Torah Tweets: A Postdigital Biblical Commentary as a Blogart Narrative
See http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com for the complete Torah Tweets blogart project beginning with Genesis. This project forms the core of the book by Mel Alexenberg, Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life, 2015.
Artists Mel and Miriam are celebrating their 52nd year of marriage by collaborating on this blogart project. They were married motzei Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday when the torah scroll is rewound to begin the annual cycle of reading it. During each of the 52 weeks of their fifty-second year, they posted six photographs reflecting their life together with torah tweet captions that relate the weekly torah reading to their lives, past and present.
Postdigital Narrative on Spiritual Dimensions of Everyday Life
"For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp." (Deuteronomy 23:15) ///// "Judaism does not direct its glaze upward but downward ... does not aspire to a heavenly transcendence, nor does it seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze upon concrete, empirical reality permeating every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the street, the house, the mall, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop of religious life." (R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik) ///// "It is not enought for the Jew to rest content with his own spiritual ascent, the elevation of his soul in closeness to G-d, he must strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of it - the world of his work and his social life - until not only do they not distract him from his pursuit of G-d, but they become a full part of it." (R. Menachem M. Shneerson) ///// "If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else." (E. L. Doctorow)
Torah Tweets
Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the Twitter social networking website. Limiting the number of words in our Torah Tweets bloagart sentences to 140 characters is a creatvie challenge that imitates the torah itself which does not waste words. Our torah tweets are like bursts of bird song that sometimes gain a haiku-like poetic flavor. 140 is the numerical value (gematria) of the word hakel, which means 'to gather people together to share a torah learning experience' as in Leviticus 8:3 and Deuteronomy 4:10.
