photographic apparatus: the Leica M-System designed for black-and-white photography. In Mark’s images, the mesmerising nature of light is a refrain, it glints on surfaces and horizons or the contours of a face. 

Photographer Diane Arbus claimed that ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret … The more it tells you the less you know.’ (Susan Sontag, On Photography) This is true here but there are also degrees of knowing for those of us who knew Mark or came to know him through his uncompromising writing, The Fiftieth Gate (1997), Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love (2017), Season of Death: A Memoir (2024). These layers mediate our understanding of some of the images on display. In Susan Sontag’s On Photography, she defined the ‘history of photography’ as being a ‘struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truthtelling.’ (Sontag, On Photography, 1977) This latter value – the act of bearing witness – underpinned much of Mark’s work as a historian and writer and is probably what drew him to the Leica, the preferred camera of photojournalists. But what this exhibition and book reveal are that Mark did not have to beautify the world, because in meeting it and its people with love and curiosity, it offered itself up to him as it was. 

When I think of a dance in the shadows, two associations take hold. The first is that of fireflies and their brief darting dance of luminescence. This offering of nature that only occurs with the waning of light. The other association is with the photographic exhibition situated on the other side of this wall; Andrew Harris’s ‘Buchenwald Ball – 80 Years Dancing in Freedom’. Men, who will forever be known as the Buchenwald Boys, dance with their wives and their descendants in this act that evokes the miraculous – there’s that word again – by conjuring an ebullient life and future which was once impossible. In the aptly titled ‘Dancing Until the End’, we look upon dancers frozen in motion, Mark’s parents Genia and Yossl, both survivors of the Shoah. It might be a dance in the shadows but it is also a dance of and out of the shadows. The image is a riposte to that intrusive question of these past 22 months; how is it possible to celebrate, to summon our bodies in a gesture that by its very nature conjures the vibrancy of life? 

‘Hope: Dance in the Shadows,’ the chapter’s title, is taken from Mark’s last memoir Season of Death and when we read these words, he could very well be directly addressing this terrible question within a historic reality he did not live to witness: the moral collapse and atrocities of 7 October, the weight of suffering in Gaza, a resurgence of virulent antisemitism. 

‘You can dance in the shadows of your memories, affirm life as a moral response to death, build new worlds from the ashes of the old.’ (Mark Raphael Baker, A Season of Death, 2024, quoted in In Love With the World: Photographs and Words, 2025, Mark Raphael Baker) 

 When I am approached to speak alongside this exhibition I have already lingered in, I reach for the phrase ‘Hope: Dance in the Shadows.’ I briefly wonder what Emily Dickinson might have written about hope but do nothing to pursue the thought. 

Two days later I am walking across a park; one I have a pattern of turning towards for anchoring and communion. Communion. It is odd that this particular word affixes itself to this ritual of mine. It is a word so deeply set in another faith’s lexicon but communion characterises the intimate fellowship that has developed between us; my Winged Woman and I.  

Our first encounter is on 1 November 2021, and is of the kind that shifts something internally, undetectable to others but seismic. I walk towards a public garden. Its graceful design evokes an English tranquillity: larger trees around its gates, a sunken garden, plantings of roses, translucent poppies and foxglove. I am in desperate search of relief, not from the day’s heat but from scorch marks that human brutality leave upon the soul. And it is in this state that I discover her, the Winged Woman of Victory. Admittedly, it is strange to use the word ‘discover’ as if she lies hidden, but there is something about her that is of the landscape, sheltered as she is beneath two statuesque plane trees, and also wholly herself. The Winged Woman and I have since communed – I do not think there is a Hebrew word that evokes the same thing – irregularly but continuously. She offers me understanding or fortification most times I visit. 

So here I am, a week ago, walking towards the Winged Woman. I continue my route and head in the direction of three lemon trees who converse with each other. Looking at them provides a kind of sustenance. I move towards the end of the street lined with what was once worker’s cottages, where I take in the old bell in the tower.  

On these walks, which are both for movement and expansion, I experience a kinship with the French documentary maker Agnes Varda. One of my favourite moments in her documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), is when she comes upon the potato shaped like a heart. This inclination to see what might otherwise be hidden within plain sight because of our failure to witness it, is one that grows stronger with regular practice. I sometimes find other signs of love on the streets at moments when there appears to be an impoverishment of love around and gather them into my possession by way of my phone’s camera. 

Whilst walking, I am listening to an episode of ‘On Being.’ Krista Tippett has curated a series of Hope and in this last episode – I have only yet listened to the first – she turns to the work of Ross Gay, an American poet and community gardener. She speaks of his learning as such: ‘We have to know what we love and what delights us and we have to tend to that as seriously and as fiercely as how we tend to what is broken and what we’re called to make better.’ Standing in this space, amongst the startling, at times painful, at times numinous and even exultant images Mark took around us, it strikes me that this dictum of Gay’s is something he understood. 

Tippet goes on to say that Gay’s work reminds her of that Emily Dickinson quote, ‘Hope inspires the good to reveal itself.’ And I think of how surprising the world is, this world that holds the sublime choreography of the migration of birds across the sky, a world where one might summon a line of Emily Dickinson by wishing it. Of course, this is not quite how such things work. Mark knew this too; that to find moments of illumination like these, you need to walk the streets, to open yourself up to the encounter and when it comes, be prepared to wholly stare in its face and let it take you to a place of knowing or at least the threshold of understanding. 

It will be unsurprising to you that I have been contemplating the idea of hope for some while. At times like these, there is a collective leaning towards it. A few days before Hope or the contemplation of hope had been proffered to me as a subject to meditate upon, I found myself stopped, in the midst of another peregrination, on the corner of an Elsternwick street, the one with hope embedded in its name. Over several seasons, a verdant landmark had greeted me on this corner as if it was a shaggy, wild physical manifestation of hope. It might have been a creation by Maurice Sendak or Jim Henson if they had been given directions to only use materials of the existing environment and nature. As is the way of things, on this day of Aegean blue skies and Arctic breezes, I found it stripped bare of its animus. It was now a derelict looking white peeling structure. It was not so much a transformation as a degradation. One that spoke to me of how whisper close we are to ruin and desolation if we abandon this desire we refer to as Hope. 

As with that conjuring of Dickinson, I experienced a similar happening with Yehuda Amichai. I had been reflecting upon an idea that had first arrived during the pandemic; that time of collective global challenge. Perhaps what was needed to safeguard hope was a carapace of sorts. If I thought of it as a construction like a suit of armour, mine would be made by a Teimani (Yemenite) craftsperson. Filigreed with openings for air both to breathe and to be revealed, like the besamim (spice box) holder we received as a wedding gift over twenty years ago. 

 What is it that makes me reach for Amichai? I’m not an expert on his work nor intimately familiar with it. I have been discovering it slowly, over a period of decades, being first introduced to the study of his poetry as an eighteen-year-old undergraduate in Hebrew Literature classes taught by the splendid Professor Ziva Shavitsky. Mark would have been teaching at the same time on the same campus lecturing in Jewish Studies. The impulse to reach for Amichai was located in an inchoate need for a voice from another time, one which held a particular morality, the man who wrote ‘From the Place Where We Are Right’,  

מין המקום שבו אנו צודקים. 

When I search for Amichai on hope, I type in the Hebrew word tikvah תקווה. What comes is a poem titled Ein Yahav עין יהב. 

I discover after reading it that Ein Yahav, the place towards which the person is journeying, is a moshav in the Arava desert named after the neighbouring Spring (Ein). It translates to the phrase ‘Wellspring of Hope’. 

This poem describes a journey through the night (of course, it must involve darkness), of driving through the rain, maybe even a deluge, until the narrator comes to the place in the desert where people grow date palms and where he sees tamarisk trees and other trees: 

אשל ועצי אשליה עצי  

There is a language play here that does not translate well for the word ‘tamarisk’ (‘eshel’) is linked to the word ‘ashlaya’ which translators have decoded as ‘risk’ so that it reads ‘There I saw tamarisk trees and risk trees’ but in actuality ‘ashlaya’ is an illusion or delusion. This is what is being witnessed in this place of illusion and harsh reality. And then we come to this: 

שם ראיתי תקוה דוכרנית כמו תיל דוקרני 

ואמרתי בלבי: אמת, התקוה צריכה להיות 

כמו תיל כדי להגן עלינו מן היאוש. 

התקוה צריכה להיות שדה מוקשים 

‘Then I saw hope barbed as a wire, 

And I spoke to my heart: It is true, Hope needs to be 

Like barbed wire to defend us from despair, 

Hope needs to be a minefield.’ 

In Amichai’s poetic vision, hope is in need of being encased in a protective material, but it also contains the violent agency of destruction. What devastation does hope bring? The vanquishing of despair. For in despair, nothing can grow. What might we do to protect ourselves from this state of desiccation? The Things You Cannot See, the exhibition we stand in, and its companion book In Love With the World, contain great beauty and make us intensely aware of one of the responses available to us always, but especially at times of grief and precariousness. A response enacted time and time again by Mark Raphael Baker (z’l) and his parents before him: to gather ourselves up and dance to meet the glinting world.