The Tree of Joyous Times and Challenging Times
Shayne Cytrynbaum & Max Cohen 

Our “Sacred Time” art project is centered around the idea of how we must allow both the positive and negative times in our lives to pass by, and that we must learn to go with the flow and to appreciate life’s true beauty, rather than planning for everything and obsessing over the details. We were inspired by the famous excerpt from Kohelet 3:1-2, “A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven: a time for being born and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted”. We understood this text as recognizing how although daily lives can be stressful and messy, we have to take a step back and learn to appreciate the beauty of what’s happening all around us, as only by taking the positive times in life (e.g. “a time for being born”) with the negative times (e.g. “a time for dying”) can we truly appreciate life’s beauty. We represented this duality of life through a tree, a traditional symbol for life found around the world and in our own Tanakh. However, our tree features one half covered in healthy green leaves, while the other half is barren, with dying leaves falling to the ground via an interactive pulley system, representing the joyous and challenging times in our lives respectively. In addition, we are including a sun and moon circling above the board, respectively symbolizing looking at life through a positive, optimistic perspective versus a negative one. The sun, representing a positive outlook on life, will also include UV light, which when shining above the board will reveal the passage from Ecclesiastes written in Hebrew on the board, representing how only an optimistic outlook on time can reveal life’s true beauty and purpose. Lastly, we hope to include smaller, more abstract figures of people in various high points and low points of life, further showing how we need both joyous and challenging times in order to enrich the story of our lives, much like how these figures will enrich the canvas. If we focus too much on planning ahead in order to avoid sorrow, then we will simply miss the happy times as well; we need to learn that there is “a time for every experience under heaven”, and that although these experiences may come unexpectedly and even pose great challenges for us, they ultimately allow us to live up to Kohelet’s later advice “to enjoy themselves and do good in their lifetime”.

 

When creating our piece, there were inevitably some differences between the finished product and our original CAD file. Most of these discrepancies stemmed from the technical limitations of the CAD software that we used, Fusion 360. A clear example of this is the textures featured in our final product. Even with our tree as the centrepiece of our board and the Hebrew text featured prominently towards the base of the heptagon, there was still some empty space left, and so we decided to add fake moss and some fabric with ocean-wave designs in order to “spice up” our canvas. While these textures are not the focus of our design, and so the CAD file does not in any feel lacking in not having these textures, they do still add some meaningful symbolism and tone to our design. Both the moss and the waves reinforce the naturalistic, serene, pastoral vibe that we were hoping for. In addition, ocean waves, with their constant and unchanging motion, and moss, with its famous penchant for growing anywhere and everywhere, both represent how life continues to roll on whether you are ready or not, which ties back to our theme of accepting both the negative and positive times in our lives and just living life to the fullest. While we were unable to include these textures in our Fusion 360 design, we still were able to at least colour our board green, like the moss, to at least preserve some of the naturalistic atmosphere that we hoped for. Another difference we encountered between our CAD file and the finished product was with the leaves. The first difference between the leaves was also in terms of texture, as while the leaves in Fusion could only be a solid-colour basic green, our real-life leaves, which were laser-cut out of colourful scrapbook paper, have patterns inspired by sunflowers and Monstera plants in various shades of green ranging from teal to chartreuse to a light sage. The other difference between the CAD file and the real-life product in terms of the leaves is how we were not able to include the pulley system for the falling leaves in our CAD file. Our tree in the finished product is divided into a healthy half full of green leaves, representing the positive times in our lives, and a barren half with autumn-coloured leaves slowly falling to the ground via an interactive pulley system, representing the negative aspects of life. However, we were not able to include a pulley system in our Fusion 360 model, and so that half of the tree remains completely barren, fully devoid of any leaves. However, we still believe that the meaning of the tree’s two halves still holds up in the CAD file, as either way that half of the tree is unhealthy and therefore it still represents the negative times in our lives, regardless of whether it has dying autumnal leaves or if it is fully barren. While there are some differences between our finished product and the CAD file created using Fusion 360, we believe that our overall theme shines through, and if anything these differences may spark additional conversation on the symbolism behind the components of our design.