Shaddai A plant grows from the Nile, the שׁ, primordial cause, rooted in the water, breathing in the air, the commencement of births, becomings, and of all flows.

A Beginning I will proclaim the name of Elah Yisrael: It is Yahuweh Tzavaot the impassioned one who speaks the yod & the heh, who brings it all into being, into shape, first with words & then forming substance with his hands. Far above the newly hammered earth, the unseen Yahu (O He!) sits at his wheel, creates & curates each little pot, all the animals, trees & men, delighting in the lettered forms he finds inscribed in his personal sefer ha’mitzvot. Now it’s Yom HaShevi’i

Seven Worlds God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly light. The third turn, nothing but pea-green lizard eyes and cochineal blood. The fourth, an angel with four faces tolls the caked air with a dead bell. At the fifth there is only a fagged-out planet and the light of dead stars. The sixth, and it is said, “the former worlds shall not be remembered.” The seventh, and the land r

The Cosmic Covenant And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, this place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. – Wendell Berry, A World Lost The cosmic covenant — what Isaiah calls the covenant of peace — is, in Robert Murray’s terms, “the belief in a divinely willed order harmoniously linking heaven and earth.” Murray casts this covenant as a kind of marriage: a union binding heaven and earth, God and Israel, into a si

Onement, 1 (1948) by Barnett Newman The Sublime Art of Barnett Newman The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical – Barnett Newman Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew schoo

Apeiron beginning; ur-reality: eternal, infinite, boundless, indefinite; yielding every thing through the actions of opposites: hot-cold, wet-dry, soul-body, one-many; and in time will decohere & return to the infinite beginning: genesis and decay, ceaseless becoming

Ecophagy God was striding the heavens when a snake emerged from a bone black gap between the wet green grasses. Six days passed and earth was in the belly of the snake and the cosmos reduced to a pile of newsprint. And God tore his clothes and made for himself a garment of lamentations but snake, pitiless, scoffed him beneath the apple tree. And the universe was void of life, except, of course, for snake and you and me (obviously).

Pictures of Eve I Adam cultivated Eve by swelling her belly with something so potent that it could only have come from the stone of a forbidden fruit. II Eve was striding the earth when Adam emerged from a black gap. Six days passed and earth was reduced to a pile of newsprint. And Eve tore her clothes and made for herself a garment of lamentations. But Adam, sated and pitiless, scoffed her beneath the absent apple tree.

On the Seventh Day On the seventh day God came down, dug earth deep and wide, buried Adam in the belly of the planet. From his grave came flowers and fruit trees, valleys and hills, rivers and seas, fish, lizards, birds, mammals, humans – lots and lots of humans. Seven million years later Adam awoke from a nightmare of holocausts, rape rooms, train wrecks, the rape of Eve. But being stuck in the belly of the world he could nothing but grind his jaw and weep for eternity to en

Microcosm בְּרֵאשִׁית was the command 10 PRINT "Hello Universe" 20 GOTO 10 Unbelievable, breathless, demonic even, how a singular point could yield space, time, protons, neutrons, chemicals – a bunch of ones and zeros, flashing on and off like little bits of light. But there it was: an actual universum, infinite in volume, brimming with dark energy and matter. And earth! Circumference forty thousand kilometres; composition iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium; a mean sidereal day

Letter to Iyov Before I had to chance to complete my creation I was cast down by the rebel angels and made to suffer this, my exile. Creation evolved and I was able to converse with man in the ear of his mind. It was I who hid in the fiery tree and called out to the shepherd. I spoke to my people in thunder. There we were, in shadows, in the fog of misunderstanding. I was there when my people fought