“Go into your
houses, my people, and lock your door behind you; hide for just a moment until
the plague has passed, then awake and shout for joy!” (Isaiah 26: 19, 20)
Shout for Joy! The Plague has Passed presents a vision of a post-corona
future that we have not known before. The book offers biblical insights for
exploring the spiritual essence of personal, social, and cultural renewal when
the plague has passed. It proposes creative ways for enhancing everyday life in
an emerging postdigital culture.
These insights are derived from my teaching
and research on creative process, digital culture, and biblical consciousness
at Columbia University, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and
universities in Israel. They are expressed through my life experiences in Israel
and United States and my experimental artworks in the collections of forty
museums worldwide.
“And it was
after the plague -- God said to Moses, ‘Go up to this mountain of Avarim and
SEE the Land that I have given to the Children of Israel. You shall SEE it.’" (Numbers 26: 1, 27: 12)
Why is SEE repeated?
Moses first saw the Dead Sea and the barren expanse of desert as far as his
eyes could see. Then, he saw the future of his people in the Land of Israel.
“Old men and
women will once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem. The streets of the city
will be filled with boys and girls playing.” (Zechariah 8: 4, 5)
Moses could SEE
men and women in their golden age sitting in the streets of Jerusalem while
boys and girls were playing there. He possessed prophetic insight to visualize
the spiritual essence of life in the Land of Israel as the joy of grandparents
watching their grandchildren at play.
He saw my
granddaughter Elianne and great-grandson Eliad playing in playgrounds in
central Israel. Moses standing on the mountain saw my professional baseball
player son Ari standing on the mound pitching for Petah Tikva Pioneers in Tel
Aviv. There were old men and women sitting with boys and girls watching the
game and cheering.
Awake and Shout
for Joy
The above text is based upon the eighth portion of Numbers (25:
10-30). I wrote it as a sequence of Tweets in the Twitter language of
postdigital culture that characterizes the post-corona era. It is from Bible
Blog Your Life https://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com, a blog that my wife
Miriam and I created to tell the story of our life together as a reflection of
each weekly Bible portion.
Updated Tweets from Bible Blog Your Life pop up throughout
this book to enliven the text and invite you to shout for joy. Albert Einstein
links the twitter of birds with the fundamental emotion of art and science that
finds expression in Psalms as “a sort of intoxicated joy and amazement
at the beauty and grandeur of this world. It is the feeling from which true
scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance, but which also seems to
find expression in the song of birds.”
Shout for Joy! offers conceptual
and spiritual tools to creatively navigate the untraveled ways and paths of the
emerging post-corona world that will inevitably change your life. You will
learn how biblical insights can contribute to your shaping a meaningful life
that integrates new directions and opportunities emerging in the post-corona
era with reviving what was most valuable to you in the pre-corona era and what
you learned from your experiences during the corona era.
It aims to inspire people of all faiths
to create a vibrant dialogue in changing times between one’s emerging life
story and the enduring biblical narrative.
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