>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Debra Band: It's an extraordinary honor to be with you to share my fourth illuminated book. I'm so very grateful to Dr. Brenner for inviting me. Each time I come to this building, it's like entering a temple. But, of course, unlike a religious temple, it belongs equally to all of us, of all intellectual and spiritual paths. Now, this work is expressly Jewish, but its core ideas of fusing spiritual and secular relate to all faiths. This morning, I'm introducing you to my vision of how we can fully fuse our souls and our modern minds through this new book, which presents the customs and liturgies of one of the most important moments in all Jewish tradition that occurs every week. On Friday evenings, the Shechinah, in Jewish mysticism, the most accessible emanation of the divine spirit, enters synagogues and homes as the sunsets and Sabbath arrives. As we shed our weekday schedules and demands, she wraps us in a veil of ecstatic, exalted imagery that couldn't be more different from the imagery of our daily lives. Ideas about the beauty of creation, of divine wisdom, and energy flowing and sparkling through the material world. We express these ideas in a sunset synagogue prayer service, followed up around the home dining table, in a tradition developed by the Jewish mystics, the Kabbalists, of 16th-century Tifat, or Safed, in northern Israel. The companions and followers of the remarkable wunderkind Rabbi Isaac Luria. Luria and his fellows drew upon an unbroken mystical tradition stretching back through the Renaissance and medieval Italy to Spain, Provence, and ultimately Israel, as far back as the Temple Periods. The term "kabbalah" in fact literally means that which is received. Luria and his community of fellow mystics received a tradition that had been the secretive study of an exclusive group of the most sophisticated Jewish scholars for over 2000 years. And they revolutionize that tradition by opening it up to the greater Jewish community through this ecstatic prayer service, enabling the study of kabbalah to reach the general community. The whole Hasidic movement, beginning in mid-18th century Ukraine, in fact, grew from the popularization of Jewish mysticism that was sparked by the Luria kabbalah Shabbat tradition. As men and women of the dawn of the 21st century, who heard the news when the Nobel Prize was awarded for dating the Big Bang, I think many of us need more than biblical commandment or vague spiritual feelings or even ecstatic joy in singing beloved liturgies together to fully appreciate the grandeur of the relationship with the divine. This is true not only in the Jewish world, which is what my work deals with, but for all religions in our time. It is essential that we understand our relationship with the divine through not only the spiritual but also through the tangible and physical aspects of our minds. We live in an age when organized religion too often seems more focused on organization than on spirituality, and is being abandoned by much of Western society. A couple of years ago, the Pew study on religion sounded the alarm for all American religious communities, Jewish as well, that we need to find new ways of keeping our communities engaged in our tradition. Paradoxically though, the need for moral and spiritual rootedness in a frightening and nihilistic world increasingly so, has never been keener. To me, an essential question in religious life is how to satisfy the hungry and demanding minds of people planted in the material world of data and science and still give them a portal into the world of the spirit, of the historical panoply of religious community on thought, maintaining the integrity of the tradition. For instance, in the Jewish world, few have to be convinced of the importance of Friday night Sabbath dinners. But in my 30 years of interviewing hundreds of young couples toward designing their Jewish marriage contracts, I've seen that family Sabbath and festival dinners are the single most important, powerful conveyor of joy in Jewish tradition from one generation to another. However, at the same time, all the numbers are showing that the family dinner experience alone doesn't convey the tradition. That a Jewish feeling alone doesn't convey the tradition. That even singing the blessings and songs doesn't give our children, even ourselves all too often, compelling reasons to bond to our traditions. In our fast-paced, data-driven world, in this marketplace of ideas, we need to have a real-world reason to drop everything on Friday afternoon and focus instead on spiritual matters. Now we have to find a way of making it all makes sense, to show all our generations that the world, that our daily experience and the world of our souls are in fact one. I think that part of the problem is that too often organized religion requires us to divide our brains in half. Half, for instance, accepts the empirical science spun out of the theory of the Big Bang. While half of the brain believes that the world was created in six days. And I'd like to share with you the journey that has helped me to resolve this dichotomy, through fusing poetry and metaphor, paint, parchment, and gold. Let me tell you how I embarked upon this trip. It has led me to places I never expected to go. Now, I come from a long line of Jewish scholars and rabbis descended from the celebrated 18th-century Hasidic Master [foreign language]. But in recent generations, the family consciousness became more aligned with more normative rationalist Jewish rabbinic thought than with the primarily mystical. My beloved late first husband David was a NASA astrophysicist. And I found his and his colleagues work entrancing. His career led me to become entirely comfortable in the intellectual world of modern physics and science, and more than slightly skeptical about a more mystical approach to existence than that native to mainstream traditional Judaism. I'm showing you now a Hubble Space Telescope image of the extreme deep field of space. Showing us lights in the universe arriving now, or better in 2014, when this image was made. But emitted as far back as the early universe. So take a good look at this photo. You're going to find that it's a central image in the paintings I'm showing you here and throughout the book. Deciding to work on the gorgeous kabbalah Shabbat customs and liturgy, presented me though with a problem. Obviously, I had to confront Jewish mysticism head on to begin to make head or tail of it. Now, mysticism, as I mentioned, had never been on my intellectual radar. But at the same time, I knew it was a serious matter not to be toyed with carelessly. In fact, right at the beginning of my work in the Jewish arts, I was horrified at the careless approach with which I saw kabbalah misused in the arts community. And early on, I decided that I would never touch kabbalah unless I was prepared to pour myself into it. When my Song of Songs book came out in 2005, the renowned scholar of medieval Jewish mysticism, Arthur Green, sent me an annoyed email, criticizing me for working with midrashic but not with the cabalistic allegory on the poetry. So what else? Upon deciding to explore kabbalah Shabbat, I contacted him to guide my reading, so that I could begin to orient myself in the Lurianic mysticism that had sent forth the Friday night liturgy. And at the same time, I joined a little weekly reading group in Hasidic literature at my synagogue. And thunder clap, I discovered to my complete incredulity that the questions and concerns probed in kabbalah were strikingly similar to those at the heart of the scientific world in which I lived my entire adult life. Kabbalah seemed to share the same concerns as cosmology and particle physics. Questions concerning the beginning of the world, the unity of all matter, and perpetuating the glorious order of the world around us. Now, this was all very perplexing. I was absolutely certain that my late husband's, the astrophysicist, spirit was rolling with laughter at my colossal misunderstanding. But soon, I found that a well-respected astrophysicist, Howard Smith, who was here at the Smithsonian for many years and is now at Harvard, had explored this very concordance. And that other biologists and mathematicians had been edging toward similar if not theological ideas about the unity of all matter. And at the same time through my reading on kabbalah, I also discovered that the sages who originated key concepts in Jewish mysticism themselves understood the mystical realm of their own experience through the use of metaphor. Sort of extreme midrash, if you will, for rendering the otherwise inaccessible reality of the divine accessible to human imagination. And metaphor midrash, for many years already, these had been as basic to my work as brushes and paint. Now, many Jewish thinkers have written of the unity of the material and spiritual worlds. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in his 2011 book, The Great Partnership, Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, wrote eloquently of how science and religion offer not conflicting accounts of the universe but rather two complementary points of view. The first demonstrating the mechanism and the second giving us the meaning. The 16th and 17th century mystic, Avraham Azulai, seemed to strain to describe all the energy of the universe as the light of the infinite God head, which spreads from above, down to the end of all levels. And in his lyrical distillation of Kabbalah, the 13 Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz tells of how the soul swings between reaching for the divine and plunging into the physical world. That this oscillation is the very nature of life itself. In both the assent to God and the decent to matter, there is holiness. Never is any one-way holy sufficient unto itself. And it's only when they exist together that they constitute a real passage between heaven and earth. Yet, how to keep all of this in mind while actually living out traditions? Illuminating Kabbalat Shabbat would offer a chance to fuse our traditions and prayer not only with imagery drawn from the Kabbalistic sources and my usual combination of Bible midrash and archaeology, but also with science, astrophysics, and biology. This quickly became my means of broadening our understanding of the Sabbath to reflect not only a spiritual sense of the completion of the world but also a view of the tangible unity of all matter understood through cosmology and physics. As I mentioned before, we live in the millennium, forget millennium, we live in the decade in which astrophysicists pinpointed the Big Bang through the cosmic microwave background radiation. We have dated the moment of "in the beginning." So here in front of me lay my next challenge in creating an interpretation of Jewish tradition that would engage, fuse our emotional, spiritual hearts with our analytic, space-age, information-age minds. And many for the science and a real-world context for the mysticism. Off to the races. So now, put on your virtual stereo vision glasses and let's consider how all this works in just a few of these painted prayers. You'll be able see them all in the book. For the last minute or so, you've been looking at my illuminated paintings of Psalm 96, the second in a series of Psalms that lie at the heart of the synagogue kabbalat Shabbat liturgy. Who of us standing at the seashore amid the clamor of thundering waves and rustling palms, has not been dumbstruck at the dramatic power of the created world. And that I think is exactly what has caught the psalmist attention here. And so in these paintings, the singing of the wind through the trees, the roaring of the waves, and energy rushing through the ever-evolving heavens, announce the presence of God in the physical world. And if you look at these black and colored bands lining the texts, these present the spectral admission lines, effectively the light signature for the gases most prevalent in air. You can begin to see here how I confuse the physics, the material world of our daily experience, with the spiritual. Now, Psalm 96 is the second in a series of psalms at the heart of the Kabbalat Shabbat synagogue service. Each of which, to me, leads us to experience the grandeur of creation using a different kind of sense. My partner in this project, the scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry, who translated all the poetry and wrote the literary analyses, Raymond Scheindlin, a few years ago, he stood here to share with you his new book on Judah Halevi. Ray suggests that these psalms must have seemed a most appropriate way of stimulating the worshipers to meditate on the meaning of the Sabbath as remembrance of the work of creation. For them, the Sabbath was more than a mere act of remembrance. It was a reenactment and a prefiguration. By properly observing the Sabbath, the worshiper participates in renewing the original act of creation, helping to guarantee the fecundity of the world for the coming week. The poem Yedid Nefesh, Souls Beloved, is a luscious love poem and song to god by the 16th-century sought Kabbalist [foreign language], one of your [foreign language] companions. And my illuminations play on the idea of the passionate love it expresses between god and the human soul. Obzekrid [phonetic] describes god as the soul's beloved, soul's father, soul's light, soul's protector, soul's glory. Always returning to the intimate language of romantic love to express the depth of human emotion to god. Whether father, healing light, or protective king, god is the intimate eternal beloved of the soul. The microcopy that you see, the lines of tiny writing that you see, winding through the paintings, includes the full text of the biblical Song of Songs. The love poetry that inspired the themes of divine and erotic love and union that pervade Jewish mysticism. Other imagery, the intense love of a father for his baby. A gazelle, this gazelle nested securely in the forest floor, captures other qualities of the human -- of the warm human love for the divine that the poet expresses. And these scenes reflect also the unity of the whole biological world, the whole material world. Our history also unites us. The columns of palmets [phonetic] that you see flanking the text are adapted from a little ivory furniture plaque now in the Israel museum that was found in Samaria, and which is exactly contemporary with the building of Solomon's temple and palace. In the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, palmets [phonetic] patterns are described for those great buildings. And there's perfectly solid art historical reason to suspect that this pattern is the very one that was used in decorating those great buildings. And so I use these palmets [phonetic] often in my work, to allude to the importance of the temple as god's dwelling on earth and the historical unity of Jewish community across time and geography. There's much more detailed symbolism in each of these paintings, but I'll let you read about that in the book. But, again, the infant and the force imagery remind us of the importance of living our spiritual life through the wonders of the natural world that we inhabit. One of the signal ways in which Jews sanctify the 25 hours of the Sabbath is with the Kiddush, the blessing over wine at the beginning of the Sabbath meals. Now, in the Kabbalistic sources, wine is a symbol of divine wisdom. And the Sabbath is the time that wisdom flows most abundantly into the material realm. My interpretations of kiddush present the mystical idea of the wine's translation of divine wisdom into the material world through a mathematical metaphor. So here at right, the Hebrew lumination plays with the image of the wine fountains, with which many Jews share kiddush with the family and friends at our tables. These cups though aren't arrayed on the typical tiered trays but pipe wine from the uppermost to the lower cups. And this wine is much more than fermented grape juice, even the best. Instead, this wine overflows from one level to the next, following the mystical metaphor that describes how divine wisdom flows from the highest, most hidden aspects of god, downward until it reaches the material world, and finally appears to us as water. The 10 cups refer, if you haven't already guessed, to the 10 sefirot, or emanations, or qualities of god. And they're presented here in colors associated with each of them in the zohar [phonetic]. But what's this pyramid arrangement all about? Now, just as the kabbalistic system ascribes the number 10 cosmic significance -- for instance, the 10 sefirot -- Pythagorean philosophy, the beginning of Western mathematics, also regard the number 10 as holy. They describe the tech tractors [phonetic], the pyramid symbolizing the unity of the universe that's formed by the flow of geometric form from a single point. The four levels of these cups Pythagorean pyramid trace the development of geometric form as follows. At top, the single cup represents a single point. At the second level, the two cups represent the two points necessary to determine a line. At the third level, the three cups are the three points defining a plane. And finally, at bottom, the four cups are the four points necessary to determine a tetrahedron, the simplest three-dimensional form. The microcopy surrounding both these pages is the passage from Proverbs 8, in which wisdom, personified as a woman, rejoices in being the almighty's first companion from before creation. And how she takes pleasure, not only in being god's closest companion, but also a playmate of humankind, bridging the divide between heaven and earth. Since time is short, I'll leave you to find out about the English painting in the book. This is all about Luria's ideas about the sweetness of the sheena's presence on earth. I love the kabbalistic notion of how we draw divine wisdom into the world on the Sabbath. As we saw, blessing wine is an important means of doing this, but we begin the process by lighting Sabbath candles a few minutes before sunset. My own private prayer, after blessing the candles, in fact, asks for wisdom for guiding my family and to imbue my work. In these paintings of candle lighting, I fuse the light of the candles with the lights of material creation. There's so much going on here. Medieval poetry and [foreign language] historical women's meditations, my mother's and grandmother's candlesticks, and all that's explained in the book. But right now, let me just focus on the sources of light. First though, a few words about the origin and mystical role of Sabbath candle lighting. The ritual began in the period of the Mishnah, that is in the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, during the period of the first codification of Jewish law. And it was begun simply to light the Sabbath table so that family could relax and enjoy their festive meal and Sabbath rest together at leisure. Mystical sources though suggests that the light from the Sabbath candles adds to the [foreign language], the additional soul that flowers within the soul of every Jew during the Sabbath. Now, this [foreign language], additional soul, descends from the feminine emanation of god, the [foreign language], the divine emanation closest in material world. It's the woman of the house who enjoys the privilege of lighting the candles, reenacting the unification of the human and divine spheres, of the sphere of the emanations themselves. So let's focus for a moment on the Hebrew illumination at right. Let's start with the candle flames at the center. Their blue and gold motif represents the [foreign language], the divine energy flowing throughout the universe. We view the candles against the dusk sky lit by the setting sun, while the ever-evolving deep sky wheels far above our heads and homes. Now, this image is taken from that same Hubble photograph I showed you earlier, showing lights of origin so distant that it comes from the earliest periods after the Big Bang. The geometric painting surrounding the words of the blessing is a classical Moorish pattern, that was part of the visual surroundings of the Sephardic world, the world of the Spanish Jews. This pattern expresses the flow of all geometric form from a single point, symbolizing the origin of all the universe and the creator whose work we celebrate on the Sabbath. There's so much to share here about the beauty of the Sabbath and the fusion of the spiritual with the scientific, and there are many themes in this book that I haven't even begun to deal with today. But let me show you just two more pairs of paintings that relate to one of the most popular ways that we experience the material world as the Sabbath arrives. Food. Challah, the special braided egg bread that we eat on the Sabbath, is not only the first thing eaten at the Sabbath dinner, but the bread symbolizes all the bounty of the feast. And the act of baking it most weeks is part of my own spiritual preparation for the Sabbath. At right, I'm showing you a meditation and painting about the act of kneading the challah dough. And you can see in the bottom left corner, right here, a little blob of dividing yeast cells, that bit of microbiology that defines bread. Above and below the painting, you'll see a little meditation about the spiritual significance of kneading the dough. This was a remarkable find for me since these are the words of my ancestress pearl, the wife of Rabbi [foreign language]. At left, the blessing itself surrounds an image expressing the mystical significance of the act of breaking the bread. The shadowy winged figures represent the seraphim, who, as you'll read in the book, mystic suggested to him the feast. The two loaves are set within a view of the deep cosmos, again, that Hubble photograph, suggesting the all suffusing divine, and the hills of Judah burgeoning with the wheat harvest. And after the meal, after singing some songs, all of which are also here, we thank the almighty for the bounty of creation. Jewish tradition precedes the grace after meals with Psalm 126, that we describe as Shir Ha'maalot. And these paintings tie the miracle of the rebirth of the Jewish homeland, about which the psalm remembers dreaming, to the biological and agricultural wonder of bringing food from our sacred soil once again. There's some wonderful archaeology here. Imagery from Orr [phonetic], Abraham's home, from the first Temple Period and from the early Byzantine Period. But I want to draw your attention to the two agricultural paintings. At right, the semicircular painting shows a woman, the mourning woman Jerusalem of Jeremiah, traipsing away from her destroyed home, dragging a bag of seed. What she can't see happening behind her is that water, a symbol of wisdom and torah throughout our sources, is starting to flow again, and those seeds falling from her bag, they're actually beginning to germinate. Above her, the deep sky reminds us of the all suffusing presence of the divine, of the unity of the entire physical world. At left, we flash forward to the miracle of the modern rebirth of the land and the advent of modern Israel. The locale incidentally in both of these paintings is a spot on [foreign language]. Now, the dream of the resettlement of Israel is reality. And again we draw sustenance from the land. The fields and hills sprout with date palms, crops, and vines. And farm workers use tractors to harvest the bounty for which we give thanks as we end the evening. I hope that these paintings at your table will spur discussion among both adults and children about what it means to celebrate the Sabbath. I've developed a small paperback bench or table side condition of the home and table materials, so that all can share and discuss the text, the paintings, and the vibrant ideas within them all. So we see that there really isn't any division. Instead, we have a unification of the scientific world of our daily experience and the mystical world revealed to us on the Sabbath. We just need to put on our stereo vision glasses. Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library Of Congress. Visit us@LOC.gov.