Losing decades’ worth of work in a devastating inferno could have been the ultimate tragedy. But for artist Yoram Raanan it’s become a kiln for renewal

No, his life isn’t over. In fact, the klalah was a brachah, the curse a blessing in disguise. Yes, he lost all his work, but he also earned a new beginning, a time to restart, refresh, and renew. If it sounds too good to be true — it almost is (Photos: Elchanan Kotler)

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s his studio burned to the ground, Yoram Raanan couldn’t help but notice the beauty.

His wife had stirred him from sleep in that same studio, where he often slept, just minutes before. A wildfire was approaching from the east, she told him, and they had to get out fast. So he grabbed his tallis and tefillin, a USB drive and his car keys, and walked out the door of the studio, the one he had been building for 25 years.

Inside there were about 2,000 paintings, everything from tiny experimentations to wall-sized masterpieces. They were hanging on the walls and lined up dozens-deep in the corners; propped up on easels and waiting their turn on a framing table; carefully organized in steel shelving units and resting on bookshelves. Everywhere there was light and color, an explosion of blues and reds; ethereal light filtering down from the Shamayim and angles fluttering their wings; Avraham Avinu embracing his beloved son, and Klal Yisrael arrayed at the fiery mountain awaiting their wedding night.

There was a book collection over 50 years in the making, tomes in art history first purchased as a teen, and a record collection with hundreds of jazz classics. There was also turpentine, oil paint, linseed oil, a huge pile of firewood chopped for the winter chill, and boxes and boxes of gefet — olive pulp left over from the pressing — all to make the lighting easier.

As Yoram Raanan walked out of his studio in Moshav Beit Meir outside Jerusalem, for the last time, he passed two giant date palms, saplings not even knee high when he first put them in the rocky ground two decades earlier. But at that moment, he wasn’t thinking about any of that. All he could do was stare at the fire, the embers rising in the air, and wonder at the orange glow streaked across the sky.

“I found it very poetic, to tell you the truth,” says Raanan, 65, sitting in his new studio on a recent afternoon. “It was just… the sparks and the leaves were just starting to ignite and they were sort of fluttering down, the eucalyptus leaves flying down like, you know, little angels. And I just thought it was very poetic, very beautiful.”

An artist sees beauty where others see destruction. And Yoram Raanan saw rebirth where others would have seen devastation.

It has been 15 months now since everything was destroyed, at least $2 million worth of work, the inheritance he was saving for his children and grandchildren. But Raanan seems happy and contented on this day, sitting comfortably in a wooden chair, back straight, eyes bright. If Yoram Raanan were a bird, he would be a wise old owl, observing the folly of the world and giving a little chuckle.

No, his life isn’t over. In fact, the klalah was a brachah, the curse a blessing in disguise. Yes, he lost all his work, but he also earned a new beginning, a time to restart, refresh, and renew. If it sounds too good to be true — it almost is.

“It’s just things,” he says.

Even as he and his wife raced out of the moshav that night, he turned to her and told her everything would be for the best.

“And she said ‘What? What are you talking about?’ ”

“I said, ‘You’ll see that a lot of good is going to come out of this.’”

And it has.

Soul and spirit

Yoram Raanan grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near Passaic, in the 1950s and 1960s. The son of a sound engineer for public broadcaster PBS and a housewife mother, Raanan took an early interest in art, spurred on by encouraging teachers.

He describes his family as “religious Conservative,” and grew up in a home where Judaism was important and love of Israel was ingrained. He attended services every Shabbos at his local shul, leading his junior congregation. He attended a Jewish high school in New York City and went to Camp Ramah for six years, where he learned the Havdalah niggun he still uses to this day.

He left home for the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree, and then set off to see the world. Like so many before him, he put on a backpack and set off to explore Europe. He visited the museums and spent a good amount of time in Greece and Egypt. Then he visited Israel for the first time, intending to stay a few months before heading to India and the Far East.

“But when I got here I just fell in love with the country,” he says.

He admits to being a bit cynical about his Judaism at the time. For one, the liberal atmosphere on campus had introduced certain doubts. But there was also the nagging feeling that the Judaism of his youth had been somehow lacking.

“I felt it wasn’t totally true in a certain way,” he says. “Something didn’t make sense to me in the Conservative movement. People would kasher their homes and then go eat nonkosher, for instance. Those kinds of things bothered me; it didn’t hold water for me. So I thought the whole thing was worthless.”

It was 1976, the early days of the teshuvah movement, and Raanan “somehow ended up in yeshivah.” He spent a few months at Aish HaTorah, then moved on to Ohr Somayach and Darche Noam/Shapell’s. In all, he would spend six years learning — a half day in the morning, and the afternoons and evenings in the studio.

Interestingly, he says the rabbanim he encountered had an intuitive understanding of the artistic process, if not art itself. At the time, there were perhaps three established religious artists in all of Israel (Yaakov Kaszemacher, Baruch Nachshon, and Elyah Sukkot), but he was lucky enough to meet a rabbi who understood the artistic mind and who could guide him along his path.

“He knew how to speak to me and my soul and how it connected to art,” he says, thinking back. “Because I didn’t think you could put Torah and art together. Most people don’t think you can put Torah and art together. This rabbi had a greater understanding of what art is — more than my art teachers — because he knew how to talk about soul and spirit, which is really what art is supposed to be about.”

Along the way, he met his wife Meira on a shidduch date when he was learning at Ohr Somayach, and the couple settled down first in Jeruasalem's Bukharim neighborhood, and then later Bayit Vegan and Har Nof. In 1994, the Raanans bought eight dunams, about an acre and a half, in Moshav Beir Meir for $215,000 and moved in with their four children.

Today it resembles a manicured estate — with two houses, a 300-square-meter studio, and landscaped gardens — but back then it was a barren outcropping. His first studio, the one that burned down, was a converted chicken coop. He cleared the land himself, planted trees and flowers and a vineyard, and watched everything grow. The moshav is about 95 percent religious and houses the campus for Ohr Yerushalayim, a yeshivah popular with American bochurim. The moshav borders a national park and the Mediterranean Sea comes into view on a clear day.

“I feel very blessed to be here,” he says. “I appreciate it every day. It’s like a dream come true, it really is.”

All for the best

When Yoram first came back after the fire, he found total destruction. The studio had incinerated in minutes, leaving nothing but twisted metal and a blanket of white ash. He could only stay for half an hour to collect some of his clothes because the asbestos roof of the burnt former chicken coop made the area an environmental danger zone.

Though at the time there were a number of fires set deliberately by Palestinians terrorists, Raanan says the cause of the Beir Meir fire was an errant police flare. In a search for arsonists, police had dispatched a drone to the forests around Beit Meir after a report of suspicious behavior. When the drone found a few people, police launched a flare into the area, setting the forest ablaze. (Still, the government claims the fire was the result of arson, which lessens his compensation.)

Though Raanan had casually walked out of his house, and belatedly taken his dog, there was a point at which he and his wife feared for their lives. The wind was blowing at 27 kilometers per hour that night and the fire was approaching rapidly. It was around 2 a.m. Thursday night, and there was a long line of residents in their cars waiting to exit the moshav, but the fire had cut them off on both sides of the road. There was a back exit, but it was locked. At one point, Yoram looked at his wife and asked if they should run.

“It was the first time I realized this was serious,” he says. “All of a sudden there was a real question of ‘Are we going to get burned alive in the car or should we run?’ ”

Despite the circumstances, Yoram says he felt a real sense of calm. “I just felt a very strong sense of Divine protection and calmness that night, I really did.”

And sure enough, as suddenly as danger had appeared, the fire relented, and the cars started to move through the exit. That’s when Raanan turned to his wife and made his astonishing statement: “Gam zu l’tovah.”

“Hakol miShamayim,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s just another day. Life is so surprising anyway. You can’t predict anything, there’s ups and downs. So this is a down, if you want to call it that.”

The hardest part of coming back to the burned remains was living in a place that didn’t look like the place he had been living in for the last 25 years.

“Think about it,” he says. “You have a life, a studio, a full-time job that you’re totally consumed with, and all of a sudden it’s gone. It’s totally burned. So I was just walking around here for days and just looking and looking and taking pictures. I can show you parts of the floor where you can see the canvas and the paint melted into the concrete. It was such total destruction and then all of a sudden I’d find something” — he gets up to walk to the next room and picks up an object, something that looks like a remnant from a kiln. “This is a piece of a painting. Paintings are painted on a canvas stretched on wood so this is the wood that is left and this is the melted paint that was left there. And it’s quite interesting. I added some gold to it and made it a precious object, a piece of jewelry almost. You can’t conceive of something like that. So it’s like, art by G-d.”

Eerily, Raanan had been documenting his life and work for the last 40 years. All the art in the studio, save the last year of work before the fire, had been digitized. He had also taken a number of videos — still available on his website — showing different aspects of his work. One even features a tour of his studio. From a financial point of view, that was a savior. Though he didn’t have insurance (most artists don’t) he had indisputable proof of his financial loss, evidence that has allowed him to build a new studio from the compensation he received from the state.

Almost immediately, a flood of orders came in. Many people had read about the fire and the tragic loss of his art, which had ironically exposed his work to a larger audience. Now all those people wanted a Yoram Raanan print.

Though he has had up years and down periods financially, the 15 months since the fire have ranked among the best, he says. It’s also been heartening to know that so many people could find strength in his story of emunah. “I’m just living my life normally. But because it’s inspiring to people, I’ve become a tool of Hashem in a way, and it’s very beautiful.”

Right away, he started getting letters and phone calls from around the world. Newspapers and broadcast outlets came to interview him, and he sensed he was living his 15 minutes of fame. Shortly thereafter, someone who had seen one of the stories came to the studio looking to buy one of the paintings she had seen in the newspaper. But they no longer existed. So she commissioned him to paint six new, large works, income that sustained him for a year.

“It was great,” he says. “I just sort of sensed that things were going to happen, and things happened.”

Redeeming scorched earth

A typical painting by Yoram Raanan resembles something like the vision you might have if you closed your eyes, settled your mind, and imagined what the Heavenly abode might look like. His work is explosive and colorful, but also penetrating and deep. It is art that takes you back to a time and place. For instance, in Bishvili, golden light fills the Temple, energy simultaneously bursting from and being pulled back into its core. In Wedding Night, Am Yisrael gathers around an ethereal glow in the desert, the light descending from above and spreading over the awed penitents.

More than anything, Yoram Raanan’s work is an emotional experience. It is art that can stop the breath short with its powerful lines, or sock the viewer in the gut with its deep brushstrokes, or transport the soul with its familiar abodes, bringing it back to places it knows it has been before. His work hangs in several museums throughout the world and is included in private collections. Original pieces cost anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000.

Before the fire, Raanan says he mostly painted acrylic on canvas. But after the fire, the mood of his work deepened. In place of canvas came wood. In place of acrylic came earthy oil paints. In place of bright blues and reds came rich yellows, browns, and grey and black, the colors of the scorched earth that surrounded him. It was as if he was redeeming those materials and colors, shaping them with his hands, and working them through his psyche.

“I had a need for organic, to be down to earth,” he says. “I felt that need to be in touch with nature and the earth. It was a very good way for me to connect to the simplicity and purity and primal color and feeling. Because that’s how I was feeling. I wasn’t feeling burnt, and I wasn’t even feeling raw, but I was feeling primal. I just had to be very simple and very direct.”

He says when he paints — he often splashes paint on a canvas and works it with his fingers — he doesn’t think a lot. “I don’t have ideas, I just paint a feeling, a color, an emotion — an energy so to speak.” What “came out” in the immediate post-fire period were paintings of the landscape — burning trees, phoenix birds rising out of the ashes, leaves falling to the earth like glowing sparks.

He’s more or less out of that period now, as a new deep purple impressionist work hanging on the wall in his studio indicates, but he’s still roaming his property, finding lost, burnt, melted, destroyed objects, and redeeming them.

Don’t feel sorry for Yoram Raanan, he says. He bears no emotional scar, he hasn’t had to seek therapy, there have been no emotional breakdowns. But there has been acceptance, and equanimity, along with a new maturity.

“I’m more in tune with genuine feeling,” he explains. “I was like this anyway, but now I’m much more serious about it. I’m trying to be much more authentic in what I’m doing. There is less ‘should’ now, less trying to please, less posing. Bitul is becoming much more part of my life because I am holding onto things less, I’m less assertive about what I want.”

This new psychological state has also had spiritual benefits. With the ego less in the way, he’s found it easier to connect with his spiritual core. Whereas before, pulling himself away from his work on a Friday afternoon was always a struggle, he’s learned to let go of This World.

“All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Shabbos is way more important [than anything I’m doing]. I don’t care how good your painting is today. I don’t care whatever it is I’m involved with. You’re doing everything for Shabbos anyway, so go into Shabbos with greater joy and excitement.’ We have to cross over that point of getting over our ego, or our needs and wants. I realize it’s much easier to do now, to flick that switch.”

November 25, 2016 was almost 40 years to the day that Yoram Raanan first landed in Israel. Forty years in the desert, 40 days and nights on the mountain, 40 days to form the embryo. Raanan — the name means “ever fresh” — has been reborn. “It was like my gestation from one life to the next,” he says, referring to the fire. “Ever fresh, always renewing. That’s me.” —

A Testimony to Lost  Work

Meira and Yoram Raanan had been longtime readers of the Jerusalem Post’s Parshah section. They liked the text but were often disappointed with the illustration accompanying it. So Meira wrote a letter to the editor one day in 2013. What if Yoram would supply the paper with a painting each week based on the parshah? And the editor said, "Great, can you have something for us by Monday?”

For three years, he produced a work each week, 165 in all. On the Shabbos of the fire, he had just completed three years of work: He started and ended with parshas Chayei Sarah.

To his good fortune, Yoram had photographed all that work for publication. Though originally intended for an exhibition, the collection has now been turned into a hefty book, Art of Revelation: A Visual Encounter with the Jewish Bible published in May.

In an introduction, Meira writes that keeping Torah alive and meaningful “has been the Jewish People’s mission for thousands of years.” The couple decided to publish the book now, she says, as a tribute to the work lost in the fire. “A magnificent visual commentary to the Torah had gone up in smoke, and we felt this book would be a testimony to the art that was lost.”

The book is a true collaboration: Meira wrote the text and Yoram contributed the art.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 714)