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)




Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Bamidbar (In the desert) במדבר

Aesthetic Peace
Take a census of each individual in the Israelite community by families… count all those fit for army service. (Numbers 1:2, 3) שאו את ראש כל עדת בני ישראל למשפחתם  כל יצא צבה בישראל תפקדו אתם

 


When Mel served in the IDF, we had hoped that our children and grandchildren would live in our land at peace with all our neighbors
Our grandsons are now in the army: We were at Yishai’s graduation as an army medic.  Or serves in intelligence in a Negev desert base.

Our granddaughter’s husband Moshe carried a Torah with an IDF mission at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial.

Netanyahu made it clear in his address to the US Congress that peace can only come when the Arabs accept a Jewish State in their midst.

However, all peace processes from Oslo to Obama are doomed to failure because the conflict is not political but aesthetic and religious.
At his Aesthetic Peace exhibition in Prague, Mel explains to the ambassadors of Israel and USA about his peace plan derived from Islamic art.
Behind them is a painting of a pattern from a Damascus mosque superimposed on a map of the Islamic world in which Israel is a counter pattern.

The continuously repeated geometric patterns in Islamic art are perceived by Arabs as spreading across North Africa and the Middle East. 

They see Israel as a blemish that disrupts the pattern, an alien presence they try to eliminate through war, terrorism and political action.   
Rug weavers from Islamic lands intentionally weave a patch of dissimilar pattern to break the symmetry of their rugs.
Since only Allah creates perfection, they purposely disrupt the uniform pattern to demonstrate that human creation is less than perfect.

Peace will come from a fresh metaphor in which the Arabs see Israel’s existence as Allah’s will 

Perceiving Israel as the necessary counter-pattern in the overall pattern of the Islamic world will usher in an era of peace.
See Aesthetic Peace blog http://aestheticpeace.blogspot.com

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