The seventh portion of Exodus, Terumah/Contribution, is read from the Torah scroll on Shabbat, February 13, 2016.
I draw on kabbalah to explore the 50 links between the
two tapestries made to cover the Tabernacle described in this week’s Torah
portion. Kabbalah is a down-to-earth
mysticism that provides a symbolic language, a spiritual bar code, for
exploring how divine energies are drawn down into our everyday world.
First, I present here one of the 52 posts of the Torah
Tweets blogart project that my wife Miriam and I created to celebrate our 52nd
year of marriage. During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we posted photographs
reflecting our life together with a text of tweets that relates the weekly
Torah reading to our lives. See how
Miriam and I link the Torah portion Terumah/Contribution to our life
together at http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/exodus-7-parallel-creations.html
The second part presents a discussion of kabbalah in
selected excerpts from the chapter “Discovering Kabbalah through a Creative
Lens” in my book PHOTOGRAPH GOD: CREATING A SPIRITUAL BLOG OF YOUR LIFE http://photographgod.com.
EXODUS 7: PARALLEL CREATIONS
Terumah/Contribution (Exodus 25:1-27:19)
“Make 50 loops on one tapestry and 50 loops on the
edge of the second tapestry so that are parallel (maKBiLot) to one
another. Make 50 golden fasteners to
join the tapestries together so that the Tabernacle should be one.”
(Exodus: 26:5,6)
(Our grandson Or Alexenberg is the photographer for
"Parallel Creations.")
The Tabernacle was not covered by one tapestry canopy,
but by two that complement one another.
The word maKBiLot in this Torah portion is the
source of the word KaBaLah, an exploration of parallel creative
processes, Divine and human
This parallelism between human creativity and Divine
Creation is derived from the confluence of two scriptural passages:
The Tabernacle’s chief artist Bezalel was filled with
“a Divine spirit, with Wisdom, Understand, and Knowledge and with artistic
talent.” (Exodus: 31:3).
“God founded the earth in Wisdom, established heavens
in Understanding, and with Knowledge the depths opened and skies dripped dew.”
(Proverbs: 3:19-20).
Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge are only found together
in the Bible to describe the creative artist and God, the Creator of the
universe.
Kabbalah invites us to discover spiritual secrets of
God’s Creation through gaining insight into our own creative process.
Having been created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27),
every person has the potential to create new worlds, to renew the cosmos.
When you photograph God with the creative eyes of an
artist you become God’s partner in creation.
Or Alexenberg created photographs of the majestic Negev mountains
where he lives and works as a professional photographer.
He explored the desert’s diversity with his creative
lens: trees, migrating birds, ibex at the Ramon Crater, and first blooms of
spring.
KABBALAH AS A SPIRITUAL BAR CODE
I hear the word kabbalah spoken frequently in Israel
where I live. I hear it from the
supermarket checkout clerk when she hands me the long paper ribbon saying, “kabbalah
shelkhah,” “your receipt.” The Hebrew word kabbalah means
“receipt.” In addition to its use in
mundane affairs, kabbalah is the hidden wisdom of the deep structure of Jewish
consciousness received from generation to generation. It is appropriate that both a supermarket
computer printout and the Jewish mystical tradition share the same word. We all stand illiterate before the secret
language of the digital age that only supermarket lasers can read — the bar
code on boxes, bottles, and cans.
Kabbalah is a down-to-earth mysticism that provides a symbolic language,
a spiritual bar code, for exploring how divine energies are drawn down into our
everyday world.
When my wife, Miriam, and I carry our groceries from our
car in the underground garage to the elevator, we hear an automated
announcement in both Hebrew and English: "knisah rashit kabbalah,
main entrance reception." Kabbalah
is the reception desk at the entrance to our building. Entering our apartment,
we unpack the bags and cook lunch together.
It is being in our kitchen with each other that the mystical secrets of
life, the deepest meaning of human existence, are revealed.
KITCHEN KABBALAH
Studying kabbalah invites the learner to visualize its
symbolic language in terms of concrete experiences. The deepest mysteries of kabbalah can only be
understood at the level of everyday life.
In his book Fragments of a Future Scroll, Rabbi Zalman Schachter
tells a Hasidic tale set in Eastern Europe more than a century ago to
illuminate this core concept in understanding kabbalah.
Shmuel Munkes was walking down a road on his way to see
his illustrious Rebbe when an elegant carriage stops. A well-dressed dandy invites him to ride with
him since he is going to see the Rebbe, too.
The dandy brags about being the son and grandson of kabbalists. Shmuel asks this self-proclaimed kabbalist
for help in deciphering a kabbalistic text of cosmic proportions that he said
he had found on a scrap of paper in a old holy book:
"In the very primal beginning there was chaos—all
was sundered and separate. Grainy nuclei
unconnected. Swirling. Then fiat, they were one in one sphere. The sphere unfolded into an orb. On the orb-lines appeared, forces cut the
space in fields. These fields became
centered in a point and enfolded the point.
Peace was made between fiery angels and the angels of the vital fluid
and in their cooperation all came our as it ought to be."
The dandy expressed amazement at this mystical text that
he admitted he could not place. Shmuel
explained that since he was a young student, he would have to wait weeks before
the Rebbe would see him. He said, “Since
you are such an important man, you will be invited to see the Rebbe soon after
you arrive in town. Please ask the Rebbe
about the text and tell me what he says.”
The dandy agrees and does get to see the Rebbe without a long wait. The Rebbe slowly reads from the scrap of
paper, closes his eyes and stares into inner places searching for the deepest
meaning the text. He opens his eyes and
turns to the anxious dandy explaining the text with one word: kreplach (a
Jewish version of ravioli).
"In the very primal beginning there was chaos—all was sundered and separate, grainy nuclei unconnected swirling.” (That was flour.) “Then fiat, they were in one sphere.” (Dough.) “The sphere unfolded into an orb.” (The dough was rolled out flat.) “On the orb lines appeared, forces cut the space into fields.” (Of course, diamond shaped pieces of dough are cut and meat put in.) “The fields became centered in a point and enfolded the point. Peace was made between fiery angels and the angels of the vital fluid.” (As the pot was filled with water and put on the stove to boil, the kreplach were put in.) “And in their cooperation all came out as it ought to be."
The Rebbe laughed when he finally saw Shmuel. “What a dish you cooked up,” he said.
CREATIVITY AND ORIGINALITY
Kabbalah teaches how your creativity can draw holiness
into a profane world by opening channels through which divine light illuminates
your material reality. You become a
creator of worlds when you use your camera to reveal fresh visions of God in
your surroundings in ways that no one has ever seen before.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik sees the transformation of
the profane into the sacred when you become a partner of God in the act of
creation, when you bringing into being something new, something original.
Through your acts of creation, transcendence is lowered into the midst of our
turbid, coarse, physical world. The
person who never creates, the passive type who is derelict in fulfilling his
task of creation, the person who never brings into being anything new, cannot
be holy. If you wish to attain holiness, you must become a creator of new ways
of seeing the world.
Abraham Isaac Kook, a poet and down-to-earth mystic who
served as the chief rabbi of the Land of Israel during the first part of the
20th century, teaches:
“Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must
create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises by
itself and one cannot impede it on its course…. The creative individual brings
vital, new light from the higher source where originality emanates to the place
where it has not previously been manifest, from the place that ‘no bird of prey
knows, nor has the falcon’s eye seen.’ (Job 28:7), ‘that no man has passed
nor has any person dwelt’” (Jeremiah 2:6).
CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE DANCE OF THE MIND
Kabbalah is a metaphorical way of thinking rather than a
body of knowledge to be seized. Rabbi
Arthur Green teaches that kabbalah offers a choreography for a dance of the
mind to be apprehended by the part of the mind that appreciates poetry and
hears its inner music.
This imaginative way of thinking led to the creation of a
graphic model representing a spectrum of ten hues of divine light flowing down
into our everyday world. Each of these
hues is called a sephirah (sephirot in plural). The ten sephirot are interconnected by
22 pathways, each representing one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. Hebrew letters are not merely
letters. They are the raw material of
Creation combined into phrases in the spiritual realm like atoms into molecules
in the physical realm and bits into bytes in the digital realm.
TREE OF LIFE
The kabbalistic model of creative process, both divine
and human, is depicted by ten sephirot with 22 pathways linking
them. It is called a “Tree of
Life.” It was crystallized by Rabbi
Isaac Luria, known as The Ari, and his circle in the Galilee mountain town of
Tzfat in the sixteenth century. In a
single visual image, it revealed the major concepts of kabbalah that had
formerly been hidden in a vast body of obscure verbal discourse that could only
be deciphered by a learned few. It made
a profound contribution to understanding the complexities of kabbalah by a wider
circle of people.
The ten sephirot are grouped into four Worlds:
Emanation/Intention, Creation/Mind, Formation/Emotions, and Action/Making. Although the Hebrew names of these worlds are
usually translated as Emanation, Creation, Formation and Action, it is most
relevant to the aims of this book to call the worlds by names denoting their
meanings: Intention, Mind, Emotions, and Action.
At the top of the Tree of Life, closest to the source of
the emanation of divine light, is the sephirah of Crown (Keter)
the will and intention to create essential to setting the process of creation
in motion. Crown is the single
sephirah of the World of Intention.
Crown is followed by two cognitive sephirot:
Wisdom (Hokhmah) and Understanding (Binah) of the World of
Mind. Wisdom and Understanding are followed
by six affective sephirot of the World of Emotions: Compassion (Hesed),
Strength (Gevurah), Beauty (Tiferet), Success (Netzakh),
Splendor (Hod), and Foundation (Yesod). The eight sephirot from Crown to
Splendor are funneled through Foundation into in the tenth sephirah
Kingdom (Malchut) where they are actualized in the realm of space and
time in our here and now World of Action.
Consciousness of the flow of divine light down through
the worlds of Mind, Emotions, and Action “liberate the people who are blind
though they have eyes and deaf though they have ears” (Isaiah
43:7-8). Photography can be liberating
when you open your eyes fully to see what was always there in fresh and
creative ways. Be on the lookout for
acts of compassion, strength, beauty, success, and splendor as they illuminate
the World of Action. Listen closely
enough to discover the delicate beauty in elusive melodies emanating from your
everyday life. Pay attention to the
cries of the widow and orphan and the songs of birds.
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