(From The Times of Israel, 8 June 2017)
To conclude my five part Times of Israel series on art, Zionism and identity in the networked world, I draw on Rabbi Yohanan's words in Tractate Taanit in the Babylonian Talmud, “God declared: ‘I will not come to the heavenly Jerusalem before coming to the earthly Jerusalem.’” As Zionist artists, my wife and I have the great privilege to explore the dynamic interface between aesthetic and spiritual energies revealed in our earthly encounters with everyday life in the Land of Israel.
To conclude my five part Times of Israel series on art, Zionism and identity in the networked world, I draw on Rabbi Yohanan's words in Tractate Taanit in the Babylonian Talmud, “God declared: ‘I will not come to the heavenly Jerusalem before coming to the earthly Jerusalem.’” As Zionist artists, my wife and I have the great privilege to explore the dynamic interface between aesthetic and spiritual energies revealed in our earthly encounters with everyday life in the Land of Israel.
The entire
series can be accessed at http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/mel-alexenberg/
and at http://artiststory.com.
Blogart as an ideal Jewish
art form
The networked
world offers the blog as an ideal Jewish art form. A blog is a web log, an
active diary of a living process, rather than still life entombed in a golden
frame. Narrative blogart is a spiritual
postdigital art form that my wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, and I employed to
celebrate our 52nd year of marriage. We celebrated our love by collaborating on
our "Torah Tweets" blogart project that documents the sacred in our
everyday life in http://torahtweets.blogspot.com
and http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com.
 |
| My wife Miriam pressing cloves into an etrog in Torah Tweets blogart project and on the cover of my book "Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life" |
During each of the
52 weeks of our 52nd year, we posted six photographs reflecting our life
together in Israel with a Torah tweet text that related the weekly Torah
reading to our lives, past and present.
The seventh photograph does not exist since Shabbat is a Non-Art Day on
which we tune out, turn off, unplug, and honor the Creator rather than our
creations.
The blog creates a
dialogue between images and text through kabbalah as a model creative process
in the age of social media. The images
are observations of spirituality in our everyday life. The text is composed as "tweets,"
sentences of not more than 140 characters required by the Twitter social
networking website. 140 is the numerical value (gematria) of the Hebrew
word hakel, which means to gather people together to share a Torah
learning experience as in Leviticus 8:3 and Deuteronomy 4:10.
I teach people of
all faiths how to create their own blogart project in my book Photograph
God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com.
The introductory
quotations that we posted at the top of our blog emphasize the centrality of
down-to-earth spirituality in Judaism from the viewpoints of Talmud scholar
Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, The Lubavitcher Rebbe M. M. Schneerson, and American
novelist E. L. Doctorow. Like
instruments in an orchestra, A. Y. Kook, Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel at
the beginning of the 20th century, sees individual actions combine into a
symphony of Jews acting together as a nation in their own land to empower the
mundane to touch the Divine. This is the
essence of the Zionist challenge.
"Judaism does not direct its
glaze 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 street, the house, the mall, the banquet
hall, all constitute the backdrop of religious life.” (Rabbi J. 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.” (Rabbi M. M. Schneerson)
“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)
“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." (Rabbi A. Y. Kook)
Art combining pride in roots
with an overview of the world as seen by others
The ingathering of
the Jewish people into their ancestral homeland in the Land of Israel at the
time that many other peoples are being dispersed into new host countries would
seem to be a countertrend to the powerful forces of globalization. However, the rebirth of the Jewish State and
the ingathering of the exiles plant roots that provide the sure footing
required to play the fast-moving globalization game. Nearly seven decades after its rebirth,
Israel has emerged as a major player in the world as the start-up nation in
hi-tech, medicine, agriculture, and water management.
Vibrant Zionist
art draws on the creative tension and energetic interplay between subjugation
and freedom, between narrow unidirectional thought and open-ended systems
thought, between spiritual and material realms, between traditional values and
scientific and technological development, between war and peace, between hatred
and brotherhood, between local action and global outreach, and between being
rooted in one’s own culture and exploring others. This tension and interplay is the stimulus
and raw material for creating art to revitalize Jewish culture while offering
fresh directions for the growth of art globally.
Art confronting hatred,
bigotry, racism, terrorism, and cults of death with moral outrage
In the tradition
of Picasso’s Guernica, I have created a work of webart http://www.futureholocaustmemorials.blogspot.com to warn the world of Iran’s quest
for a nuclear bomb to “wipe Israel off the map.” Just as the world’s acquiesce
to Hitler’s raining bombs on the Basque village Guernica gave him the license
to proceed with preparing for WW II and exterminating the Jews of Europe on his
way to global conquest, the world’s indifference to the thousands of rockets
launched against Israel by Iran’s proxy armies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are
empowering Iran to incinerate the Jews of Israel as a prelude to the Islamist’s
global jihad.
My webart cries
out “Never Again!” to the apathetic world of nations that did little to prevent the murder of six million Jews in Europe or collaborated with the Nazis in their
extermination. It issues a powerful
warning to these same nations now pressuring the Jews, the indigenous people of
the Land of Israel Samaria , and Gaza freely elected the Iranian proxy Hamas thugs whose
genocidal charter reads: “Israel , by
virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and
the Muslims…. Muslims will fight the Jews…for the sake of Allah! I will assault
and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.”
Art promoting an aesthetic
peace between the Jewish State and its neighbors
Pursuing peace is
a central value of Judaism. The Hebrew
word for peace, shalom, is mentioned 237 times in the Hebrew Bible and
scores of times in the Jewish liturgy. Peace
is offered in Israel’s Declaration of Independence: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and
their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them
to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish
people settled in its own land.”
Despite virulent
Islamist anti-Semitism and genocidal aims, Israel continues to seek peace. However, all political processes and road
maps from Oslo to Obama were doomed to failure because the Arab conflict is not
political but rather an aesthetic problem that calls for an artistic
solution. In my exhibition Aesthetic
Peace Plan for the Middle East at the Jewish Museum of Prague and on the
Internet at http://aestheticpeace.blogspot.com,
I propose an aesthetic solution that creates a new metaphor for peace derived
from Islamic art and thought.
Islamic art
teaches Arabs to see their world as a continuous geometric pattern that extends
across North Africa and the Middle East.
They see Israel
as a blemish that disrupts the pattern.
It is viewed as an alien presence that they have continually tried to
eliminate through war, terrorism, and political action. A perceptual shift that can lead to a genuine
peace can be derived from Islamic art and thought. In Islamic art, a uniform geometric pattern
is purposely disrupted by the introduction of a counter-pattern that demonstrates
that human creation is less than perfect.
Since Islam believes that only Allah creates perfection, rug weavers
from Islamic lands intentionally weave a patch of dissimilar pattern to break
the symmetry of their rugs.
 |
| Islamic rug with dots counter-pattern |
Peace will come from a fresh metaphor in which the Islamic world sees Israel’s existence as Allah’s will. A shift in viewpoint where
Art creating dialog between
Israel and the Diaspora
Although living in
Israel by a Jewish calendar, speaking Hebrew, walking on the soil of our
ancestors is the Zionist ideal, the networked world provides unprecedented opportunities
for Jewish artists in their ancestral homeland and those in the Diaspora to
creatively interact with each other. Social media generate multiple frameworks
for global communities to form and flourish.
Zionist artists forming virtual communities worldwide with Israel as the
central node is the realization of the dream of the cultural Zionists led by
Ahad Ha’am at the First Zionist Congress in 1897.
Artists can share
their creative works through social media -- blogs, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
Rhizome, etc. Particularly vital to the
Zionist future is creative dialog and collaboration between the two largest
Jewish communities. Through inspired
partnerships between artists in Israel, the world center of Jewish culture, and
artists in the USA, the world center of artistic innovation, a new Zionist
energy will emerge and flourish.
In addition to
energizing the creative dialog between Jews in Israel and United States, it is
important to the Zionist enterprise in a networked world to establish a creative
dialog between Israelis and Americans of diverse backgrounds. To realize this extended dialog, I created a
work of participatory blogart JerUSAlem-USA linking the twenty places in
the United States called ‘Jerusalem’ with the original in Israel: http://jerusalem-usa.blogspot.com. In this collaborative artwork, Americans send
photographs of the twenty places in USA named “Jerusalem” to which Israelis
respond with images of original Jerusalem in Israel. This digital dialog creates an interactive
network of people with shared values that deepens friendships between them.
 |
| Jerusalem, Rhode Island, from the blogart project JerUSAlem-USA |
The Lubavicher Rebbe, Rabbi 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.”
The Times of Israel, 8 June 2017
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