By Another Light

 

Teva

 "The history of religion and philosophy is really the history of the profound human belief that we have faculties capable of responding to orders of truth which, did we apprehend them, would change the whole character of our universe; showing us reality from another angle, lit by another light."

Evelyn Underhill

     God uses signs, symbols, and stories to speak to His people... imagery of the invisible for visual people.

      In Genesis 6:14, God speaks to Noah, "Make for yourself an ark of Gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch." The Hebrew word translated 'ark' is teva, and is used twice in the Hebrew Scriptures: regarding the 'ark' of Noah and the 'basket' of Moses (Exodus 2:3). A teva is a sacred container, a vessel designed to protect and carry its contents. 

     Teva also means word.

Teva

    
     The three characters in teva- tau, beth, hey- remind me of a night in the life of Moses, the night called Passover.

 

     God instructed Moses to place lamb's blood on the posts and lintels of every Israelite home... forming a cross.

     The Children of Israel were thus protected from the Angel of Death on the night called Pesach- the feast of freedom, by the blood of the lamb.

     As I meditate on teva today, July 4- Independence Day- the characters say to me: 

"Behold, the house whose doorway is covered by the blood of the Lamb who hung on the cross and is the Word; that house is free indeed!"

The End of a Matter...

The instruction of the Lord is perfect...

Psalm 19:7 

     In the Hebrew language, form embraces function, and to ignore the aesthetic element is to ignore the fabric of the King's robe. Each Hebrew character carries meaning- an intentional weaving together of symbols, numbers, and ideas, with nuances that stagger the imagination. Martin Luther said,

"The words of the Hebrew tongue have a peculiar energy. It is impossible to convey so much so briefly in any other language. To render them intelligibly we must not attempt to give word for word, but only aim at the sense and the idea."

     It is unfortunate that the Hebrew word Torah is most often translated Law. A more accurate translation would be direction, teaching or instruction. The word is written as follows:

 

Here are the names of the characters:

 Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said, "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." As I meditate on the sacred text of the Hebrew scripture I am intrigued by the letterforms, by the aesthetic nuances, and I read stories within stories. Some may say I am 'seeing' things, but because I believe the text to be God breathed, I wonder... perhaps the grammar structure itself is intended to reveal aspects of the Creator's imagination.

     The final character in the word Torah is the hey. The Jewish mystics believed the hey represented the breath of God, and in early forms symbolized a man with outstretched arms- as if to say, "Behold!" When the word Torah is in the construct state (indicating possession) the hey changes to a tau, the final character of the Hebrew alphabet. In early forms, the tau symbolized a cross.

 

     Psalm 19:7 begins with-

The Torah of the Lord God is perfect, restoring the soul...

and because Torah, in this case, is in the construct state the word begins and ends with the letter tau... the last and final character is both the beginning and the end. The perfect direction of God is exhibited with a resh and a vav, placed between two crosses.

God Will Provide the Lamb

    "Behold, the Lamb of God

who takes away the sin of the world!"

John, the Baptizer, upon seeing Jesus

      My friend, Deborah Mrantz, challenged me in a email. She wrote, 'Have you considered doing something (visually) with Abraham?' So, while driving, this came to me-

I imagined a series of three images- A knife, thorns and a ram's horn.

I roughed out a quick version on corrugated paper-

God Will Provide The Lamb

Oil on Corrugated Paper

The layers within the Hebrew language run deep, forming a network that both inspires and defies human comprehension. Within the verses of text the individual words speak; within the words the individual characters have a voice.

In Genesis, chapter 22, Abraham and his son Isaac are climbing a mountain when Isaac asks, "Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?" Abraham replies,

"God will provide the lamb."

In my minds-eye I saw the Hebrew lettering for 'the lamb' amidst the thorns, between the knife and the horn. It was as I painted these characters that I focused on their nature as letterforms. The expression 'the lamb' is constructed with three characters: 

The two outer characters are both the letter Hey, making the sound of a breath:

Originally, the character symbolized two outstretched arms.

The character says, 'Behold!' 

During a Jewish wedding ceremony, the couple whispers to each other, "Behold (hey), I will try with all my being to be present for you."

(from The Book of Letters by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner).

The name of the character in the center of 'the lamb' is

sin:

To the ancients, the character symbolized teeth, meaning to devour or consume.

As I meditated on the letters and their meanings, 'the lamb' became pictured to me hebraically as sin, enclosed, consumed and destroyed between the outstretched arms of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit-

the three-in-one God who promises, with all His being, to be present for me.