Parashat Bereshit: ‘Bokea II’: The renewal of creation
Within the world, the continuous force of re-creation continually gives us energy and the opportunity for new beginnings.
In Judaism, the creation of light − and of the world − is considered a continuous process, renewed daily. Every day is a new beginning.
This is reflected in the prayers we say every morning in the blessing before the Shema, acknowledging that God in His goodness renews, every day constantly, the act of creation. In the Shabbat morning prayers, we add that God “opens the gates of the east and breaks open [bokea] the windows of the heavens,” bestowing light on the world and mercy on its inhabitants.
Within the world, the continuous force of re-creation continually gives us energy and the opportunity for new beginnings. On a personal level, my husband, Yoram, and I experienced renewal after near-total destruction. On Thanksgiving night 2016, Yoram’s art studio went up in flames and destroyed hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of his paintings. Of Yoram’s life work, all that survived were the paintings he had sold over the years, plus a few that were in our house, which was miraculously untouched by the flames.
God, creation, and renewal
Renewal has been a theme of Yoram’s work, especially in the past seven years. Even as we were fleeing our home in Beit Meir, he said to me, “Only good will come of this.” Yoram’s last name, Raanan, means “ever fresh and new,” and it was in this spirit that he experienced his loss as part of life and the cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation, which are also part of his artistic process. He had total faith that only good would come out of the destruction. And indeed, out of the ashes, the studio was rebuilt, bigger than before, and many new and inspired paintings were born.
Among the lost paintings was a series based on the weekly Torah reading, which for three years had appeared in The Jerusalem Post. But as we left the house on the night of the fire, Yoram grabbed a hard drive that contained files of that series. I had been trying for some years to write about the paintings, with which I felt a spiritual bond. I see things in the paintings that resonate with my experience in meditation and make me want to express what I see in writing. But as a writer, I tend to procrastinate, so a book about the paintings was progressing only slowly.
Spurred by the fire, I finally settled down to writing. The Art of Revelation, with Yoram’s paintings and my interpretations, came out in 2018.
When writing about Yoram’s paintings, I start by interviewing him about his artistic process and thoughts and feelings about the painting. Then I research the themes and symbols that come up. With Bokea II, Yoram spoke about how the painting arose out of scraping and searching, trying to find harmony in chaotic wet paint, and how “by letting go into the disharmony, by digging and searching, I find surprises and often gifts that emerge from my struggles.” What he found was structure – two sides and a middle – and the gift of rays that formed a doorway for light to shine through. (From this, the painting got its name Bokea, which in Hebrew means “breaking through.”)
The painting began with Yoram splashing paint onto the canvas in a chaotic manner. As he began “playfully exploring the chaos… I decided to impose the structure of two sides and a middle in order to tame the disharmony.” With just a couple of strokes, a doorway opened, through which shone rays of light, and I brought them out, allowing the rays of light to accentuate.” To the dominant blues of the painting, Yoram added iridescent pearl paint and glass beads for dynamic surface quality and sparkle. The rays pass through a curtain of color, both reflecting and refracting the luminescence with a pearly iridescent glow.
Amid the spreading rays of light, new structures appear: rows of vertical lines. I got glimpses of ancient history, arches, and shadows of people. Bands of red and pink add another dimension of color. Light is actually made up of many rays; it is also a form of energy that travels in waves. All this is conveyed through the powerful movement of the paint, which creates an opening for a softer, calmer inner light.
We began by seeing the painting as vertical; but in the end, he turned the painting sideways so that the vertical became horizontal, and the viewer not only witnesses the dawn but sees it breaking over the Earth. This brought to my mind how in the blessing for the renewal of light, we pray for new light to shine upon Zion.
What is the light of Zion? Our sages explain that the light created on the first day of creation was too pure, too holy, to be present in the regular world and was therefore hidden. The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that the ultimate purpose of creation is that God’s presence be revealed in the lowest realms. Therefore, at the very outset of creation, God made a “mission statement” declaring that the ultimate purpose of the world should be revelation. And so, in the future, in the time of messianic redemption, this light will be restored for the righteous in the world. We pray for the merit to see this light.
As Yoram spoke about the vibrant energy and the calm, spiritual center, it made me think about how important inner quiet is. Rabbi Itamar Schwartz suggests a practice to connect to newness:
“When one is in a place of quiet, one can dwell on this simple thought: ‘I am being renewed. God is in my heart and is renewing me every moment.’” He suggests that we practice this “quieting” every morning for a few minutes and find divine presence in the heart, and then try to believe and experience that “God infuses in me every day new koach [strength], renewing me from the start.”
We begin this new series of paintings for the weekly Torah reading in the midst of terrible sorrow and destruction, when it is hardest to say “only good will come of this.” But we pray for God’s help to fight and prevail – and for His renewing energy to rebuild after destruction.