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)

Friday, May 6, 2011

Emor (Say) אמר

Photographing God

You shall count for yourselves 7 complete weeks after the day following the Passover holiday when you brought the omer as a wave offering, until the day after the seventh week you shall count 50 days. (Leviticus 23:15-16) וספרתם לכם ממחרת השבת מיום הביאכם את עמר התנופה שבע שבתות תמימת תהיינה עד ממחרת השבת השביעת תספרו חמישים יום

God is the compassion, the strength, the beauty, the success, the splendor, and the foundation of everything in heaven and earth. (1 Chronicles 29:11) לך יהוה הגדלה חסד והגבורה והתפארת והנצח וההוד כי כל יסוד בשמים ובארץ

We count each of the 49 days from when we were freed from our enslavement in Egypt until we arrived at Mt. Sinai – from Passover to Shavuot.

Unlike slaves who live repeated days of drudgery, free people can feel and appreciate the unique character to each day.

As each of the 49 days is counted, it is given a different name integrating one of the 7 divine attributes into one of 7 divine attributes.

These attributes (7 of the 10 sephirot in kabbalah) are:

Hesed: Compassion / Largess / Loving All

Gevurah: Strength / Judgment / Setting Limits

Tifert: Beauty / Aesthetic Balance / Inner Elegance

Netzakh: Success / Orchestration / Eternity

Hod: Splendor / Gracefulness / Magnificence

Yesod: Foundation / Integrating All/ Gateway to Action

Malkhut: the world of action in space and time.

Mel photographed a Greek fishing boat in Elouda that brought to mind the gevurah of his great-grandfather Elchanan, a fisherman in Salonika.

After generations in Greece, Elchanan had the strength to take his family in his boat to Odessa where it was better for Jews 150 years ago.

Elchanan's son Mordechai left Odessa for America in 1886 where his son Abraham was born. Mel (Menahem ben Avraham) moved to Israel in 1969.

Mel asked his students at Ariel University to photograph each of the 6 attributes of feeling realized in their everyday world of malkhut.

Keren saw hesed as an elderly man responding to feral cats hungry for love and food. He pets each one and portions out food for them.

Roni photographed the birth of a calf, an awesome event expressing tifert, deeply felt beauty of seeing new life coming into the world.

Esti's father breeds parrots. She sees netzakh as a parrot chick succeeding in freeing itself from its egg continuing the cycle of life.

Yael sees hod as the glorious feeling of young lovers kissing. She photographed the shadow of the event.

She reveals the link between the Hebrew word hod (splendor) and hed (echo). Yael sees a shadow as a visual equivalent of an echo in sound.

Yesod is five generations of our family. We celebrated Eliad's first birthday and the 100th birthday of Miriam's mother Anna Benjamin.

Behind her are her granddaughter Iyrit and her great-granddaughter Inbal. Her great-great-grandson Eliad is sitting on Miriam's lap.

See more about photographing God at www.photographgod.com

1 comment:

GeorgeMay 6, 2011 at 3:57 PM
Hello Mel,
Miriam amidst the image of the 4 generations of your family is breathtaking. God bless you all.
hope to talk with you soon.
Jehuda
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

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.