photograph god

Searching for God Exhibition

2010-02-13T22:21:00.013+02:00

Wayne and Geraldine Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery
at The Ohio State University - Marion Campus

Ohio State students, visitors to the Searching for God exhibition, and people throughout the world are invited to participate in the Photograph God project by sharing their images and thoughts with others globally. Your photo sequences will be posted on this blog.

Photograph events in your everyday life that reveal the divine attributes of compassion, strength, beauty, success, splendor, integration. Send two photographs that document a process like a comic strip or storyboard sequence with a sentence identifying the place where the event took place and how it expresses one of the six divine attributes. Send your photographs as jpg images (300-400 pixels wide) and your text as a Word document to: melalexenberg@yahoo.com

See How to Photograph God posting below for instructions followed by exemplary submissions.

How to Photograph God

2008-05-09T08:40:00.014+03:00

Kabbalah through a Creative LensFocus your camera lens on God and you will see God looking back at you. Seeing God is seeing divine light reflected from every facet of your life. The ancient wisdom of kabbalah will help you recognize that you have been looking at God all the time but missed the action.

You only see light. You have never seen your mother, father, spouse, or children. You only have seen the light reflected from them. You only see light passing through your eye’s lens, stimulating the rods and cones in your retina, and transmitting the forms and colors of those you love to your brain. Just as you enjoy seeing your loved ones from the light they reflect, you can find joy seeing divine light reflected from every place you look. This blog teaches how to see the spectrum of divine light through your camera lens.

Photograph God in Reflections of RealityGod does not exist in reality. God is reality itself. Rabbi David Aaron, who teaches kabbalah in the Old City of Jerusalem, explains in his book, Seeing God, that God is the all-embracing context for everything. In Hebrew, God is called Hamakom, which means “The Place.” God is the place where everything is happening. You do not exist alongside God; you exist within God, within the only one reality that is God. Everything is in God, God is in everything, but God is also beyond everything.

Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality. If you want to photograph God, focus your lens on Hamakom, The Place, anyplace where you see divine light illuminating reality. Let your camera collect the light reflecting from the reality shaping your everyday life and you will find yourself photographing God in action.

To photograph God as the place where all action takes place, you need to redefine the English word “God,” a Germanic word conjuring up images of some all-powerful being zapping us if we step out of line. This is an alien concept in kabbalah. Names for God in biblical Hebrew are not really names for God at all. They are names linked to divine attributes. Hebrew speakers call God Hashem, literally “The Name.” When you read “God” here, think of the Hebrew word Hashem, The Name of the nameless One encompassing all of reality and beyond.

Photograph God as a VerbGod is a verb. God is no thing – nothing in the process of becoming everything. The great 16th century kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as The Ari, calls God Ha’efes Hamukhlat, “The Absolute Nothingness,” as well as Ein Sof, “Endless.” God is One, infinite nothingness and everything in the universe all at once.

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, usually translated as “God,” should really be translated as “Is-Was-Will Be.” YHVH integrates past, present, and future of the verb “to be.” It is associated with the divine 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 freeze the action in a still-life picture, nature morte (dead life in French).

Photograph living processes in a series of images like comic strip or storyboard sequences. Show before and after. Photograph KUZU. KUZU is YHVH in motion. The biblical passage beginning with “Hear, O Israel, YHVH is our God, YHVH is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), 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 to set God in motion.

K-U-Z-U is spelled with each of the four letters that follow Y-H-V-H in the Hebrew alphabet. K follows Y, U follows H, Z follows V, and U follows H. 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 in motion from multiple viewpoints. Photograph KUZU.

Photograph God in Every Nook and Cranny of Life
Look for God in every aspect of your life. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, teaches that you should not direct your 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 your gaze upon concrete reality. He emphasizes that you should not confine your search for God to houses of worship for you can find God penetrating into every nook and cranny of life. Photograph God in the details of empirical reality permeating your daily mundane activities.

Photograph God in Your Work and Social Life
Draw God down into everything you do. The Lubavicher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson, the greatest contemporary Hasidic master, emphasizes that it is not enough to rest content with your own spiritual ascent, the elevation of your soul in closeness to God. You must also strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of your involvement with it – your work and your social life – until not only do they not distract you from your pursuit of God, but they become a full part of it. Photograph God in your relationships with others.

Photograph God at Ground Level
In his acclaimed novel, The City of God, E. L. Doctorow echoes these rabbinic 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.” Photograph God everywhere you go and in everything you do.

Photograph God in the Still Silent Voice
Living for seven years in the Negev desert, I would frequently walk through the desert mountains where a strong silence surrounded me and followed me. The silence grew more intense as I stopped to stoop down to get a close look at a tiny flowering plant emerging from the crevice of a rock. The Hebrew word for “desert” MiDBaR is spelled with the same letters as the word for “speaking” MiDaBeR. The desert speaks softly about delicate forms of life. In the desert, you can see the quiet voice of God. In the Sinai desert, “all the people saw the sounds” (Exodus 20:15) rather than heard them.

Standing on a desert mountain, the prophet Elijah saw a great powerful wind, smashing mountains and breaking rocks. After the wind came an earthquake and after the earthquake was fire and after the fire there was a still silent voice. Elijah saw God in the still silent voice, rather than in the mighty wind, rather than in the rumbling earthquake, rather than in the raging fire. (I Kings 19:11-12). Listen for the still silent voice as you photograph God in the intimate spaces and minute details of your life. Transform your vision of small ordinary events into extraordinary images.

Photograph the Spectrum of Divine LightJust as a prism breaks up white light into the colors of the spectrum, kabbalah reveals a spectrum of divine light derived from the biblical passage “You God are the compassion, the strength, the beauty, the success, the splendor, and everything in heaven and on earth” (Chronicles 1:29). Look for these six attributes of divine light flowing down into your life.

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 / Everything Integrated / Gateway to Action

Focus on episodes expressing these attributes as you walk through the streets, ride on a bus, shop in the mall, dance at a wedding, hike in the countryside, or come home from work. “God walks in the midst of your camp” (Deuteronomy 23:15). KeReV, the Hebrew word for “midst,” shares the same root as being “close” KaRoV. As you sense the closeness of God walking with you, create six sets of pictures revealing the spectrum of divine light that you see all around you.

Let God Look Back at You
Photographer Jan Phillips quotes from Rabbi Elimelech as she shares her thoughts about focusing her lens on God in her book on photography and creativity, God is at Eye Level: “Whoever does not see God in every place does not see God in any place…. 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.”

My students at Ariel University and Emuna College in Jerusalem created most of the photographic sequences posted in this blog. People worldwide are invited to also participate in this project by submitting their photographs to me at melalexenberg@yahoo.com.

Yesod: 5 Generations

2007-04-20T13:35:00.005+03:00

Yesod is five generations of my family. Yesod (foundation) represents the balance between netzakh (success/eternity) and hod (splendor/grace).

The top photograph was taken in 2006, when my great-grandson, Yechiel Eliad, was eight days old.

The bottom photograph was taken one year later when we celebrated Eliadi's first birthday, and the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Eliadi's great-great-grandmother, Anna Benjamin, on the 59th anniversary of Israel's independence. Behind them are my wife, Miriam, our granddaughter, Inbal, and our daughter, Iyrit.

Hesed: Compassionate Intervention

2007-01-31T23:23:00.000+02:00

Tal Bilgoray sees compassion in the intervention of a medical team aiding a premature baby.

Gevurah: Strength is Defending Home

2007-01-31T23:06:00.000+02:00

Tal Bilgoray sees strength in her brother's preparation for his unit going into action to defend Israel from terrorist attacks.

Tiferet: Beauty is Coming Home

2007-01-31T22:27:00.000+02:00

Taya Babenko experiences beauty from suddenly seeing the familiar landscape of Israel as the airplane approaches the coast bringing her home from abroad.

Netzakh: Eternal Cycle of Sky and Sea

2007-01-31T20:26:00.000+02:00

Linor Ohayon appreciates the shared amorphous forms of white clouds and white surf moving against blue sky and sea. God orchestrates an eternal cycle as evaporation from the sea forms clouds which, in turn, return water to the sea as rain.

Hod: Splendor as Graceful Flight

2007-01-31T19:42:00.000+02:00

Alexander Cruise sees splendor in the graceful movements of a bird in flight.

Yesod: Bread as Foundation of Life

2007-01-31T19:28:00.000+02:00

Yulia Yagudin enjoyed the pleasant aroma of fresh baked bread, the foundation of life, while photographing old women lovingly shaping small bagels in a traditional way handed down from generation to generation.

Splendor/Hod as the Echo of a Kiss

2006-07-11T11:09:00.000+03:00

Yael Kenan sees hod as the glorious feeling of young lovers kissing. She photographed the shadow of the event to reveal the link between the Hebrew word hod (splendor) and hed (echo). Yael perceives the shadow as a visual equivalent of an echo in sound.

Teaching/Learning as Foundation/Yesod

2006-07-02T11:53:00.000+03:00

Michal Hadari photographed a father learning Torah with his son. He is building a foundation for successfully transmitting Jewish values from generation to generation assuring a splendid future. The biblical injunction “to diligently teach your children” forms a central part of the daily liturgy. Foundation/yesod integrates the attributes of success/continuity/eternity/netzach with splendor/hod.

Avian Splendor/Hod

2006-07-02T09:17:00.000+03:00

Esti Lazarovich Shachaf sees splendor/hod as the metamorphosis of a strange-looking earthbound creature with stubby feathers into a magnificent bird in flight. Scroll down to “Avian Strength/Gevurah” and see the same parrot in the first moments of its life.

Hesed on Her Wedding Day

2006-07-02T09:14:00.000+03:00

Sharon Vaserman sees compassion/hesed as the divine loving kindness bestowed upon a bride on her wedding day. Sharon feels hesed saturating the wedding with all the good in the world coming together to forge a bond of love between bride and groom as they become one.

Success from a Lizard's Viewpoint

2006-07-02T09:05:00.000+03:00

The multifaceted meanings of the Hebrew word “netzach” are related to success and victory, conducting and orchestration, continuity and eternality. Mor Perry photographed a lizard’s success in catching its lunch.

Netzach as Continuity

2006-07-01T21:41:00.000+03:00

Merav Razon sees the birth of a child in the modern State of Israel as an expression of netzach. It is a divine event attesting to the continuity of the Jewish People despite millennia of bitter exile. The prophet Isaiah links the words “from generation to generation for all eternity (l’netzach netzachim)” to the joyous return to their homeland “coming to Zion with glad song, with eternal gladness.”

Success/Netzach from Poland to Israel

2006-06-30T09:00:00.000+03:00

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 nighmare and unimagineable 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

2006-06-30T08:33:00.000+03:00

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

2006-06-30T08:00:00.000+03:00

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

2006-06-29T09:09:00.000+03:00

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

2006-06-29T08:27:00.000+03:00

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

2006-06-27T12:40:00.000+03:00

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

Invitation to Participate in Photograph God Project

2006-06-23T10:36:00.000+03:00

People throughout the world are invited to participate in the Photograph God project by sharing their images and thoughts with others globally.

Submitting Photographs
Photograph events in your everyday life that reveal the divine attributes of compassion, strength, beauty, success, splendor, foundation. Send a series of 2 or 3 photographs that document process like a comic strip or storyboard sequence. Write a sentence or two in English identifying the place where the event took place and how it expresses one of the six divine attributes listed above. Send each photograph as a jpg image (328 pixels wide) attachment and a Word document text. E-mail them to: melalexenberg@yahoo.com

Legal Notice
By submitting your photographs, you attest that you are the photographer, and that you grant Mel Alexenberg a perpetual, royalty-fee license to publish them on the Photograph God blog and in all other media both digital and print, to reproduce, exhibit, distribute, select, arrange, modify, edit, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to the images. In exchange, your name will identify you as the photographer when your photographs are used. If you do not wish to grant Mel Alexenberg these rights, do not submit your photographs.

Photographing a Verb

2006-06-21T21:24:00.001+03:00

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

2006-06-18T21:25:00.000+03:00

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

2006-06-16T12:11:00.001+03:00

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 Center of Samaria and Emuna College 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)