Visual Prayer

What would have happen if letters could pray?

Forget everything and experience spiritual elevation?

The mystical-visual experience in Judaism does not exist in the same plane as the law that forbids the creation of sculptures or pictures in the 10 commandments. We became the people of the book for a reason. In Judaism the letters have profound meaning, much more then the eye can get (“peshat”, “remaz”, “derash” and “sod”). The letters have become a tool for spirituality, and they represent the ongoing dialog between heaven and earth, actual and abstract. In a daily prayer cycle there are three main prayers: “shema”, “kadish” and “the 18th prayer”, they are repeated as mantra making the connection between god and men stronger. Viewing the boundaries which exist between these two worlds, I came to the conclusion that the powerful combination of prayer, the beat, the cantillation notes and the trance that a person feels will transfer through magical observation into a world of symbols (letters). This will be added to all textual memories and be engraved in the mind of the observer in a way that will make the written passages and the feelings surrounding him through the prayer more signiﬁcant. I began my journey by checking the sources of the Hebrew language, deﬁning symbols, signs and the connection between them. I studied related texts of other religions on visual spirituality, and investigated structures and morphological segmentation in psalms in the bible. I was exposed to different Jewish philosophies that reinforced my designs an’d decisions. From them I concluded that a major part of creating a myth is the existence of a binary pattern (complete opposites): vision and hearing, unity and separation, black and white, thinking and experiencing (faith and sense). Moreover, another important part of creating the ecstatic experience is the forced speaking (the rhythm of the prayer is set by the public leader and the audience that surround the prayer). In this structure, the prayer is a gate to spiritual elevation.

Modern Jewish Museum Berlin

Permenant exhibition 2020-forward