TorahTweets: A Postdigital Biblical Commentary as a Blogart Narrative

Artists Mel and Miriam celebrated their 52nd year of marriage by collaborating on this blogart project. During each of the 52 weeks of their 52nd year, they posted six photographs reflecting their life together with a Torah Tweet text that relates the weekly Torah reading to their lives. The success of this blog gave birth to the books"Photograph God" and "Through a Bible Lens" that teach how to link your emerging life story and the enduring biblical story with your smartphone.

Down-to-Earth Spirituality

Unlike the Torah narrative that begins “In the Beginning,” a blog begins at the end. This "Torah Tweets" blog displays its narrative in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing first. The blog http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com was created to reverse the order of the blog posts in this blog to begin in the beginning.

See the blogs for the books Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media http://throughabiblelens.blogspot.co.il/ and Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com/. Both books invite you to explore creative ways to photograph all that happens in your everyday life while crafting a vibrant dialogue between your life story and the biblical narrative.

Postdigital Narrative on Spiritual Dimensons of Everyday 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) ///// "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." (R. Abraham Y. Kook)

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Tzav/Zakhor/Purim (Command/Remember/Lots) צו/זכור/פורים

Power-Ranger/Spiderman/Batman Defeat Haman/Hitler/Hamas

He shall remove his garments and don other garments.(Leviticus 6: 4)

ופשט את בגדיו ולבש בגדים אחרים

Remember what Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt. How, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the way, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the Land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)

On the Shabbat before the holiday of Purim, we are charged not to forget Amalek's merciless murder of Jews solely because they are Jews.

We photographed Jewish children celebrating life in Purim costumes in our Power-Ranger great-grandson Eliad's kindergarten in Israel.

In the Scroll of Esther read on Purim, the incarnation of Amalek is Haman who plots to murder all Jews in the Persian kingdom.

This week, we could not forget! We were witness to modern day Amaleks' aims to annihilate the Jewish people that will also fail.

We went to the cemetery in Petah Tikva to remember Miriam's mother Anna Benjamin on the 2nd anniversary of her passing at 102.

There are no tombstones to mark her parents' graves. They were torn from their home in Holland to be viciously murdered in Auschwitz

IDF officer Moshe Peretz, father of Anna’s great-great-grandson Eliad, said kaddish for her parents on a IDF mission to Auschwitz.

This week, our son Moshe Yehuda went the funeral of the Fogel family butchered in their beds by bloodthirsty Arabs.

The Arab street celebrates these murders as Hamas fires deadly missiles into Israel and Ahmadinejad calls “to wipe Israel off the map.”

The Purim story ends in Iran with Haman hanging from the gallows he constructed to hang the Jew Mordecai.

Power-ranger Eliad aided by Spiderman and Batman will thwart the evil plots of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Persian ayatollahs.

For the Jews there was light, gladness, joy, and honor. (Esther 8:16

1 comment:

Shalom GorewitzMarch 21, 2011 at 12:23 AM
Heard an NPR story this morning about the comfort Japanese get from their super hero characters during their devastation and trevail.

Thanks for pointing out Leviticus sentence in relationship to Purim.
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PRAISE FOR PHOTOGRAPH GOD BOOK

“Mel Alexenberg offers a scintillating experiment in creativity. His work is an invitation to deepen your spiritual sensibilities as you extend your imagination.” - Jan Phillips, author of God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art

“One of art’s most complete and compelling integrations of the sacred and profane. It reads like a swift and soulful breeze.” - Dr. Shaun McNiff, author of Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things, University Professor, Lesley University, Cambridge

“Thinks brilliantly outside the box. It crisscrosses disciplines, from science and technology to philosophy and mysticism to art as both historical and creative phenomena. This is one of those books that other thinkers will wish they had somehow thought about how to write, and to which readers of diverse sorts will simply respond by saying: wow!” - Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, author of Tradition and Transformation, Professorial Lecturer, Georgetown University

“Photograph God strikes a balance between Kabbalah and contemporary culture. It is literate, wise, and easily accessible.” - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning and Kabbalah: A Love Story

"Photograph God gives us an amazing perspective on our own existence, especially in the age of interconnected iPhone culture." - Prof. Michael Bielicky, Head of Department of
Digital Media/Postdigital Narratives, University of Art and Design/ZKM Centerfor Art and Media, Karlsruhe

“A mystical computer program for spiritual seeing.” - Rabbi Dr. Shimon Cowen, Director, Institute for Judaismand Civilization, Australia

"In an original way, Prof. Alexenberg invites us to connect the networked world of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Blogspot, with the concept of the unseen God." - Dr.Yael Eylat Van-Essen, author of Digital Culture: Virtuality, Society and Information, teaches at Tel Aviv University and Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

"Alexenberg proposes that text and image - something as simple as photos taken with a smartphone, and multiplied in their resonance by the Internet - can be a consciousness raising tool" - Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

TORAH TWEETS

Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the Twitter social networking website. Limiting the number of words in our Torah Tweets bloagart sentences to 140 characters is a creative challenge that imitates the torah itself which does not waste words. Our torah tweets are like bursts of bird song that sometimes gain a haiku-like poetic flavor. 140 is the numerical value (gematria) of the word hakel, which means 'to gather people together to share a torah learning experience' as in Leviticus 8:3 and Deuteronomy 4:10.

PLAYFUL SPIRIT

The images and text in this blog engage the torah through creative play. Lest you view our playing with torah as irreverent and sacrilegious, you should know that torah itself teaches us to approach it in a playful spirit. "Your torah is my plaything." (Psalm 119:174). "I [the torah) was the artist's plan. I was God's delight every day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the inhabited areas of His earth, my delights are with people." (Proverbs 8:30, 31). Rav Kook in his letter to the founders of the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem used the allegory of a child coming out of a coma calling for her doll for the reawakening of the Jewish peoples' art after its long exile of aesthetic sleep. Art is play in earnest.

About Miriam

Miriam Benjamin
I am an artist who has created Jewish ceremonial objects and clayscapes inspired by the forces of geology and erosion in the Negev desert. I also created Legacy Thrones, three monumental artworks made in collaboration with elders from different ethnic communities of Miami and art students in Jerusalem. My artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Miami, Washington D.C., Detroit and Honolulu. I studied at Columbia University, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Arrowmont School of Crafts, Massachusetts College of Art, and earned my M.F.A. at Pratt Institute. I was artist-in-residence at the South Florida Art Center and have taught at colleges in Israel and New York. Born in Suriname, the Dutch colony in South America, the great-granddaughter of the Chief Rabbi of Holland (see "My Synogogue Came on Aliyah"at http://www.artiststory.com/. I made aliyah with my family to Hibat Tzion when I was nine. I live in Ra'anana, Israel, with my husband Mel Alexenberg.