Ilan HaSefirot

Spring-Summer 2023

Digital illustration and original writing

This work is inspired by the form of the Ilan HaSefirot, the Kabbalah’s Sefirotic Tree, by the Zohar’s poetic imagery, narrative, and musings, and by the paradox of the Zohar’s incredible use of words and its recognition that there is much that cannot be conveyed through words themselves.

I wanted to play with it all. To put myself into the mindset of what the Kabbalists were seeking to express, even where it is not what I would put forth. To play in the sandbox of imagery with the unfettered creativity found in the Zohar, and to bring to it the images and questions that are part of me too. To consider that the classical form of the Ilan HaSefirot has elements that are round, elements that are rigid.

Within each sefira is an exploration of key imagery and attributes and characteristics and characters associated with it, as well as some of my own musings on it.

I was especially moved by Arthur Green’s exploration of the narrative or movement of forces from one sefira to the next, seeing the flow as a way to understand the emergence of the sefira itself – the interstitial connective material is my attempt at visualizing the narrative.

This work was especially influenced and informed by:

Arthur Green’s chapter on the sefirot in A Guide to the Zohar (it is possible some of the phrasing is verbatim, quotes and notes got lost in visualization and in the creative process; a keener eye will spot this; I will offer thanks for understanding).

Melila Hellner-Eshed’s A River Flows From Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar.

To help get me thinking in detail about Netzach and Hod, I turned to the Brown Driver-Briggs Lexicon and the Breslov.org blogpost “Sefirah of the Week: Netzach, Hod.”

This work was initially created in Microsoft Word for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s class in Medieval Jewish Thought, taught by Joel Hecker, Ph.D. Subsequently, it was prepared for printing with Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

With gratitude to the scholars, thinkers, teachers, mystics, dreamers, creators, to the human urge to connect with the sacred and the divine, and the strength to recognize our limits.

May you be met with beauty and splendor, with love that is unbounded yet that respects and upholds your bounds, with wisdom and understanding, with a sense of awe and enormity and the ability to find your place in it all, with warm embrace.