“In the network, God created media systems for creating heaven and earth. When the earth was absolutely empty and dark, God created light and separated between light and darkness (1 and 0, on and off).” (Genesis 1:1-4)
A creative translation of the first verses of Genesis from the original Hebrew offers the Creation narrative in postdigital perspective.
We can read the first word of the Bible B’reshit (in the beginning) as B’reshet (in the network). In Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew word et appears twice: once before heaven and once before earth. “In the beginning God created et the heaven and et the earth.” Since English has no equivalent for the word et that links a verb to a noun, it drops out in translation.
The word “et” is spelled alef-tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Spanning the full set of 22 Hebrew letters, et symbolizes media systems, from the original language of the Bible to the digital language of the Internet.
The term “postdigital”, as I have defined it, refers to “the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems.”
My new book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life brings postdigital concepts into the everyday world. You can see my photographs of the creation of world in and around my house here.
Media Systems Linking Heaven and Earth
The media system of heaven, the spiritual realm, is written in the Torah with Hebrew letters that form words. The media system of earth, the physical realm, is written with electrons and protons that form atoms and molecules. The media system of the digital realm returns us to the primeval binary creation of darkness and light, 0 and 1. It is written with the binary digits 0-1 called bits that form bytes. Every blog, website, video, song, and text that you access in the Internet is written with the binary system of the first day of Creation.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson, the 20th century’s greatest Hasidic leader educated as a scientist, recognized the spiritual power of the Internet early on. The Rebbe taught: “The divine purpose of the present information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge – spiritual knowledge – with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions.”
Create a Spiritual Blog of Your Life
My wife, Miriam, and I created the “Torah Tweets” blog art project to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage. It developed into my book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life. During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we posted photographs reflecting our life together with texts that relate the weekly Torah reading to our lives. We disseminated our weekly “Torah Tweets” posts worldwide through the Blogosphere and Twitterverse.
Photograph God invites others to create their own Bible blogs that link their unfolding life stories with the Bible’s storyline. Bible blogging offers a powerful way to express spirituality in an age of smartphones and selfies.
