“God said to Moses, ‘Go up to this mountain of Avarim and see the Land that I have given to the Children of Israel. You shall see it.’" (Numbers 27:12) These two sentences appear in Pinhas, the eighth portion of the biblical book Numbers, read in synagogues in Israel on Shabbat, July 23, 2016 and in USA on July 30, 2016.
Why does the Torah, known not to waste words, repeat the word “see”? Did Moses see something different the second time?
The
brilliant Torah scholar Rabbi Haim ben Attar (born 1696 in Morocco, died 1743
in Jerusalem) proposed that Moses’ first vision was seeing the Land of Israel
as it appeared in his day. He saw the
desert landscape extending from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean. He blinked his eyes and saw life in the Land
of Israel in our day. His sight was
transformed into insight. He could see
children playing in the streets in the State of Israel as was predicted by the
prophet Zekhariah “And the streets of the city will be filled with boys and
girls playing.”
Moses
played the leading role in the exodus from Egypt by bringing his people to the
borders of the Land of Israel. The great
biblical miracle of liberating thousands from enslavement in Egypt after
hundreds of years of exile pales in comparison with the Zionist miracle in our
time of liberating millions of Jews from persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust
in a hundred countries after thousands of years of exile and bringing them home
to Israel. Moses could see the Zionist
miracle realized.
Choosing to be an integral part of this Zionist miracle, unprecedented in world history, offers me enthralling creative opportunities as an artist. I draw inspiration from the Zionist challenge of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook to “renew the old and sanctify the new” as I explore the vibrant interface between the structure of Jewish consciousness, the realization of the Zionist dream in the State of Israel, and new directions in art emerging from postdigital creativity in a networked world. The wellsprings of my Zionism flows from my Jewish roots and values experienced in a world where art, science, technology and culture address each other.
As two
artists, my wife Miriam and I created the “Torah Tweets” blogart project to
link our story to the biblical narrative http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com through photography and digital
poetry disseminated worldwide through the blogosphere and twitterverse. Below is our “Torah Tweets” post for this
week’s Torah portion Pinhas (Numbers 25:10-30:1) that is
elucidated in my book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life
http://photographgod.com that teaches people of all faiths to
link the emerging stories their lives to the Bible’s stories.
SIGHT AND
INSIGHT
Pinhas (Numbers 25:10-30:1)
God
said to Moses, "Go up to this mountain of Avarim and see the Land that I
have given to the Children of Israel.
You shall see it." (Numbers 27:12)
And
the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing. (Zekhariah 8:5)
God
said to Abram, "Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace, and
from your father's house to the land that you will come to see." (Genesis 12:1)
Why is
"see" repeated twice? At first
glance, Moses saw the Dead Sea and desert.
Then, he saw the future of his people in their land.
Rabbi
Haim ben Attar explained that Moses gained a deeper vision and grasp of the
inner spiritual essence of life in the Land of Israel. (Or Hahaim)
Moses
could see children playing in the Land of Israel.
Seeing
Zekhariah’s vision realized, we photographed our grandchildren and
great-grandchildren:
Renana,
Inbal, Rachelle, Yishai, Elan, Talia, Or, Yahel, Shirel, Meitav, Tagel, Razel,
Elianne, Avraham, Nadav, Ariel, Eliad, Tahila.
The
Jewish people's story begins by linking kinesthetic and visual senses. Abram
sees the land in a new light by walking away from his past.
On
receiving the Ten Commandments, the Torah tells of the Israelites' synesthetic
experience: All the people saw the
sounds. (Exodus 20:15)
Passive
hearing is transformed into internalized visions of the script for creating a
better world.
The Torah
formula for transforming sight into insight is:
May God expand Yefet, but he will dwell in the tents of Shem.
(Genesis 9:27)
The name
of Noah's son Yefet is related to visual beauty. Yefet's son is Yavan (Greece).
Beauty in
ancient Greece is seen in the elegance of outward form. Israel descends from Shem, related to
shemiyah (hearing).
Torah
beauty is tiferet the innermost emanation of divine light that
integrates our intentions, thoughts and feelings through creative action.
AWAKE
AFTER A 2000-YEAR COMA
(From my
book The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic
Consciousness http://future-of-art.com)
Rabbi
Abraham Yitzhak Kook, a down-to-earth mystic who served as Chief Rabbi of the
Land of Israel, wrote a letter of congratulations on the founding of the
Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem. By way of allegory, he refers to the revival
of Jewish art and aesthetics after two thousand years of exile as a child in a
coma who awakes calling for her doll.
“The
pleasant and beloved child, the delightful daughter, after a long and forlorn
illness, with a face as pallid as plaster, bluish lips, fever burning like a
fiery furnace, and convulsive shaking and trembling, behold! She has opened her
eyes and her tightly sealed lips, her little hands move with renewed life, her
thin pure fingers wander hither and thither, seeking their purpose; her lips
move and almost revert to their normal color, and as if through a medium a
voice is heard: ‘Mother, Mother, the doll, give me the doll, the dear doll,
which I have not seen for so long.’ A voice of mirth and a voice of gladness,
all are joyous, the father, the mother, the brothers and sisters, even the
elderly man and woman who, because of their many years, have forgotten their
children’s games.”
Rabbi
Kook saw artists at work as a clear sign of the rebirth of the Jewish people in
its homeland. Their playful spirit nurturing sensitivity for beauty “will
uplift depressed souls, giving them a clear and illuminating view of the beauty
of life, nature, and work.”
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