This blogpost was published today in The Times of Israel, IsraelSeen, and LinkedIn. It explores how God, named “The Place” (in Hebrew Hamakom),
honors human beings by creating through them.
It is based upon my book Photograph God http://photographgod.com that examines four contemporary
buildings that express Jewish consciousness:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, Frank Gehry’s
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, and Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower at
Ground Zero. The fourth building is a
virtual one, the interactive Internet, a world wide web of images and texts, a
human community of global reach. The Wikimedia
Commons photo above shows the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
My last week’s Times of Israel blogpost “From a
Skyscraper for Killing God to a Peace Hut Higher than Sky” http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-a-skyscraper-for-killing-god-to-a-peace-hut-higher-than-sky/
discusses four building projects described in
the Bible. Humanity’s first collective
building project, the Tower of Babel, was a skyscraper for killing God that
ended in disaster. It is followed by more positive human constructions:
Abraham’s Eshel academy for spiritual learning in a tent opened to the
four winds, the Mishkan Logo-like
tabernacle designed to be packed-up and moved, and the Sukkah hut
constructed annually to this day as an invitation to world peace.
BUILDING TIME OVER SPACE
In Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content,
art historian Norris Kelly Smith explained Wright’s originality and genius in
terms of Boman’s comparison between Hebrew and Greek patterns of thought. Since
Wright was well versed in the Bible as the son of a Unitarian minister, he
internalized the biblical message of freeing humanity from enslavement in
closed spaces and expressed this freedom in his architectural design. Smith
emphasized that Wright imbued the field of architecture, conditioned by two
thousand years of Greco-Roman thought, with Hebrew thought. Wright sought to
create a new architecture to echo the biblical call inscribed on the Liberty
Bell in Philadelphia: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10).
He wanted American architecture to assert its cultural
independence from Europe. The connection between the exodus of the Israelites
from Egyptian slavery and the American experience as a rebellion against
European tyranny was clear to America’s founding fathers. On July 4, 1776, the
Continental Congress formed a high-powered committee, made up of Thomas
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, to propose a seal and motto for
the newly independent United States of America. They proposed a seal depicting
the Israelites escaping to freedom from bondage under Pharaoh through the
divided waters of the Red Sea, with Moses standing on the shore extending his
hand over the sea, causing it to overwhelm the Egyptians. The proposed motto:
“Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Fourteen years later, George
Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah repeating the
same biblical message of freedom:
"May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered
the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the promised land,
whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these
United States as an independent nation, still continue to water them with the
dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in
the temporal and spiritual blessings of the people whose God is Jehovah."
Hebraic consciousness of freedom, movement, and change is
exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral Guggenheim Museum in New York. When
I had asked my children what they remembered most from their visits to the
Guggenheim, they enthusiastically reminisced about running down the ramp and
being high up looking over the fence into the center atrium. It is not a box
for rectangular pictures set in static space. It is an active place to be
engaged over time. The exhibitions I saw there that worked best were shows
about movement: Alexander Calder’s mobiles were moving around the spiral space
to create a circus of color. Yaacov Agam’s kinetic and dialogic art changed
with the movement of the viewers in his Beyond the Visible exhibition,
and Jenny Holzer’s ruby light word messages on a running electronic signboard
flashed their way up the spiral ramp. The motorcycle show was right on the
mark.
The Bible encoded in a spiral Torah scroll provides a clue as
to the nature of biblical consciousness as an open-ended, living system. It
shares its spiral form with major forms of life, from DNA, to a nautilus shell,
to the growth pattern of palm fronds. The spiral shape of Wright’s Guggenheim
Museum represents the victory of time over space. It is the architectural
expression of Hebraic thought and experience.
This is significant because it was fully realized by a non-Jew.
SETTING A BUILDING IN MOTION
In creating the Bilbao Guggenhiem Museum, Frank Gehry moved
beyond Wright to a more powerful realization of the Hebraic mindset that Boman
describes as dynamic, vigorous, passionate, and sometimes quite explosive in
kind. It started in Canada when young Frank would play with the live carp
swimming in his grandmother’s bathtub. Gehry often told the story that every
Thursday his grandmother would buy fish and keep them in the bathtub until
Friday when she prepared gefilte fish for the Sabbath meal. The vigorous body
motions of swimming fish seen from above gave Gehry his vocabulary for the
dynamic shape of his museum. Fish are one with their environment. They must
stay in constant motion in it to stay alive. Oxygen carrying water must be kept
moving over their gills for them to breathe. To stop motion is to die. In their book on Gehry’s complete works, Dal
Co and Foster write:
"Over the years, Gehry has cultivated a highly personal studio
practice of working with models, because it permits impossibly cantilevered
parts and vertiginous piles of volumes in fluid transformation. As he began to
shape buildings from mobile parts, his sense of space transcended Cartesian
notions. This special sense defies verbal definition, but it might be compared
with the sensation of moving bodies in a medium akin to water. To the extent
that his buildings arrest volumes in continuous motion (and transformation),
time becomes their formative dimension."
As an integral part of education for an architecture of time
and motion, Gehry takes his students on ice in full hockey gear to interact
with each other and their environment in rapid movement. Like fish in water,
skaters standing still on ice are unstable. Swift motion creates balance. The
same concept of stability in motion is sensed in seeing the “fish-scale”
titanium skin on the Bilbao museum that makes it look like a futuristic
airplane. Airplanes must move through their air medium in order to fly. Stopping
motion in midair leads to crashing and death. He sets the bodies of his
buildings in motion as a choreographer does with dancers. His studio practice
appears like a performance rehearsal.
Gehry creates a dynamic flow between the building and its
waterfront site and between the visitor and continually unfolding spaces. While
jutting out over the water, the huge flowing fish-like building uses a
combination of water-filled pools and the river to create an energetic
interplay between building and site. Its full aerodynamic form can be seen from
the other side of the river. Crossing the bridge and approaching the building
transforms the experience of this monumental sculptural form into a more
intimate encounter. Shifting viewpoints confuse the building and its
environment as well as interior and exterior spaces. Moving through and around
Gehry’s museum provides fresh encounters and new ways of seeing.
BUILDING STORIES
Influenced by the narrative structure
of the Hebrew Bible, architect Daniel Libeskind explains that he creates
buildings that tell stories. “If a building doesn’t tell a story it’s a
nothing. Every building should tell you
the deeper story of why it’s there.”
Libeskind
follows in the tradition of his grandfather who made his living traveling from
village to village in Poland telling stories colored with Torah values. He
emphasizes that his architectural sensibility is consciously Jewish, aiming at
shaking people’s souls. Architecture, he
wrote, “seeks to explore the deeper order rooted not only in visible forms, but
in the invisible and hidden sources which nourish culture itself, in its
thought, art, literature, song and movement.”
He explores the symbolic potential of architecture through which history
and tradition, memories and dreams are expressed.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Report, Libeskind
describes how his architecture expresses Jewish values that reject looking at
buildings as merely material reality.
"I know that any building that I love is a building full of
connections to something memorable, to something that has to do with the larger
world, not just the immediate functional use.
Architecture should be able to pose questions, not just make people fall
asleep and be anaesthetized, but invoke the real vitality of life, which is
full of something wondrous. It’s the
Jewish value that space in not just the superficial idol that people often
venerate, but that space is connected to culture, to spirit, and has great
resonance in terms of tradition, the present and how it’s oriented towards new
horizons.'
His first commission was the Jewish Museum in
Berlin at the heart of the beast that devoured six million Jews in a fiery
genocidal frenzy. Libeskind used the
elements of architecture to tell the horrific story of the brutal mass murder
of European Jewry from the point of view of the son of survivors of a Jewish
family decimated by the Holocaust. The unconventional structure of the
unbalanced building itself tells the story.
Visitors to the Berlin museum experience disorienting discomfort as they
walk on tilted floors between sloping walls through uncomfortable spaces, irregular structures, displaced fragments,
misshaped proportions, unanticipated lighting, unconventional acoustics, and
unexpected temperatures. James Young
writes in Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum that
Libeskind’s drawings for the Berlin museum “look more like sketches of the
museum’s ruins, a house whose wings have been scrambled and reshaped by the
jolt of genocide, a devastated site being prepared to enshrine broken
forms.”
In contrast
to the Berlin museum telling the unredeemable narrative of centuries of
drenching the soil of Europe in Jewish blood, Libeskind designed a Freedom
Tower that honors America’s primary value of guaranteeing freedom for all its
citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Freedom Tower, the tallest building in
the Western Hemisphere, reaches up from the site of the World Trade Center
demolished by the 9/11 attack by Islamist terrorists that destroyed the lives
of 3,000 Americans. Its spire reaches a symbolic height of 1,776 feet
corresponding to the year the United States declared its independence. It can be seen aligned to the torch of the
Statue of Liberty that Libeskind first saw immigrating to the United States
when he was thirteen. As the first step
in telling the American story through his Freedom Tower, he studied the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States.
Perhaps the
Jewish historical experience of rebirth after catastrophic events informs the
work of Jewish architects. In addition
to Daniel Libeskind being selected in an international competition to create a
new World Trade Center, two other architects were selected in different
competitions to also create works at the site of the 9/11 catastrophe. Santiago Calatrava, designer of the Bridge of
Strings at the entrance to Jerusalem, was selected to design the WTC
Transportation Hub that he created to resemble a bird being released from a
child's hand. Calatrava’s family was
victim of the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution, execution, and banishment of
its Jews at the time Columbus discovered America. Michael Arad was selected to design a
memorial as a sacred place to remember and honor the thousands murdered by
terrorists in the horrific attacks on the WTC.
He created Reflecting Absence, two pools with the waterfalls
cascading down their sides filling the empty footprints of the Twin Towers.
Each pool symbolizes the loss of life and the physical void created by the
destroyed towers. The sound of the water falling drowns out the sounds of the
city making the site a contemplative sanctuary. Arad, son of Israel’s
ambassador to the United States, serviced in the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani
Brigade commando unit defending the Jewish State against enemies aiming at
annihilating it.
BUILDING BLOGS IN THE CLOUD
The Cloud is a digital age term that describes a vast number
of computers interconnected through a real-time communication network such as
the Internet. The Cloud embodies a
peer-to-peer distributed architecture without the need for central
coordination. Residents of The Cloud act
as both suppliers and consumers of information. The Cloud appears to be cloudy
because it is unpredictable which paths data packets will take when transmitted
across a packet-switched network that links your computer, tablet and
smartphone to every other one in the world.
The Cloud is a living network of networks of networks blanketing our
planet.
When you photograph God and post your images on your blog or
on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn,
Twitter, or other sites in The Cloud, you distribute them worldwide, sharing
them with all who enter into The Cloud.
When you are spiritually blogging your life, you are building a blog in
The Cloud that continues to live on in The Cloud, accessible to billions of
others. Indeed, I am writing this book
in Dropbox, situated somewhere in The Cloud unknown to me.
The Cloud is a thought-provoking
metaphor for an invisible God everyplace that can be revealed to us anyplace
that we invite divine light to illuminate our retinal screen. The Place, Hamakom, is the
One and only master network of all interlinking networks. That you can see nothing at all looking at
the motherboard or memory of your computer with the most powerful microscope is
extended to every other digital device in The Cloud. However, the screen on your computer, tablet
or smartphone can reveal every photo, video and text on a growing global
organism that we call The Cloud.
In his book Judaism: A Way of Being, distinguished Yale University
computer science professor David Gelernter explores the paradox that God
coexists as an abstract, indescribable, and invisible transcendence and an
intimate presence close to us everyplace we are. He proposes a veil between God and man to
reconcile two verses from the same chapter of the Bible: “No man can see Me and
live” (Exodus 33:30) and “The Lord spoke to
Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his neighbor” (Exodus 33:11).
Perhaps the metaphor of a veil made of a misty cloud can resolve the
passages from the Midrash: “Let the
soul praise God whose place nobody knows” and “In every place where you find a
trace of human footprints, there am I before you.” God can be intimately close while not visible
through the veiling cloud.
A number of biblical verses
describe a cloud guiding the Israelites on their trek through the desert and
hovering over the Mishkan. The kabbalah proposes that the cloud over the
Mishkan extended over the huts of every family. The cloud both shielded them from the
scorching desert sun and was translucent enough to let enough light through to
see their way. The cloud is a metaphor
for God’s both being hidden above a hovering cloud and divine light that can
illuminate our huts when we let God in. The kabbalah proposes ten sephirot thorough which the blinding intensity of divine
light filters down into our everyday world. In Genesis 9:13, God sets a rainbow in the cloud as a
sign of a covenant between God and the earth.
The rainbow spectrum transforms white light into the multicolored world
for us to enjoy if we open our eyes in wonder.
A creative digital age translation
of the first verses of the Bible from the original Hebrew can offer us a fresh
look at connections between The Place and The Cloud. “In the network, God created media systems
for creating heaven and earth. When the
earth was absolutely empty and dark, God created light and separated between
light and darkness (1 and 0)”
We can read the first word of the
Bible B’reshit (In the beginning) as B’reshet (In the network).
In Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew word et appears twice, before heaven and before earth. “In the beginning God created et the heaven and et the earth.” Since English has no equivalent for the word et that links a verb to a noun, it drops out in translation. et is spelled alef-tav, the
first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Spanning the full set of 22 Hebrew letters, et
symbolizes media systems.
The media system of heaven, the
spiritual realm, is written in the Torah with Hebrew letters that form
words. The media system of earth, the
physical realm, is written with electrons and protons that form atoms and
molecules. The media system of the
digital realm returns us to the primeval binary creation of darkness and light,
0 and 1. It is written with the binary
digits 0-1 called bits that form bytes.
Every blog, website, video, song, and text that you access in The Cloud
is written with the binary system of the first day of Creation.
Educated as a scientist, The
Lubavicher Rebbe, the 20th century’s greatest Hasidic leader, recognized the
spiritual power of The Cloud early on.
Each of the nearly 3,000 husband-wife emissary teams who established Chabad
Houses from Miami and Paris to Mumbai and Katmandu have created websites. The emissaries’ annual conferences can be
viewed live via Internet simulcast with a running Twitter commentary. The Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson,
teaches:
“The divine purpose of the present
information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented power and
opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge – spiritual knowledge – with
each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use
today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to
interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of
our souls, our hearts, our visions.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Follow my Times of Israel blog
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/mel-alexenberg/ where my
posts are based upon my book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog
of Your Life. See praise for the book at http://photographgod.com.
You can read the entire book at once by ordering it from amazon.com and other
Internet book sellers.
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