Jonathan Boyarin provided an object narrative to the Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) Journal. Object narratives should, according to the journal, explicate religious images, objects, monuments, buildings, or spaces in 1500 words or less.
Boyarin's narrative is about an Ets Chayim (Tree of Life); the scrolls for a Torah.
This Ets Chayim, a Tree of Life, is obsolete, redundant, out of time and out of place. It is detached both from the Torah scroll for which it was made, and from its mate that once served that scroll’s other end. It is not supposed to be here anymore—here, that is, in a transformed, glass-sheathed, twenty-first-century Lower East Side, where the traces of immigrant life have been erased, sanitized, and gathered into museums, or commodified as “atmosphere” for an urban playground. Perhaps the act of marking it—noting its persistence beyond obsolescence, shorn of the text to which it was once an auxiliary, bereft of the hands that once grasped it and the congregation that once stood as it was lifted up—is a minor act of resistance in itself.
Read the full narrative at mavcor.yale.edu.
Photograph © Elissa Sampson.
