The theme of Divine Doodles is what happened before the biblical words "In the beginning." The major text of the Jewish mystical tradition is the Zohar (the word means brilliance), a work of incomparable imagination that purports to describe how the Infinite Divine brought the world, and indeed all worlds into existence. Unlike science that deals with observable phenomena, this text attempts to explain how the Divine light is attenuated so that we humans are not overwhelmed or subsumed into the Oneness of God. Zohar begins with a Divine contraction to make a spiritual void in which creation can take place, a space without God. God then allows a tiny bit of Divine light into that void, since without it, nothing can take place. The story continues with that bit of Divine light building for itself a palace or house, like a silkworm builds its own house, and from that house emanate ten Divine principals or qualities (Hebrew "Sefirot"). The Sefirot are the mechanism through which the worlds are created and maintained, from the highest spiritual worlds closest to the Divine to our own physical world. The forms have a "house shape" and the spiritual void and cocoon is represented by the opening in the center. Included in the 2008 Liturgical and Sacred Art Exhibition, Liturgical Arts Festival of Springfield.
Arnold Schwarzbart
The text
יהוה
The four-letter Name of God, written in the permutations of its letters used in Jewish mystical meditation.
Across the surfaces, with the ten sefirot in gold in the opening
Studio of Arnold Schwarzbart
Arnold Schwarzbart ז״ל · 1942 – 2015 · Knoxville, Tennessee