Gates שערים / Naomi Schmelzer
Background
Questions of transition - how hard it is to move on, specifically from Shabbat to weekday, but also other transitions. What must be left behind forever. What you can bring along? what happens to what you bring with you? gates frame time - you pass through, then you’re on the other side. Can you go back? Should you look back? Can you invite others to go through with you? What might help? Does anything help?
What gates/archways/ transitions there are in Jewish tradition - havdala. End of Yom Kippur (פתח לנו שער). Jerusalem as prayer portal to heaven ( שער השמים). Baba Batra, Metzia, Kama. Illuminated manuscripts.
Gate as invitation. Gate as a choice. Creating a boundary in time, or in space,
and/or between sacred and profane.
Gates can welcome you into a home or garden.
I made an archway around the after-Shabbat prayer that asks God to open - in the coming week and every week - gates of light, and joy, and friendship, and more.
I hope what it does it provide a hopeful ritual for after Shabbat, as I leave Shabbat and embark on the new week.
Process
It all started with havdala - the transition from Shabbat to weekday. Divorce has brought me too many painful transitions and endless regret. And havdala sometimes feels like the hardest ritual to do alone. even the coronaseder alone was easier! havdala needs witnesses.
So when I discovered this beautiful alphabetical poem for after Shabbat asking God to open gates of all good things this week and every week, I thought maybe it could help.
My first gates were from the 3D homework assignment -
gates leading to different categories of Jewish ritual
- daily, weekly, and yearly
Then a beloved friend remind me that besides archways there are also gates that open and close, so I made one of those
and completely coincidentally, I got a WhatsApp picture from a rabbi about re-opening the gate to the synagogue after COVID
Now, again, poetry,
Violent, arcane, common,
Hewn of the commonest living substance
Into archway, portal, frame,
I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your
ancient and stubborn poise
- as the earth trembles-
burning out from the grain
-Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe, 1974
Maker exercises and conversations brought me to repeated prints of archways
and to a wire and string archway
It turns out there are archways of ‘ancient and stubborn poise’ everywhere
Gates of Transition
What emotional, spiritual, or other ‘gate’ you are passing through now in your life?
What’s on the other side - do you know? Is something/someone passing through the gate with you? What are you hoping is on the other side?
What does a gate actually do? Possible answers: open, close, exclude, divide, frame, beckon, welcome…
What does your body feel and your hands do when you hear/read the word “gate” ?
Dance a gate. Be a gate. Draw a gate. Sculpt a gate.
In the prayer we ask God to open specific gates. Is that “fair”? Are we trying to control/ limit the transition into the unknown? Is this just a way to submit a laundry list of wishes? Or maybe the prayer is an expression of qualities/gifts we’d like to bring to the coming week, to help us experience the transition, whatever it brings?
What do you think the prayer, and the gate imagery , “does”?
What gates do you need opened right now?