Success/Netzach from Poland to Israel

Dalia Sharvit sees success/netzach as the victory of good over evil and eternal love of the Jewish people for its Torah. As a participant, she photographed the "March of the Living" to Nazi death camps in Poland to never forget the horrible nightmare and unimaginable suffering of millions of Jews murdered there. On her return home to Israel, she photographed strength/gevurah showing her brave peers defending their country against its current enemies seeking to destroy it while beginning their dangerous day in praise of Hashem and in chanting the eternal words of the Torah.

Splendor/Hod Sunset

Sharon Vaseman sees splendor/hod as the graceful flow from daytime to evening as a fisherman contemplates his place in the divine creation watching the setting sun caress the water's surface bringing sky down to earth.

Bovine Beauty/Tifert

Roni Levi photographed the birthing of a calf, an awesome event expressing beauty/tifert as the vital balance between the farmer's compassion/hesed and strength/gevurah in helping to bring new life into the world.

Foundation/Yesod as Growing Food

Keren Atiya sees earth as the foundation/yesod of all life, the source of our food. A tractor tilling the soil and the lush green results show the integration of technology in the process of growing food crops.

Compassion/Hesed as Love and Food

Keren Atiya sees compassion/hesed as a process that begins with hungry cats, hungry for love and food, surrounding a man who has seen much in his life who chose to respond to their hunger. He pets them, satisfying their hunger for love, and then portions out food for each of them making sure there is enough for all.

Avian Strength/Gevurah

Esti Lazarovich Shachaf sees strength/gevurah as her parrot chick freeing itself.

Photographing a Verb

God is a Verb
God is no thing. God is no thing – nothing in the process of becoming everything. You can discern God over time, in the flow, in the action, in the process of something becoming something else. The primary biblical divine name YHVH should be translated as “Is-Was-Will Be.” It is a verb associated with the attribute of inner beauty (tiferet). When beauty hidden in the mundane suddenly jumps out at you, catch the action in a series of photographs of Is-Was-Will Be. Don’t snap a still-life, nature morte (dead life in French), photograph living processes like comic strip or storyboard sequences.

Photographing KUZU
KUZU is YHVH in motion. The biblical passage beginning with “Hear, O Israel, YHVH is our God, YHVH is One,” is written by a scribe on small parchment scrolls affixed to doorposts in Jewish homes. These mini-Torahs called mezuzot, a word derived from the root zaz, which means to move. Each scroll is rolled up with the biblical text on the inside. On the outside of the scroll at the place on the reverse side of where YHVH is written, the scribe writes KUZU. KUZU moves YHVH one letter forward. It is spelled with each of the letters that follow YHVH in the Hebrew alphabet. It is if we were to write GOD as HPE, H being the letter following G, P the letter following O, and E the letter following D. In addition to moving each of the letters in YHVH forward, KUZU is written upside-down to invite us to see God as a dynamic process from multiple viewpoints. Photograph KUZU.

Where to Look for God

In Every Nook and Cranny of Life
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, teaches us not direct our glance upward but downward, not aspire to a heavenly transcendence nor seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality, but to fix our gaze upon concrete, empirical reality. Do not confine your search for God to houses of worship for God permeates into every nook and cranny of life. Look for God in the marketplace, the street, the factory, the house, the mall, and the banquet hall. “For God your Lord walks in the midst of your camp.” (Deuteronomy 23:15)

In Our Work and Social Life
The Rebbe of Lubavich, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, emphasizes that it is not enough to rest content with our own spiritual ascent, the elevation of our souls in closeness to God. We must also strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of our involvement with it – our work and our social life – until not only do they not distract us from our pursuit of God, but they become a full part of it.

At Ground Level
In his acclaimed novel, The City of God, E. L. Doctorow echoes these thoughts:

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. It will be cryptic, discerned over time, piecemeal, to be communally understood at the end like a law of science. They’ll put it on a silicon chip.

Everywhere God Looks Back at You
Photographer Jan Phillips writes in her book on photography and creativity, God is at Eye Level, and quotes from Rabbi Elimelech:

My eyes find God everywhere, in every living thing, creature, person, in every act of kindness, act of nature, act of grace. Everywhere I look, there God is looking back, looking straight back…. Whoever does not see God in every place does not see God in any place.

Seeing God

LightsOROT, Created at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies for Yeshiva University Museum in New York, Mel Alexenberg and Otto Piene

Seeing God through a Viewfinder
The project that I assigned my students at Ariel University and Emunah College School of the Arts in Jerusalem was to photograph God – to document processes revealing six divine attributes in their everyday life.
Compassion/Hesed: Largess / Loving All Strength/Gevurah: Judgment / Setting Limits
Beauty/Tiferet: Aesthetic Balance / Inner Elegance Success/Netzach: Orchestration / Eternity
Splendor/Hod: Gracefulness / Magnificence Foundation/Yesod: Integrating All / Gateway to Action

Seeing God is Getting in Touch with Reality
In his book, Seeing God, Rabbi David Aaron, head of Isralight Institute in Jerusalem, uses kabbalistic insights to illuminate how we can see divine light all around us. He shares my discomfort of using the word “God,” a Germanic word conjuring up images of some all-powerful being zapping us if we step out of line. He calls God Hashem, literally “The Name” in Hebrew, the name of the nameless One encompassing all of reality and beyond. He writes:

Hashem does not exist in reality – Hashem is reality. And we do not exist alongside Hashem, we exist within Hashem, within the reality that is Hashem. Hashem is the place. Indeed, Hashem is the all-embracing context for everything. So there can’t be you and God standing side by side in reality. There is only one reality that is Hashem, and you exist in Hashem…. Everything is in Hashem, Hashem is in everything, but Hashem is beyond everything…. Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality.

Seeing the Spectrum of Divine Light
Like the spectral colors that make up white light, we can see the spectrum of divine light in our everyday world as the attributes of compassion, strength, beauty, success, splendor, and foundation.

This spectrum revealed in the kingdom of space-time (malkhut) in the world of action (asiyah), is spelled out in the biblical passage: “You Hashem are the greatness of compassion (gedulah/hesed), the strength (gevurah), the beauty (tiferet), the success (netzach), the splendor (hod), and the integral foundation of everything (kol/yesod) in heaven and on earth.” (Chronicles 1:29)