Torah & Texts

The Wise Have Eyes

By Jacqueline Nicholls, Jewlia Eisenberg, and Sarah Lefton

This musical Kabbalah piece titled The Wise Have Eyes is an interpretation of a mystical tale from the Zohar known as The Parable of the Maiden (or Sava de-Mishpatim).

The Wise Have Eyes was created by Jacqueline Nicholls, Jewlia Eisenberg and Sarah Lefton in chavruta (חַבְרוּתָא “partnership”), a traditional approach to study in which partners analyze, discuss, and debate a shared text. San Francisco Bay Area-based singer and songwriter, Jewlia Eisenberg wrote the song and music you hear and London-based fine artist Jacqueline Nicholls drew and filmed the drawings. BimBam’s founder Sarah Lefton was the project’s producer.

This song and film were adapted from the Kabbalah’s foundational text, the Zohar II: 94b-95a – the section known as Sava de-Mishpatim, or Saba de-Mishpatim if you like. To read a beautiful translation of the source, visit (this excerpt), from Skylight Paths Publishing’s Zohar: Annotated & Explained translated and annotated by Daniel Chanan Matt and edited by Andrew Harvey.

The artists were each deeply challenged by this difficult text, taking it up with enthusiasm, wrestling with it, putting it aside and re-engaging together over several months. They did not agree about everything in the story – in the song, or in the art, and yet after this collaboration together they are each so proud of the extensive facets of meaning you’ll uncover in The Wise Have Eyes.

Read the artist statements