Multimedia artist creates computer midrash

On the bookshelves in Abbe Don's living room, thick volumes of Judaica with crumbling covers stand side by side with the sharp-cornered white boxes of computer applications.

Judaism and computers? What can high technology possibly have to offer an ancient religious and cultural tradition?

A multimedia artist and consultant, Don is actively trying to answer that question.

Having created "interactive storytelling" projects incorporating video clips, audio and computer-edited collages, she now wants to use interactive multimedia to create midrash, commentary on the Torah.

Her newest project, still in its infancy, is called "Digital Drash."

"I've always wanted to play around with the forms of Hebrew letters but I felt like a fake before because I didn't know the language," says Don, who at 35 had never celebrated a bat mitzvah and never learned Hebrew.

She calls this "the single biggest regret of my life."

In January, Don enrolled in an adults' bat mitzvah class at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Berkeley. She chose Kehilla because she appreciates the perspective of the Jewish Renewal movement and likes Kehilla's unique approach.

"They've taken the traditional liturgy and made it more feminist and spiritual," she says.

As a class assignment, Rabbi Zari Weiss asked her students to write a midrash, reinterpreting the Torah from the perspective of someone standing at Sinai.

"Part of what I love people to do is try to make the biblical text come alive," says Weiss.

Faced with this assignment, Don thought, "What would happen if I added music? What would happen if I added pictures?" Thus "Digital Drash" was born.

"I think it's wonderful," Weiss says, "that she's getting excited about the text and using the medium that's most comfortable for her to bring the text to life."

For the past several years, Don, who lives in San Francisco, had been developing multimedia projects incorporating oral history and storytelling.

"I was very inspired by the way my great-grandmother told stories," the artist says. In her art installation "We Make Memories," four female generations of her family told their own stories, overlaid on a digital photo collage and embedded with video.

A Web site called "Bubbe's Back Porch" (http://www.bubbe.com) offers stories told by Don's great-grandmother, Annie Shapiro, and invites users to post stories of their own. But now, Don says, "I really want to work on something different and in some ways more lyrical and magical."

Though at this point "Digital Drash" is still, as Don says, "a rough cut," the new project is lyrical and magical.

Waves of Hebrew text from the Torah float in the background, then change to brilliantly colored desert scenes against the sound of music in a minor key. Over this, the artist reads a midrash she wrote herself.

The midrash is about receiving the Torah at Sinai, and is told from an ordinary woman's perspective.

"I would probably focus on the women's stories," says Don about the direction the project will take. Ultimately, she says, she would like "to organize it like a Talmud, where the movie was one block of text.

"There's definitely a movement toward making the midrash process more accessible," the artist says. She feels that congregations like Kehilla, which are trying to engage a new generation of kids who have grown up with computers, might benefit from easily accessible projects like "Digital Drash."

Don created "Bubbe's Back Porch" on the World Wide Web precisely so that anyone with an Internet connection could have access to it at any time and participate in its unique brand of digital storytelling.

With all her projects, her goal has been to "create an experience that makes people go, `Aha!'"

Until recently, she says, "I never thought midrash could be like that."