Abraham
rushed to the tent to Sarah and said, “Hurry!
Take three measures of the finest flour!
Kneed it and make rolls!” Abraham
ran to the cattle to choose a tender and choice calf.
(Genesis 18:6, 7)
The biblical
passage above is read in synagogues on Shabbat, 19 November 2016. It is part of the fourth Torah portion of the
Book of Genesis called Vayera (and he appeared). The first section below is the “Paradise or
Barbeque” post in the Torah Tweets blogart project. I wrote the blog post as a sequence of tweets
with less 140 characters as required by the Twitter social networking website. Torah
tweets are like bursts of bird song that sometimes gain a haiku-like poetic
flavor.
This post
expresses the core concept of my book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual
Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com that teaches how to create a
spiritual blog that links personal stories to the biblical narrative by drawing
on the wisdom of kabbalah in a networked world. I could have titled my book Spirituality
through a Smartphone Lens: Discovering the Sacred in Everyday Life.
PARADISE
OR BARBEQUE
Abraham ran
after a calf that ran away from him into a cave that was the burial place of
Adam and Eve.
At the far
end of the cave, he saw intense light emanating from an opening.
When he came
close to the opening, he found himself standing at the entrance to the Garden
of Eden.
About to
enter the pristine garden, he remembered that his wife and three guests were
waiting for lunch back at the tent.
What should
he do? Should he trade paradise for a
barbeque?
The Bible tells
us that he chose to return to the tent and join his wife in making a meal for
their three guests.
Abraham
realized that paradise is what we create with our spouse at home. Other visions of paradise are either mirages
or lies.
Enjoy
life with the wife you love through all the days of your life. (Ecclesiastes 9:9)
My wife,
Miriam, and I worked together to create paradise in our vegetarian kitchen.
Adam and Eve
had a vegetarian kitchen.
Spirituality
emerged from our collaboration making a potato casserole for our guests.
We bought
potatoes and scallions in Avi’s vegetable store and cottage cheese and grated
yellow cheese in Bella’s grocery.
We baked the
potatoes in the microwave, sliced them into the baking pan and covered them
with the cheeses.
Miriam
washed the scallions, cut them up, and sprinkled them over layers of
cheese-covered potatoes.
After the
casserole was baked, we served it to our guests.
KABALLAH
IN A NETWORKED WORLD
As two
artists, Miriam and I created the year-long Torah Tweets blogart project
to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage.
It offers a model for photographing God and spiritual blogging. During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year,
we posted six photographs that reflect our life together with a text of tweets
that relates to the weekly portion of the Torah. It was widely disseminated through the
blogosphere and twitterverse. You can access the entire blogart project, both
images and texts, at http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com.
My Photograph
God book invites people of all religions and spiritual traditions to blog
their own lives. It shows how to create
a spiritual blog by photographing God revealed in everyday life while crafting
a dialogue between the blogger’s story and the Bible’s story. The insights of kabbalah, the down-to-earth
mystical tradition of Judaism, offer tools for spiritual bloggers to appreciate
the creative process, both divine and human.
It challenges bloggers to inspirationally link an ancient spiritual
tradition to life in a networked world by photographing God creatively.
PHOTOGRAPH
‘THE PLACE’ WHERE EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING
God does not
exist in reality. God is reality
itself. Rabbi David Aaron, who teaches
kabbalah in the Old City of Jerusalem, explains in his book Seeing God
that God is the all-embracing context for everything. In Hebrew, God is called Hamakom,
which means “The Place.” God is the
place where everything is happening. You do not exist alongside God. You exist
within God, within the only one reality that is God. Everything is in God, God
is in everything, but God is also beyond everything.
Seeing God
is all about getting in touch with reality.
If you want to photograph God, focus your lens on Hamakom, The
Place, anyplace where you see divine light illuminating reality. Let your smartphone collect the light
reflecting from the reality shaping your everyday life and you will find
yourself photographing God in action.
SHATTER
POPULAR IMAGES OF GOD
The English
word “God” is a Germanic word that often conjures up images of some all-powerful
being in the sky zapping us if we step out of line. Your first step to photographing Hamakom,
The Place of all the action in your life, is to shatter popular images of God.
The Bible admonishes us not to create graven images that delimit a God that kabbalah calls Ein Sof “Endless” and Ha’efes Hamukhlet “Absolute Nothingness.” God is no thing, nothing, and has no name.
To
photograph God, you need to get rid of “God.”
You need to abandon conceptual graven images, idols of God engraved in
your mind from childhood. Free your mind
from any images of God. See God as Hamakom,
any place that you focus your lens.
I
reluctantly use the word “God” when I write in English since a comparable word
does not exist in the Bible in the Hebrew original. We rather find names for the emanations of
divine light illuminating our thoughts, feelings and actions. Hebrew speakers call God Hashem,
literally “The Name,” the name of the nameless One.
The most
frequently used word in the Bible that is translated as “God” is YHVH. Since it is made up of only vowels, it cannot
be pronounced. It is the sound of your
breathing. YHVH should be
translated as “Is-Was-Will Be.” It
combines in four letters the present, past and future tenses of the verb “to
be.” When the Bible is studied in
Hebrew, YHVH is read as Hashem. When the Bible is read aloud in
synagogue, the reader sees the word YHVH and reads it as another word,
the word for Lord Adonai.
The divine
response to Moses asking for God’s name is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, “I Will Be
as I Will Be.” God’s name is no thing,
not a noun. It is a verb that actively
points to a future open to all possibilities.
Getting rid
of the popular image of God is the essence of biblical consciousness. In the Bible, Abraham is called the first
Hebrew, which means “one who crosses over.”
He crossed over from popular images of God of his times shaped from clay
to an imageless God that permeates all of reality and beyond. As a prelude to the biblical story of
Abraham beginning his journey away from his father’s world of idolatry, the
oral tradition tells that Abraham was minding his father’s idol shop when he
took a stick and shattered the merchandise to bits. He left only the largest
idol untouched, placing the stick in its hand. When his father returned, his
shock at seeing the scene of devastation grew into fury as he demanded an
explanation from his son. Abraham explained how the largest idol had broken all
the other idols.
Use your smartphone
as a tool to shatter the popular conceptual idol in the sky called “God” by
focusing on Hamakom. Focus your
lens on whatever place you find yourself.
SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
You can
discover unprecedented creative opportunities for linking biblical texts with
the spiritual in your everyday life through digital photography, a narrative
blog form, and the Internet’s social media.
The Torah
Tweets blog begins with a series of quotations from the Bible, contemporary
thinkers, and popular literature that establish down-to-earth spiritually as
the major theme of Judaism. Weaving
through Photographing God, you will find this theme inviting you to
discover spirituality as it flows down into your life.
"For
the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp." (Deuteronomy 23:15)
"Judaism
does not direct its gaze upward but downward ... does not aspire to a heavenly
transcendence, nor does it seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract,
mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze upon concrete, empirical reality
permeating every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the factory, the
street, the house, the mall, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop of
religious life."
(R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik)
"It
is not enough for the Jew to rest content with his own spiritual ascent, the
elevation of his soul in closeness to G-d, he must strive to draw spirituality
down into the world and into every part of it – the world of his work and his
social life – until not only do they not distract him from his pursuit of G-d,
but they become a full part of it." (R. Menachem M. Schneerson)
"The
first message that Moses chose to teach the Jewish people as they were about to
enter the Land of Israel was to fuse heaven to earth, to enable the mundane to
rise up and touch the Divine, the spiritual to vitalize the physical, not only
as individuals but as an entire nation." (R. Abraham Y. Kook)
"If
there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our
times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it
will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the
traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else." (E. L. Doctorow)
PHOTOGRAPH
THE SPECTRUM OF DIVINE LIGHT
Photograph
God teaches how to
make an invisible God become visible through your creative lens. It draws on the ancient wisdom of kabbalah to
help you recognize that you have been looking at God all the time and often
missed the action. It helps you develop
conceptual and practical tools for photographing God as divine light reflected
from every facet of your life.
Just as a
prism breaks up white light into the colors of the spectrum, kabbalah reveals a
spectrum of divine light based upon the biblical passage:
“Yours
God are the compassion, the strength, the beauty, the success, the splendor,
and the [foundation] of everything in heaven and on earth” (Chronicles 1:29).
Learn that
photographing God is to creatively photograph these six divine attributes
revealed to you in all aspects of your life.
Focus your lens on acts of compassion, strength, beauty, success, and
splendor that you encounter every day and everywhere. Shift your focus to see ordinary events as
being extraordinary, incredible, and amazing.
Take nothing for granted. To be
spiritual is to be continuously amazed.
You can
better understand and appreciate the range of meanings within each of these six
divine attributes by seeing them expressed in the lives of biblical
personalities: Compassion (Abraham and Ruth), Strength (Isaac and Sarah),
Beauty (Jacob and Rebecca), Success (Moses and Miriam), Splendor (Aaron
and Deborah), and Foundation (Joseph and Tamar). Imagine walking with your smartphone
millennia ago photographing key events in the lives of these people. Then take your smartphone and photograph
actions that you observe in the lives of family, friends, and others you
encounter that parallel events in the lives of these biblical
personalities.
LINK YOUR
STORY TO THE BIBLICAL STORY
Photograph
God invites you to
connect your personal narrative to the biblical narrative. It guides you in creating a blog to observe,
document, and share how your everyday experiences reflect biblical messages. It
teaches how to find fresh meaning in your life story by relating it to the
biblical story through
digital photography and creative writing.
Having
learned how to focus your lens on God wherever you look will help you create
blog narratives gleaned from your creative reading of the Bible. You will be encouraged to explore
imaginative ways for blogging photographic sequences that link two stories –
the story of your life as it unfolds and the enduring biblical story. You will also experiment with writing
accompanying tweet texts to disseminate worldwide through your blog, Twitter,
Facebook, and other social media.
POSTDIGITAL
NARRATIVE
Our
year-long blogart project is a narrative art form that reveals a paradigm shift
from the Greek to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. The conceptual background for the Torah
Tweets blog is offered in my book The Future of Art in a Postdigital
Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness http://future-of-art.com published by Intellect Books/University of Chicago
Press. It explores how the
static, moderate, passive Hellenistic consciousness revived in the Renaissance
contrasts with the dynamic, open-ended, action-centered Hebraic consciousness
emerging in contemporary art forms.
The active
interface between photographic narratives and biblical texts is a postdigtial
expression of Hebraic consciousness.
Wikipedia’s definition of “postdigtial” refers to my book, defining
"postdigital art” as artworks that address the humanization of digital
technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and
spiritual systems. It points to an
attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital.
A Torah
Tweets blog transforms the mundane into the spiritual, the ordinary into the
extraordinary, and experiences of daily living into expressions of biblical
values.
From The Times of Israel, Nov. 16, 2016, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wheres-the-garden-of-eden-its-in-your-kitchen/
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