“A lion has roared; who will not fear?” (Amos 3:8)
“Go into your houses, my people, and lock your door
behind you; hide for just a moment until the wrath has passed.” (Isaiah 26:20)
Close your door, but open a window to the world. While the frightening coronavirus pandemic
requires that you hide in physical isolation away from everyone, the virtual
world of smartphones and social media invites you to come out of hiding and connect
to anyone.
Lockdown confines you to a bizarre way of life that you
could have never have imagined. Confined to your home, you are suddenly offered
a quite pool of time to rethink your pre-corona life. A miniscule virus
invading plant Earth has set up a situation for creatively envisioning a postCOVID-19
life with greater meaning, deeper satisfaction, and spiritual significance than
your daily routine before the plague.
The novel coronavirus has turned life topsy-turvy in our age
of new media. Instead of parents urging their smartphone addicted children to
talk face to face with friends in physical space they are suddenly being
required to limit their interaction with friends to virtual space.
What Was is Not What Will Be
To use lockdown time to creatively rethink what your life
could be after the pandemic ends, take into consideration that the world will
not return to what it was. Everything will be different.
An online panel of the Institute for National
Security Studies in Tel Aviv explored how the world will inevitably reboot
itself after corona. The INSS director Amos Yadlin said, “What was is not what
will be. We will return to a different
world, where the corona impact will be on everything.”
The world has seen an altered world order emerge after key
events in the 20th century: World War I, the Great Depression, World
War II, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and 9/11.
Each of these events triggered worldwide changes that created new
situations whereby the world everyone returned to after the formative event was
not the world they knew before it.
Reboot your life after
the plague has passed
“The dove came
back to him in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its bill. Then
Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.” (Genesis 8:11)
“Although you intended to harm me, God intended it for
good.” (Genesis 50: 20)
“Reboot” is a word first used in the 1970’s “to shut down
and restart a computer” that evolved in the 1980’s to mean “to start anew: to
make a fresh start” according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary. The Cambridge Dictionary adds to make a fresh
start “in a way that is new and interesting.”
I use “reboot” in both the context of living in a ubiquitous
digital culture and of starting life anew in fresh and interesting ways after we
win the world war against the coronavirus that is not even a living organism,
but a minuscule DNA protein molecule that can invade our bodies and kill us.
The two biblical verses above offer insights for rebooting
your life by pondering how after the pandemic has receded from the earth that
it may have been for the good. The second verse are the words of Joseph to his
brothers who had sold him into slavery. His rise to become the ruler over all
of Egypt gave him the opportunity to save the lives of multitudes including his
family.
Biblical values offers solace when things do not go the way
we want. It invites us to accept life’s difficulties by transforming them into
opportunities. We learn from a story told almost two millennia ago about what
happened to Rabbi Akiva on one of his journeys.
He was traveling to a far-away place together with a donkey,
a rooster, and a lantern. As evening
approached, he stopped in an inn. When
he asked to rent a room for the night, he was told that all the rooms had
already been rented. Since there were no
other inns in the town, he continued down the road and camped in the woods when
a gust of wind blew out the flame in his lantern. As he was falling asleep, he was startled by
the shriek of his rooster as a fox ran off with it. His second attempt at sleeping was brutally
interrupted by the horrific scream of his donkey being killed by a lion.
As he began to doze off again, he heard the hooves of horses
racing down the road. When he awoke in
the morning and proceeded down the road, he heard that a band of robbers had
killed the people staying at the inn. He
realized that the crowing of his rooster, the braying of his donkey, and the
light from his lantern would have given him away as the robbers galloped down
the road. His response was, “This too is
for the good. Everything that happens
has a reason.”
A common expression heard is Israel is “gam zu l’tova” (“This
too is for the good”) when things seem to go wrong.
In the Beginning God Created Media Systems
“In the network of all networks, God created media
systems for creating heaven and for creating earth. (Genesis 1: 1)
Instead of the common English translation of the first verse
of the Bible “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”
I rebooted my mindset to think in the language of the digital age as I
translate from Hebrew, the original language of the Bible in which I teach and
speak to my grandchildren in Israel where I live.
This translation was a creative leap from the biblical past
into a new medium future. It draws from my teaching design of natural systems
as a professor at Columbia University, creativity for the electronic age at MIT
Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and Jewish thought and education at Ariel
and Bar-Ilan universities in Israel.
“In the beginning” in
Hebrew is read as B’resheet. In the world of science and technology, we
are invited to read it as B’reshet, meaning “in the
network.” The first word of the Bible, some 4,000 years old, is reframed
as the living network of networks, the cloud of Internets blanketing our
planet.
In Hebrew, a two-letter word spelled alef-tav,
the first and last letters of the alphabet (like A-Z in English) appears before
“heaven” and again before “earth.” Alef-tav is
pronounced ET. The first words of the Bible are read
as: “In the beginning God created ET the heaven
and ET the earth.” Since English has no
equivalent for the word ET that links a verb to a noun,
it drops out in translations.
ET is God’s first creation before heaven.
Spanning the full set of 22 Hebrew letters, ET that
appears before “heaven” symbolizes a spiritual media system. The ancient Hebrew
alphabet is a prototype of media systems for creating spiritual systems like
the Bible itself.
The second ET before “earth”
encompasses digital media systems. The digital media system is a binary system
of 1-0, on-off, light-darkness. “God separated between the light and
darkness.” (Genesis 1: 4) All that we experience in the virtual
world is written with an alphabet of just two letters, 1 and 0. Every photo,
text, song, website, blog, and video that you access through your computer or
smartphone is written with the binary system of the first day of Creation.
Breaking Out of the Frame: Inside/Outside: Panim/P’nim
“The Lord would speak to Moses face to face as one speaks
to a friend.” (Exodus 33:11)
I extended my linguistic reboot translating the first verse
of the Bible into the language of the new media age, to using linguistic
playfulness to create Inside/Outside: Panim/P’nim, a bioimaging system for
live self-portrait generation. It breaks out of the golden frames that have
surrounded portraits painted on canvas for centuries by creating a live
real-time dialogic portrait.
I designed it in my studio/lab at MIT’s Center for Advanced
Visual Studies for the LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the
Electronic Age exhibition at Yeshiva University Museum in New York. My
bioimaging system integrates real-time computer graphics with
biofeedback.
The starting point for this artwork is the fact that the
Hebrew words for “face” panim and for “inside” p’nim
are written with the same four letters. I explored creating a digital
portrait in which outside flows from inside and inside flows from outside in a
continuously flowing feedback loop.
I developed a system using biofeedback from brain waves
sensed by electrodes connecting the participant’s head to an
electroencephalograph. For the museum, however, difficulty placing
electrodes on people’s heads required that I redesign the system. I built
a console in which a participant seated in front of a monitor would place a
finger in a plethysmograph, which measures internal body states by monitoring
blood flow, while under the gaze of a video camera.
A feedback loop is created in which changes in one’s
internal mind/body state changes a video image of one’s external self. It
is a video/computer graphics self-portrait painted by the dialogue between
one’s inner body processes and one’s virtual image.
A person sits before a video camera. Her body is
connected to a biofeedback sensor. She watches a real-time naturalistic
image of herself on the video monitor. Information about her internal
mind/body processes is digitized and conveyed to the central processing unit of
the computer system. The video image is modified by a specially designed
software package that I created with my MIT graduate students.
It can be modified by changing color or size, by stretching,
elongating, extending, rotating, replicating, superimposition or by other
computer graphics effects. For example, the participant sees herself turn
green and is shocked by the sight. The shock, in turn, changes the
biofeedback information causing the computer to modify her self-portrait
again. Her green face now becomes elongated. Changes in body processes
affect changes in the video image. The perceived video image, in turn,
stimulates the mind/body changes, and so on in a continuous feedback loop like
the unending flow of a Torah scroll.
Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphones
and Social Media
“Awake and shout for joy” (Isaiah 26:19) when
the curtain comes down at the end of the plague.
These insights can open opportunities for creatively
rethinking and reshaping your life for the better. When you shout for joy that
the plague has passed, you will have had a time confined at home to explore
alternative ways to enrich your future.
The book demonstrates to people of all faiths how biblical
insights can transform life, in good times and bad, into imaginative ways of
seeing spirituality in all that we do.
The spiritual power of digital culture in shaping the future
was recognized early on by the
Lubavicher Rebbe, the 20th century’s great Jewish leader who was educated as a
scientist. He wrote:
“The Divine purpose
of the present information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented
power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge – spiritual knowledge
– with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to
use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to
interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of
our souls, our hearts, our visions.”
This article was published in The Times of Israel, March 31, 2020
