Dana Azrieli, chairwoman of the Azrieli Group, described the
concept of the building’s architecture as an expression of values of Judaism
coupled with aesthetics of nature. She
said, “We looked at a range of sources of inspiration for the design, including
our history, nature, culture and values.
We looked at Jewish tradition, and we saw the Jewish people as the
‘People of the Book.’ We considered the curving shape of the megillah
and the Torah, in addition to receiving inspiration from the curving lines of
Tel Aviv’s strong Bauhaus tradition and the twist of a snail’s shell.”
As a biologist turned new media artist and professor of art
and Jewish education, Dana Azrieli’s thoughts about life forms and Jewish
tradition reflect my teaching at universities in USA and Israel. I taught
“Morphodynamics: Design of Natural Systems” at Columbia and MIT and “Art in
Jewish Thought” at Bar-Ilan and Ariel.
The significance of the spiral form in both biological systems
and Jewish consciousness is explored in my books: Through a Bible Lens:
Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (Elm Hill/HarperCollins)
and The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic
Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press). Through a Bible Lens is one of two
books and 80 articles that I wrote during the six years that I have lived with
my wife Miriam at Palace Ra’anana, Azrieli Group’s retirement community.
PEOPLE OF THE SPIRAL SCROLL
Jews are called am haSePheR, usually translated
“People of the Book.” But SePheR is a word written in the Torah scroll
itself long before the invention of codex type books contained between two
covers. SePheR means spiral scroll. It is spelled SPR, the root
of the word “SPiRal” in numerous languages, ancient and modern. Jews, then, are
“People of the Spiral.” In kabbalah, Judaism’s down-to-earth spiritual
system, the SePhiRot are emanations of divine light spiraling down into
our everyday life. The English words “SPiRitual” and “inSPiRation” share the
SRP root from the Latin SPiRare, to breathe.
In Judaism, form gives shape to content. The medium is an essential part of the message. Weekly portions of the first five books of the Bible in the form of a Torah scroll are read in synagogue. The symbolic significance of the spiral form is so strong that if a Torah scroll is not available in synagogue, the Bible is not publicly read at all. The exact same words printed in codex book form convey the wrong message. If the divine message encoded in the Torah is trapped between two rectilinear covers, it loses its life-giving flow. The Torah teaches that the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians in a malben, a brickyard. Malben is also the Hebrew word for rectangle.
The Torah must have the infinite flow of a Mobius strip where
the final letter of the Torah, the lamed of yisraeL (Israel)
connects to the first letter, the bet of B’reshit (in
the beginning). Lamed bet spells the word for “heart.” The heart of the
Torah is where the end connects to the beginning in an endless flow. Form and
content join together to symbolize the essence of Jewish values. The Bible
encoded in a flowing scroll form provides a clue as to the nature of biblical
consciousness as an open-ended, living system like DNA molecules, snail
shells, and the spiral growth pattern of palm fronds.
SPIRAL LADDERS AND SPIRITUAL BAR CODES
The spiral is a key symbol of Jewish culture, from tzitzit
fringes to ram's horn shofar to spiral hallah bread. Their spiral forms parallel the major life
forms in nature. The ladder in Jacob’s
dream can connect spiritual and scientific viewpoints: “He had a vision in a
dream. A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven
as Divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) Jewish tradition arrives at the spiral shape
of Jacob’s ladder by noticing that the numerical value of Hebrew words for
“ladder” sulam and for “spiral” slil are both 130. Creative play
using numerical equivalents of Hebrew letters, a system called gematriah,
can lead to fresh insights. The spiral
ladder in Jacob’s dream can be linked to the DNA spiral ladder with rungs on
which codes for all forms of life are written with four words: A-T, T-A, C-G,
G-C.
“Speak to the Israelites and say to them that they shall make
fringes (tzitzit) on the corner of their garments for all
generations. And they shall include in the
fringes of each corner a thread of sky-blue wool.” (Numbers 15:37) The sky-blue dye used to color the thread is
derived from a spiral sea snail.
To this day, these ritual fringes are tied to the corners of
a rectangular prayer shawl. Like the DNA
spiral that spells out the code for the characteristics of all plants, animals,
and human beings, each spiral fringe spells out “God is One” in a numerical bar
code. Each fringe is tied with four sets
of spirals held together by five knots in a sequence of 7, 8, 11, and 13 turns
(in the Ashkenazi tradition). Seven days of divine creation is followed by the
eighth day in which humanity joins with God in continuing the creation. 7 + 8 =
15, the numerical equivalent of YH, the first two letters in the divine
name. The numerical value of second two letters, VH, is 11. The full
divine name YHVH equals 26. The fourth set of 13 turns is the numerical
value of ehad, the Hebrew word for “one.” In morning prayers, Jews
gather together in one hand the fringes from the four corners of our prayer
shawls as we recite the shema, the central affirmation of Judaism “God
is One,” while looking at the spiral tzitzit that spells out “God is
One” in a numerical bar code.
I created Four Corner of America, the official artwork celebrating the Miami’s Centennial. I make large ship-rope tzitzit, colored one strand sky-blue, and placed them at the four corners of America. The tztzit on the coast of Florida and Maine reached into the Atlantic Ocean and on Washington State and California into the Pacific Ocean. The Torah not only speaks of four corners of a garment, but also about the four corner of the Earth. The biblical word for “corner” kanfot literally means “wings.” It was appropriate that American Airlines sponsored my art project.
JEWISH ARCHITECTURE AS LIVING SYSTEM
A Jewish structure of consciousness in architecture
emphasizes temporal processes in which space is actively engaged by human
community rather than presenting a harmoniously stable form in space.
Architectural theorist Bruno Zevi, compares the Hebraic and Greek attitudes
toward architecture in his essay on concepts of space-time shaping Hebraic
consciousness in the book Bruno Zevi on Modern Architecture:
“For the Greeks a building means a house-object or a
temple-object. For the Jews it is the object-as-used, a living place or a
gathering place. As a result, architecture taking its inspiration from Hellenic
thought is based on colonnades, proportions, refined molding, a composite
vision according to which nothing may be added or eliminated, a structure
defined once and for all. An architecture taking its inspiration from Hebrew
thought is the diametric opposite. It is an organic architecture, fully alive,
adapted to the needs of those who dwell within, capable of growth and
development, free of formalistic taboo, free of symmetry, alignments, fixed
relationships between filled and empty areas, free from the dogmas of
perspective, in short, an architecture whose only rule, whose only order is
change.”
Theologian Thorleif Boman writes in Hebrew Thought
Compared with Greek about the
dynamic action-centered Hebraic consciousness, noting that biblical passages
concerned with the built environment always describe plans for construction
without any description of the appearance of the finished structure. The Bible
has exquisitely detailed construction instructions for the Tabernacle (mishkan)
without any word picture of the appearance of the completed structure. The mishkan was a movable, small scale
structure made of modular parts and woven tapestries. It was taken apart, packed on wagons, and
moved through the desert from site to site. Its modest tent-like design and
active life was quite different from the immovable marble temples of ancient
Greece that still stand today.
We can see a renaissance of this ancient Hebraic
consciousness in the scientific foundations of the hi-tech revolution. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogione explains in Order
Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature that the traditional
science of the age of the machine tended to emphasize stability, order,
uniformity, equilibrium, and closed systems. The transition from an industrial
society to a hi-tech society in which information and innovation are critical
resources, brought forth new scientific world models that characterize today’s
accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium,
nonlinear relationships, open systems, and a heightened sensitivity to the flow
of time.
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.”
91 STORIES
The 91 stories the Azrieli Tower has significance in
Judaism. When the reader chants the
words from a Torah scroll, he sees the unspoken divine name YHVH but
reads it as Adoni. In prayer books in the Sephardi tradition, these two divine
names are printed together as YHV followed by a stretched out H
holding within it the word Adoni. YHVH has the numerical
value of 26 and Adoni of 65.
Together they equal 91. The
visual and spoken divine names become one.
After a prayer is recited, the congregation says amen,
a Hebrew word adapted by English to affirm the truth of the prayer. Amen has the numerical value of 91.
The word for artist oman is 91. The words for angel malach
and for food ma’achal each have a numerical value of 91. The biblical words for angel and food are
written with the same four Hebrew letters to teach us the angels are spiritual
messages arising from everyday life.
From The Times of Israel, Jan. 1, 2019
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