Torah invites us into a conversation. Our testifying of it can be transformational.
View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Two weeks ago we read the Torah portion Noach. It speaks of a great flood, a consequence that flows from human behavior bursting through the retaining walls of moral standards. At its conclusion there is a rainbow, a sign of hope.
One of Shulchan’s study participants sent me a video of a song inspired by the Torah portion. It’s the Gospel Music Workshop of America, founded by Reverend James Cleveland, singing “After the Rain.” The lyrics are rooted in the Biblical story of Noah’s flood. They also quote from Psalm 30: “Weeping may endure for a night, joy will surely come.”
What I found compelling was the sense that for the singers it was a lived experience – profound hardship meeting the certainty that joy will come again – and not just the recitation of an ancient text. Their presentation is more than performance. It is a testifying.
In return, I shared a clip of Little Richard singing “Didn’t It Rain,” a traditional gospel song. It was most iconically sung by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1964. Little Richard’s offering is beyond singing. It is bearing witness. Little Richard is living for us in the moment his own life of trials, hurt, and rejection and his enduring experience of joy in the world. He ignites everyone in that room with a communally shared experience.
Art – song, dance, literature, poetry, painting, theater – has this power to go beyond reporting an event in a detached manner. It lives it for us in the moment. And we, in turn, have the power to allow that bearing witness to ignite something within us.
Yari Ostovany is an artist who was born in Iran in 1962. He moved to the United States in 1978 and received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. His works often begin from within the aesthetics of his cultural origin: calligraphic gestural marks. However, they quickly dissolve “as the layers explode and implode, are added, rubbed out, re-applied, scoured into and scraped away…until another dimension – a sense of resonance – arises…where forms and marks become metaphors for a transcendent reality.”
In his work, Ostovany is ever in “search for self-generating light rather than one coming from an external source.” In his article “The Encounter Between East and West/Gesture and Color,” he writes: “I approach painting as the visual evidence of, and not a report on, an experience.”
Pictured here is his work Rumi/Shams. It is one in a series of paintings called “The Third Script.” The Third Script is a teaching from Shams of Tabriz, a wandering Sufi mystic who became the spiritual guide for the poet Rumi. It seeks to describe a level of knowledge, an “indescribable third script, which cannot be understood by mind but only known as its presence is felt.” This knowledge can be accessed only through an intensely profound and intimate union with another. According to Sufi legend, Rumi and Shams experienced such a mystical intimacy, one that “freed the molten lava of poetry” within Rumi.
Ostovany brings us not a report from the field nor a figurative representation of that encounter between Shams and Rumi and the spiritual and creative eruption it ignited. With color and form and texture – and the undoing of all that – Ostovany paints “visual evidence of an experience.” It is a testifying.
Torah portion Vayera (“appeared”) describes an experience that Abraham has. The opening sentence reads, “God appeared to Abraham.” Yet, the next verse states, “Looking up, he saw three men standing near him.” Where was Abraham looking when God appeared to him? Why does the text shift seamlessly from God making an appearance to Abraham seeing three human beings?
Torah is not reporting to us an event. It is singing/painting an experience. An experience which does not unfold in the ordered temporal segments through which we normally live our lives. The moment of encountering God is the moment of seeing three human beings. The infinite is also present to us in finite forms. There are three humans in order to diffuse our mind from reducing God to any single object, place or being. And the experience stirs Abraham not to worship but to hospitality.
The Gospel Music Workshop of America choir exult their faith that the trials of this moment will give way to joy. Little Richard trembles in joyful awe that “yes, it did rain…and here I stand, enduringly alive!” Torah paints a scene that melds spiritual vision and human decency. These are wisdoms that exceed our understanding. They are our testifyings.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday November 14 as we explore the power of testifying.
Links to the Gospel Music Workshop of America and the Little Richard videos will be posted Wednesay, November 13.
