Ark at Kol Shofar

Each fabric panel is the width of a person. As a group, they suggest the presence of a minyan even when no one’s around. They are silk-screened with texts chosen by Rabbi Chai Levy which reference the cherubin above the original Ark in the Holy of Holies. The texts/cherubim refer to relationship and connectedness: that God’s Presence is found in the space between people.  The idea of these verses is to create visual midrash around the theme of relationship and connectedness, that God’s Presence is found in the space between people, that loving the other is essential to creating a sacred space of prayer, and that loving God is enacted by loving the other.

The sacred passages included in the parochet are as follows:

Starting closest to ark:

Text 1 – Ex. 25:22 – “There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you – from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Pact – all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people”

Text 2 – Ex 25:8 – “Make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in them.”

Moving outward:

Text 3 – Gen 1:27 “God created the human in God’s image. In the image of God, God created him, male and female God created them.”

Text 4 – Deuteronomy 10:19 “Love the Stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt”

Moving farther outward:

Text 5 – Bereshit Rabba 24:7 “Rabbi Akiva said: Love your neighbor as yourself – this is the great principle of the Torah.”

Text 6 – Talmud Shabbat 127a “These are the deeds… and the study of Torah is equal to them all.”

The ark doors are an exact representation rendered in sand-blasted glass of an 18^th century parochet made of velvet embroidered with metallic and silk threads by Jacob Koppel Gans in 1772-73. The original resides in the collection of the Jewish Museum, New York.

The reinterpretation in Tiburon connects the congregation to its largely Ashkenazi roots.