Shabbat interrupts our experiencing the world only through a sense of lack and anxiety. It reminds us that we also have within us everything we need for a life of wholeness, fulfillment and peace. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Archaeologists uncovered in northern India a seal, dating to 3,500 B.C.E., that was used to sign documents. The seal shows a procession of seven men carrying square standards, held aloft on poles like modern flags. The discovery underscores that the display of banners has been a critical part of community identity and authority since earliest human civilizations.
June 14 is Flag Day in the United States. It commemorates the adoption by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 of the Stars and Stripes as the official American flag. Prior to then, in the early days of the American Revolution, there were scores of colonial and regimental flags. Among them were the Boston Liberty flag, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, the Gadsden flag from South Carolina with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” and the Culpepper flag on which was inscribed “Liberty or Death.”
The unofficial national flag flown on July 4, 1776, Independence Day, was the Grand Union Flag. Its design consisted of 13 stripes, representing the thirteen colonies, with a blue field in the upper left-hand corner bearing the red cross of St. George of England with the white cross of St. Andrew of Scotland. It was first flown by the ships of the Colonial Fleet on the Delaware River. John Paul Jones, then a Navy lieutenant, raised it aboard the American fighting ship Alfred on December 3, 1775. The formal break with Great Britain in 1776 motivated congress to remove symbols of British Union from the American flag.
By resolution of the Marine Committee, the Continental Congress approved on June 14, 1777 “that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation.” It was under this symbol of “a new constellation” that the American revolutionists fought for a new beginning that honored a way of life they had been creating among themselves for decades.
A “new constellation” is in formation before our very eyes as we read this week’s Torah portion. What was in Genesis the story of a family became in Exodus the story of an entity called the Children of Israel. The revelation at Mount Sinai was a convocation for them to become a covenantal community: a people accountable to one another and in service to their most high. The book of Leviticus was an acknowledgment of the inevitability of loss and fracture in human existence. And it provided lessons in how to live through those moments and emerge wiser and stronger.
Now, with the beginning of the book of Numbers, the people are ready to resume their journey. They are organized around family tents, which are in turn grouped according to the tribes of which their families are members. Each tribal camp is arrayed under a unique flag. Can unique tribal identities promote a new coherence? Or are they doomed to only engender divisive destruction? Are the tents only symbols of exile? Or can they also serve as portals to a higher state, to a promise of place and peace in the world?
Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples, into a family with aristocratic roots. As a child he wrote poetry and painted. By the time he was nineteen he had his first solo exhibition, at the Galleria Valle Giulia in Rome. The following year he embarked on a life as a nomadic and curious student of cultures.
In 1972 he traveled to Afghanistan, where he learned about Sufi mysticism and got to know weavers and embroiders there. Over the next several years he made trips to India, learning Sanskrit and studying ancient Vedic texts at the Theosophical Society in Madras. He collaborated with Indian sign painters, miniaturists and papermakers. He immersed himself in the region’s spiritual traditions. “To be painter,” he said, “I needed to be in exile. To be lost in between states of being opens a door.”
Between 2012 and 2014 Clemente created, in collaboration with a community of artisans in Rajasthan, India, an enormous installation covering 30,000 square feet. The installation, titled Encampment, includes six painted canvass tents, four large-scale sculptures (Earth, Moon, Sun, and Hunger), and nineteen paintings.
Pictured here is one of the tents, Standing With Truth Tent. Like the others, it is adorned with human figures, esoteric texts, embedded icons. The colors are rich. The human images convey both love and longing; isolation and joining.
The entire installation is arranged so as to encourage both engagement and passage by viewers. “Every single moment of the unfolding experience of Encampment,” Clemente wrote, “is just a pretext to move on, to move forward from that moment. It’s never supposed to be a beginning or an ending; it’s just supposed to be a transition.”
Inscribed on the sculpture Hunger are words from French philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle: “The spectator feels at home nowhere because the spectacle is everywhere.” Debord sees the modern condition as one of alienation, a culture of consumerism in which the individual is separated from what provides subsistence, driven only by a need to possess and consume. The human is exiled from self, from the creative possibilities that are driven by desire, by the desire to conjoin with an other.
Clemente’s Encampment serves as a disruption of that exile. The tents welcome viewers into a hospitality that reminds them of subterranean desires and nourishing connections. And the arrangement reminds them to keep moving deeper and higher.
Torah has no ending. It provides no guarantee as to outcome. Free will is too highly endowed a divine attribute to permit such reassurance. But it does provide spiritual and ethical practices to help live a life of fulfillment and peace.
This week it’s banners of heritage and tents of passage. And in the middle of all is the Mishkan. The house that reminds us that we can be more than beings driven by our hungers. Shabbat interrupts the anxious search. We can rest from the need drive and revive ourselves through the desire drive, that which seeks not to possess but to embrace. Not to consume, but to create. Not to divide, but to join.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday June 6 as we explore rooted in transition.
