FACE TO FACE - PANIM EL PANIM: A Sacred Encounters Chevruta Book / Sharoni Sibony
Background
Before Atiq, I had been exploring the ways in which my body wanted to reveal its own wisdom. I created works on paper that explored the interplay between my self-care rituals for chronic pain and the ritual objects of communal prayer, set against the backdrop of different muscle and nerve tissues, all with an invitation to the viewer to consider how we can make our synagogues and communal spaces more spiritually centering places of recursive healing, strength, and support.
In the Atiq Maker Kollel, I was especially interested in developing the relationships among ritual, the body, time, and chronicity. But the pandemic has recentered my rituals and routines, and I found that the one ritual that has kept me most grounded has been the daily practice of partnered Torah learning, chevruta. Even though I haven’t met my chevruta partners in person, I wanted to create an object that we could share together in the physical world and that would embody the material records of our conversations.
In the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 63A), the rabbis discuss the dynamics of chevruta study, one arguing that two Torah scholars sharpen one another – like a knife? Like a pencil? Like a polished diamond? Like the engraved letters of the Torah themselves? This collection of passages from Tanakh, Talmud, Chassidut, and contemporary poetry open up different kinds of answers to these questions, speaking to each other of the interplay between language and creation, language and Torah, and about the ritual of chevruta study itself.
The cover images borrow that famous optical illusion of two faces, almost nose to nose, forming a vessel in the “negative” space between them. This chevruta book, like the Torah, is a playing field that two people can share together. It is in this sacred face-to-face encounter between earnest and curious Torah learners that we can perform tikkun and continue to reconstitute the shards of the world into a whole container again.
Invitation for Reflection
How do learning and dialogue meet in your own life? What are the texts that you cherish and
want to share with others? What themes and preoccupations do they reveal?