Shmaia Levy From the series “Celebrations in Hell – Ha’Oman 17, Jerusalem”, 1997-2002 Color print
Jerusalem, Surface Fractures
Group Exhibition
Curator: Shemesh, Shemesh Hedva
20 December, 2008 — 7 February, 2009
ladder-tower that is planted in the sacred earthly space; the world, the Land of Israel, Jerusalem, the Temple, the Holy of Holies, which anyhow expresses a journey in historical time/space, parallels Babel’s tower that sends a guiding beacon through the cosmic, redemptive temporal space.
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The experience/trauma of being shattered in all directions is also shared by the Babylonians and Jerusalemites. Both the myth of Babel and the myth of Jerusalem were scattered between the seventy seven tongues of the world, by those “confounded” “sons of Shem” that experience the trauma of translating the sacred utopia into the daily history which is wholly immersed in the ephemeral mundane; the trauma of translation into languages, places and times different than the sacred location of the original utopia in its original dimensions. Jerusalem, the historical city and the utopia, representing a hierarchy of sanctity for a location, for humanity and for time, translates the sacred body, the ideal, vertical-hierarchical ideal chosen people of human civilization into multiple entities that form around the Judeo-Christian-Muslim theological notion of syncretic pan-human redemption at the End of Days. Therefore we must ask: Is there a source for Jerusalem’s utopia? And if so, what is it? Was Jesus’ struggle with the priests of Jerusalem, for instance, a “translation” or a struggle over the ultimate source of Jerusalemite utopia? Jerusalem undoubtedly inherited the tribulations of Babel, the confoundedness and the necessity of translation that came in its wake, despite the differences and opposites at play among “the sons of Shem” in its midst concerning the essence of “making HaShem (name / God’s name).” Therefore, the sons of Shem, in aspiring “to make a shem for themselves,” exist and operate also within Jerusalem’s utopia according to the ancient lore.
Opposite Jerusalem, the Babylonian city, whose local representative is the Tel Avivian megalopolis, whose scant revived remnants are revealed before us as global cities of “capital,” “merchandise” and “societies of industry and ostentation,” keeps noting and translating for us the horizontal egalitarian utopia of the contemporary city where the spreading and un-hierarchical manifold strives to reach an immediate, creative/proactive reality, out of which perhaps, in the End of Days, the entire land shall become “of one language and of one speech.” In the meantime, however, the towers/mosques of the one and the skyscrapers of the other are nothing but a symbol for the distance that still exists between reality and utopia, between the reality and the possibility of a redemptive and finalmeaning.Babelbeganwiththedispersionthatstrovetogatherand ended up in dispersion. But without a doubt, according to the utopian decree, they – those ancient sons of Shem and their progeny – kept gathering repeatedly until the ideal fulfillmentofutopia(intheEndofDaysofcourse).Doesitnotremindussomething of the Israelis? And what would be the next aspiration of Jerusalem’s utopia after the gathering of all diasporas and nations? What exactly will happen at its End of Days? Eras will tell, but sometimes days can be just as telling.
subordinate-effeminate-passive (as in the Talmudic account of God’s overturning Mt. Sinai upon the helpless Israelites like an inverted cask). And finally,themostimportantdifference of them all, the event that brings the Babylonians’ activity to an abrupt end: the incomprehensible “confusion” that leads to dispersion, vs. the awareness of sin that leads to the exile of the Hebrews, the sons of Avraham.
***
The peshat (literal meaning) of the biblical account of the Babel myth/utopia uniquely contradicts what we perceive in our mind as utopia, i.e. a vision that by default cannot exist in reality. The story of Babel, similarly to the myth of Eden, is presented as a utopia (non/place) that has already been actualized on earth in the form of a people “of one language and of one speech,” which strove to unite earth and sky and to preserve the possibility of this utopia in an existence that would last eternities through making a name for themselves (assiyat shem). This people are confronted with the impossibility of preservation of this utopia and ultimately become “scattered all over the world,” in order to try and actualize it again.
What is unique about Jerusalem’s utopia is that it seems to be comprised of both possibilities of the utopian revelation we mentioned above. On the one hand, Jerusalem’s utopia is feeding on the revelation brought to mind with “shem,” as a pattern for supernal Jerusalem, it set outs while aware of the failure of Babylonian dispersion, and as it strives within actual history toward its vision of the End of Days, it sketches on earth, in place and time, the pattern for supernal Jerusalem. In this context we may think of the Psalmist’s cry: “You hedge me before and behind, You lay your hand upon me.” Midrash calls Jerusalem “the eye of the world,” and this eye of Jerusalem is stretched between the pattern for supernal Jerusalem and her vision of the End of Days, while everything in between is nothing but one small tear. Like the Babylonian myth, this wish is also impossible, somewhat absurd, a timeless, a-historical perspective, which is deeply anchored and rooted in actual history, and feeds on it. And as we have already said, like the God who descends to see the tower that the Babylonians had built, she also gazes (like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History) at actual history with eyes wide open but at times also without batting an eyelash.
It seems that Jerusalem is Babel, only inverted. Jerusalem’s vision of the End of Days is a mirror image of the Babylonian utopia: following a universal catastrophe, different and disparate peoples “of one language and of one speech” gather to a single holy place for a single purpose. The Babylonian myth is planted very deeply in the Hebraic nation, and not in vain does it appear in its holiest book as an additional version of the myth of man’s fall from Eden. It is this myth that repeatedly divides the nation into two different worldviews, ideologies, utopias, while both and at the same time it is the myth that unites the nation on the basis of the eternal and indefatigable return/striving to ultimately encounter Jerusalem’s vision of the End of Days; the symbolic
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Jerusalem is absent. From the accounts that follow the Flood and precede the story of Babel, which discuss the detailed genealogy of the division of the “sons of Shem” into their families, we infer that the city builders who wished to make a “shem” (name) for themselves were descended from Shem, and from the ensuing description of the Shem dynasty after the Flood thru Avraham, the father of the Israelite nation, we learn that the trauma that the Semitic race suffered following the initial attempt to likroh beShem (“call by name”), forms an inseparable part of the legacy of that nation. And in other words, Jerusalem the city of God where the deity is destined to leave its shem (name) to dwell, sets out on a path of travails and roving, with the words “Go forth from your native land” – without mentioning that land by name even once in the entire Pentateuch. Jerusalem’s part is not made explicit immediately, but is constructed at great length with the complete inversion of the motifs that construct the Babel myth.
I will firstrelatetotheconstitutiveandimportantmotifthatsetsthesecitiesapart:thetime/space, the sense of the primordial-cyclical time of eras, situating the minutest human endeavors in an archetypal time/space of sorts that is eternal, circular, in each and every one of the verses of the Babylonian myth; versus the time/space in Avraham’s “Go forth from your native land” which is earthly, historical, narrative-based, disintegrating into molecules; and the independent, different tone of each and every verb that constructs it: “And the whole earth was of one language…” – eras; “as they migrated,” “they came upon,” and settled” – one era and many eras. Later they speak amongst themselves, “And they said one to another,” with fraternal enthusiasm that indicates they shared common worship rites, “let us make bricks,” “let us build!,” and the divine logic of the hearts that unites them “to make a name for ourselves, else we shall be scattered…” Human remnant in the new world, on a journey of flightfromthe shock of Flood toward a rite-act that would protect them from the laws of nature and history that are disrupting the serene existence with tremendous catastrophes. The people speak to themselves, without receiving orders, without a leader, without a pillar of fireorcloudtoleadtheway,butonlyonthebasisoftheprimevalcallofsurvival that would sustain the community: “to make a name,” that is, to reconstitute the primordial space and time that had been destroyed, with a city and a tower-temple that would connect them with the skies, with the timeless, to abolish the infinitetimeand contingency of history. Babel and Jerusalem maintain the same relationship: a “choosing” people vs. the “chosen,” comes together and gathers vs. the dispersed and folded, findsitsplacevs.”tothelandthatIwillshowyou,”adiscovering-creating-logos (bricks, mortar) vs. miraculous redemption (the splitting of the Red Sea, the manna …), a signified-present-witnessingGodvs.anabsent-discovered-signifyingGod, making a shem (name) vs. carrying HaShem (God’s name), a mythical universal language vs. a separate-secluding sacred language, the actualized/ideal vs. the messianic/ideal, a constitutive-phallic-passionate people (“let us”) vs. a people that areto make a shem (“name”) for themselves, that is, to build a city that would occupy the world entirely, at whose a heart tower-temple would carry this name from the earth to the sky, from one extremity of the world to the other, in order to prevent the corruptive, destructive dispersion. They seek to create the world in their image and in their likeness and to present it as a whole, harmonious world-offering to a whole, perfect God. And they succeed; they nearly achieve their objective, as the text attests: “Nothing that they may propose to do will be beyond their reach.” That is, they did not give up on their plans for building the city, but only “ceased” temporarily, because miraculously the ultimate utopian city is brought to an abrupt, immediate end by the biblical text-God, which constitutes and negates it both at the same time. That which they had feared came to pass, as the Bible has it, “upon the face of all the earth”; they were confounded, but there is no hint in the text that anything prevents them from returning some day to complete what in any event “will not be beyond their reach…”
***
Although I have already implied this, it is important for me to emphasize: the utopian pretention found in the myth of Babel is sky high, so to speak: earth (city) and sky (tower) come together to create a closed system, with the passion that strives toward an absolute, God-like “shem” (a play on words that means either/both name the biblical Shem), at the heart of which human community functions. Yet this is not at all the secular “city of man” that had committed the sin of hubris which is juxtaposed against the “city of God,” Jerusalem, as several traditional or naïve modern interpretations try to imply. Not a single extant text from ancient times depicts a human community that was not entirely devoted to the worship of some deity or other. Without a doubt, in the myth of Babel as in all of the Babylonian cities of that era, the tower served as a symbol connecting the temple at the heart of the city-earth-world with the skies. After all, the pre-biblical name Babel (as is Jerusalem’s in an oblique way), which several capital cities boasted, is clearly theophoric: that is, it contains the deity’s name; since Babel means bah – father and bel – god, i.e. father-god; or bab – gate and el – god, i.e. the gate of God. How did the meaning of the same word, Babel, transform into confoundedness and confusion (blilah and bilbul in Hebrew, derived from the Hebrew consonantal root b.l.l.)? Who became confused? Whose confusion is it? What was it exactly that the Babylonians “initiated” that agitated the biblical God so much that He decided to confound them?
***
God holds the solutions and man holds the interpretations. Reams of interpretations have been written about the tip of every letter in the biblical text in order to shed light on the many questions that spring from this pure and wondrous myth, which symbolizes the ambiguity of human civilization, and the ambiguity of “making a name.” But for our own purposes, we will study a smichut parshiyot in which Babel is present andlike to demand that this Jerusalem illumine these questions from within herself, in order for them to illume her in return with the harshest light possible.
For the sake of discussion I will assume that Jerusalem’s utopia will emerge from the sum of myths and ideas that are linked to the city: a “totality” whose outcome might be a “totality” of different “utopias,” or a “totality” of different versions of the same utopia. We have two sources at our disposal – textual/ideal, and historical/earthly. What are, then, the sources of Jerusalem’s utopia? In order to understand the unique features of the evolution of the utopia of the city of the Bible, I apply an exegetical principle embraced by a multitude of hermeneutical approaches, ranging from the most traditional to the latest in postmodernist deconstruction/interpretation. By this I mean the principle of smichut parshiyot (literally: proximity of Torah portions; in biblical exegesis: the study of the ordering of texts/narratives). First we will rely on this principle in our attempt to understand the circumstances of the two archetypical cities mentioned in the Bible with relative proximity, the firstactualandwhosecircumstancesare studied, while the other a utopian parable whose circumstances are vague and call for interpretation. The firstisthecityofEnoch,thepersecutedsonofCain,Abel’skiller/murderer, which is built within the very “historical” biblical continuum of the “world,” out of having its fair share of travails and roving, and which, in the spirit of archetypical primordial precedence (“father of all…”) that permeates this portion (Noah), it represents the birth of the tribal city of refuge, the mother of all cities and communities in ancient primordial civilization, created and founded on the pendulous movement between manslaughter (murder) on the one hand and the fear of revenge on the other. Since, Lamech, fifthgeneration(!)toCainspeaksaboutavenging”seventysevenfold” against anyone who would harm the sons of Cain, while the vengeance for harming Cain stood at a mere “sevenfold”! Try to image how many vengeance killings of the sons of Abel took place (but were not mentioned in the Bible), until threats of vengeance reached such multiples.
The second city, which inspires in us awe for the transparency of its rational program and its practical and utopian impeccability, is Babel. This city as well, like Enoch’s, is constructed from nightmares and alarm and from the travails and roving that come in their wake; but they do not originate from earthly enemies, from the fear of tribal vengeance, but from the dread of the holocaust that had just been inflictedonitsfounders, the fear of the Flood. The sheer destruction that the powers of the gods may wreak once more, and the dread of the obliteration of human society that follows the memory of the universal holocaust that had recently befell them, transformed the land into “one language and one speech,” in the profound, not the technical, sense of the expression. It will not be contrived to say that they consider a “refuge city” – a city founded on those sins, killings and revenge that had led to their dispersion, and in any event to the wrath of the gods – to be a secondary necessity. Since, they decideSo, is Israel (Zionism) disjoined from Jerusalem? Is Jerusalem disjoined from Israel? Although this notion was contemplated back in the days of the fledglingZionistmovement, the actual reason for this state of affairs’ inevitability is the return of another ancient, forlorn, historical entity that is attached to Jerusalem in Jewish consciousness – the reinstated Judean state descended from the ancient Judean kingdom. For, indeed, in its hour of need the Zionist movement joined the pack of Jerusalem’s suitors, but with the passage of time the city too was pushed aside by another entity, the reinstated State of Israel descended from the ancient Israelite kingdom. And on the historical continuum of the latter, Jerusalem is not a necessary part of reality. Hence, on the basis of “Hebraism” we may certainly talk of a renewed division into the two kingdoms: the return of the “kingdom” of Judea whose capital is Jerusalem, the pan-monotheistic “city of God”; and about the return of the “kingdom” of Israel, whose capital is the always expanding pantheistic megalopolis in the Dan area. It is easy to imagine Zionism in the wake of Israeli normalcy becoming completely dissolved in an all-unifying globalism, while the kingdom of Judea alternately seethes and atrophies as it changes its garbs incessantly (from a wardrobe of infinitelyremotepolarities:Reform,sectarian, gay and lesbian, Judeo/Christian, hassidic, Muslim/Aristotelian, kabbalistic, Gnostic, and other communities), around the kingdom’s charismatic center, the city of Jerusalem and the reestablished temple. A temple around which at least part of the “absent worship” will surely thrive and will also become a global Jewish hub similar to the Vatican and papacy in Rome.
***
My intention is not necessarily to take a stand in the political and intercultural struggle that has been taking place here since the establishment of the State of Israel, but rather to attempt to read the geopolitical map that is being drawn before our very eyes on the basis of the myth of history’s eternal recurrence, and on the basis of a quest for the seeds of urban utopia that were sown in the dawn of our Hebraic history (of the house of Shem) in our holiest of books, the Bible.
First I will ask, what is Jerusalem’s utopia? No city (place) is without its utopia (non-place), that is, without its primordial archetype or super-idea. Two questions immediately come to mind: (1) How is utopia born? (2) What comes first?Doesutopia,as a Platonic idea of sorts that exists “there,” create a city after its image and after its likeness; or do the ever shifting natural selections of the urban organism that take place in each and every of its physical, geographical, political and historical stages create utopia retroactively? I do not believe that the latter possibility is less mysterious than the former, in the same way that it is not more complex; and in what follows Jerusalem will prove my point. These are interesting questions, without a doubt, but here we will discuss them only insofar as they will allow us to understand one of the most fascinating historical discoveries in the annals of the human city: Jerusalem. Moreover, I would
the Jewish city the firstHebraiccity(thereinstatedcityofJudea)?Forinordertounderstand the ever growing distance between Jerusalem (Judea) and Israel, one must firstreadintothedepthofBabylonianconfusion(below),thathaspenetratedintothetranslation of the “Israeli” by the “Jewish” and vice versa; the translation by the Jewish on its religious-secular polarity and by the Israeli on its Jewish-universalist polarity. In this context we may say that Zionism existed in the time/moratorium during which the Zionist city was constructed on the basis of the “Hebraic,” but at a certain point, precisely when they turned to build the “tower,” the builders ceased to build it because of a certain confusion in their Semitic language, and from there they were scattered in all directions.
As a result of the dispersion, the confusion, which took place in the language of utopia, some of the Hebraic builders of the Israeli city withdrew from the Jerusalemite tower and stopped building it. For our eyes are not besmeared and we can see that there is nothing profound in Jerusalem save the three great religions that live and pulsate within it – all else aspires to become dwarfed before these religions, that are so essential. That is, Jerusalem is now undergoing a process of return to the historical city of worship, where the Jebusite and other nations dwelled even at the height of the Kingdom of Judea, lived in the city or its environs, and practiced their various rites. As Israeli urbanity is contemplating the very possibility of the survival of “Israeli cultural uniqueness,” and the more reasonable possibility of retreat into/absorption by the “international” cultural dilemmas, Jerusalem, with resoluteness whose conspicuous signs abound, moves/returns toward something else that is both a continuity and a development, or a renewed maintenance of that ancient thing. Have we not been witnessing in recent years a giant leap designated to establish a connection and continuity with Jewish history throughout the generations, with the ancient capital of the Judean kingdom in particular? And by imitating and relying on Jewish sources, has not Jerusalem embarked on a Return to Zion of sorts in the vein of Ezra and Nehemiah?
Therefore, we may ask what in fact binds Jerusalem together with the Zionist movement. What will be the essential difference, from the city’s utopist perspective, between the Zionist movement and the movement of Christian crusades of the Middle Ages, for instance? (And if we make a perfectly legitimate claim, that these crusades are indeed the historical gathering of the gentiles to Jerusalem, depicted in the city’s vision of the End of Days, then the latter movement is even closer to the city). Does Jerusalem indeed perceive differently each of its sons, the various “sons of Shem” or those “making a shem (name)”? Is there a difference not only between the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim, but also between them and the Jebusite who dwelled in Jerusalem in the days of the ancient Kingdom of Judea?
Jerusalem. As soon as I pronounce its shem (name) – since we will discuss here the essence of the “making of the shem (name)” by “the sons of Shem” – I am overcome by great fatigue and I wish to partake of the slumber of God, HaShem. I lay this stone, which has been turned by many, to support my head in order to dream this Babylonian ladder-tower, which has been transported to Jerusalem, boasting a long list of attempts to ascend and descend it: by kings, empires, warlords, claimants to the throne, sons of God, revolutionaries on ideological crusades. And she – once laughing, once crying; once she sinks into her illicit affairs, once she is sanctifiedbyherownvirginity;onceshe sinks into her sleeping-beauty’s slumber, and once she dances with all of her ancient demons. Not exactly an ordinary Angel of History.
Recently we have heard one of Jerusalem’s carnivalesque distraught laughs, while its court jesters – one a latter-day Pharisse, the other constructing Arcadias for himself, and the third (a plebian) salt of the earth – have jested before the city, vying for her reins. For a while, third-or-worse-rate politicians have been jousting before us in the city court, which is breached and open to all, and we ask: How was the city once great with people deserted by her great (Zionist) ministers? How did her splendor and glory turn away from the principles of their “Israeli” ideology? Moreover, we allow ourselves to quietly ponder that in fact Jerusalem is like a bone in their throats, and that Israel never actually had better days than when the city was locked behind
Jordanian walls.
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This applies to the ideological-political plane, as well as to the daily socio-cultural plane. It is therefore not surprising that in a recent collection of articles on Israeli urbanity, The Israeli City: The Last Hebrew City? (Hebrew, eds. Oded Heilbrnuner and Michael Levin, Resling, 2006), which reviews the history of Israeli urbanism, Jerusalem is entirely absent from the discussion. I wish, as a counter-response that is not apologetic but rather pragmatic, to pursue the implicit contrast between the Hebraic, the Israeli and the Jewish, and to open the discussion with the question:”Is
In remembering Zion, we recall that the appearance of the myth of the Tower of Babel shortly after the fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis is not a coincidence: both myths strive to encounter the Temple Mount as it appears in the vision of the End of Days. They aspire to encounter utopian Jerusalem and the earthly city: the symbolic tower set in actual space, sanctifying the world, the Land of Israel and domestic space.
By the Rivers of Babylon
Albert Swissa

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Shmaia Levy From the series “Celebrations in Hell – Ha’Oman 17, Jerusalem”, 1997-2002 Color print  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Larry Abramson, Jerusalem Rebuilt, 2006, Video, 8 min Editing: Gili Meisler  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, אתי אברג'ל, מתוך פנקס רישומי הכנה למיצב נדודים, ירושלים, 2008 עיפרון, עט שחורה וטיפקס על נייר  Page from the preparatory sketch book for the installation Etty Abergel, Wanderings/Jerusalem, 2008, Pencil, black pen and Tip-Ex on paper

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Meirav Davish Ben Moshe, Untitled, 2007-2008, Colored pencil and oil on digital image  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Silvia Licht, New Middle East, 2008, Mixed media on wood Wall installation  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Shaul Shats, Jerusalem – View from the South, 2007, Oil on canvas  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Tomer Appelbaum, Untitled, 2004, Black and white photo  Picture 002

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Andi Arnovitz, No. 6 from the series “All these Stones 1-8” (Artist’s book), 2008, Engraving, aquatint, sugar - lift and dry point on paper  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Page from the preparatory sketch book for the installation Wanderings/Jerusalem - Abergel Etty, 2008, Pencil, black pen and Tip-Ex on paper  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Haya Ester, Heavenly Jerusalem (detail), 2008, Linen and polyester strings, melted sugar  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Larry Abramson, Jerusalem Rebuilt, 2006, Video, 8 min Editing: Gili Meisler  

Jerusalem, Surface Fractures, Lev Ilizirov, Tea with Lemon and Two Sugars, 2005-2006, Video, 75 min  
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