Shabbat Pikhudei
Written by Sandra G. Kviat Monday, 10 March 2008
Not too long ago a friend and I went to a late-night exhibition at a museum. While meandering around the different rooms we came to an installation that had been highly lauded on the website.
It was called ‘Peephole’; originally it had been squeezed into a space between two shops somewhere in downtown New York. No wonder that we walked straight past it and into another room. We only discovered it when we saw a line of young guys lining up in front of what looked like an inconspicuous white wall. The only give-away was the strange music.
In turn each of the young guys, all dressed in skinny jeans and colourful tops, bent down and looked through the small cut out in the white door. The first one shook his head and did not even try to explain it to the others except for the words ‘it is just too weird’. The next one said ‘I think it might be something Jewish’ and the third guy said ‘it is just some men banging their heads against a wall’. And then they went.
My friend and I were of course very intrigued and I had no clue what to expect when I finally bent down to look. And then I could not help but laugh – the men on the television behind the door were male Jews swaying and praying by the Kotel. The young guys did not know what they were looking at and had therefore mistakenly though they were banging their heads against the wall.
Even what I recognised later to be clues had not given it away. In the small explanation on the wall there were pictures of what looked like three men with their arms around each others’ shoulders looking through a hole in the wall. In hindsight it was a picture of three soldiers praying together, resting their heads against the Kotel. Their kippot had been removed, probably in order not to give away the element of surprise and possible recognition when confronted with the images on the television.
In this instance the image was familiar and easily recognisable with all its connotations of life in Israel, Judaism, Jerusalem and prayer.
The presence of religion and in particular Judaism was easy to see for ‘those in the know’. It was easy to recognise because we were conditioned to see it. We were looking at a place where humans and God supposedly encountered each other. The Kotel is the last physical remnant of the story of divine-human encounters. The Tanakh is ripe with stories of these meetings, and this last parasha of Exodus describes the exquisite furnishings of the Tabernacle and the Tent of Meeting. Though it is not clear whether they are one and the same thing, part of the same structure or two separate structures, the presence of God in or over them is clear.
When Moses finished, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle.
When the cloud lifted from the Tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on their journeys. If the cloud did not lift, they would not set out. For over the Tabernacle a cloud of the Lord rested by day and fire would appear in it by night, before the eyes of all the House of Israel throughout their journeys (Exod. 40:34 – 38).
The presence of God is tangible here; it can be seen by everyone just as the burning bush and the pillars that lead the Israelites in the desert were concrete. This might be worrying to some as we are all fully aware of how a representation of God can mislead people. The incident of the Golden Calf is still fresh in our memories. However, as Noa Kushner[1] points out, there is nothing inherently wrong in being able to see the divine presence. The experience of the divine can include the visual sense, and in the case of Moses it might have been what helped him come to terms with the divine presence. What went wrong was “that the Golden Calf was worshipped as if it contained God entirely, as if God was nowhere else” (Kushner).
The question is whether we have learnt our lesson? Are we still getting it wrong? Unfortunately the idea of ‘ownership’ of the divine is not as far removed from us as we might think. Though we have no physical proofs of God’s presence - just imagine if we had?
In a world of trademarks, intellectual property issues and access rights – imagine what would happen to the encounter with the Divine? Apart from the issues of advertising and subliminal messages included in our daily encounter with God - imagine what kind of power this would give to the CEO of the Tent of Meeting! Imagine what that would do to religions and people. What would the effect of a visual representation be on people’s behaviours?
I am sure most of us have at one point or another wished for certainty – please God give me a sign, – even a small one, to let me now that you are there. I do not require thunder and lightning, not even burning desert vegetation – just a hint. Just a little one!
How much easier it would be for us to cope with our workload, the demands and expectations of us, if we could tune in once a day to that special broadcast that would show us God’s presence. But we can’t and that might be a very good thing.
We struggle with the texts, with our faiths, with rituals and with our role in all of this – it sometimes feels like we are banging our heads against the wall.
And perhaps we are.
Or perhaps we are not recognising the image. Perhaps what might look to others and feel to us as banging our heads is actually something else. Sometimes when we sway forward we catch a glimpse of something through that little peephole. Sometimes it feels as if we are looking beyond the wall – for a brief moment. Perhaps then what we are really doing is not banging our heads but bending down to get a glimpse of what is behind the door.
