Image of the Week: Procession of the Ark
© D. Yael Bernhard
When I was a kid, I played the flute in my school's marching band. Walking in a group while playing music was amazingly fun. Much later in life, I participated in a ritual procession to the Hudson River as part of a protest march against water pollution combined with assorted Halloween and pagan rituals. I was one of three walking drummers who led the procession. Having been part of these musical parades, I always found the moving mass of bodies, animated by music, an interesting subject for a painting. My most recently illustrated children's book, Esther's Gragger, has a Purim parade which was great fun to design and color.
But most intriguing is the famous Biblical procession that surely no two people imagine alike: the procession of the Ark. Anyone who's seen the 1951 film David & Bathsheba knows the scene in which the people dance their way to the house of King David with the Ark of the Covenant borne upon a cart. A soldier reaches out to steady the cart, and is instantly struck dead. It's as if he's struck by lightening – an electric jolt from the Creator, incensed by the unbidden human contact with those sacred objects inside the Ark: the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments (as well as other passages of the Torah that contain the seeds of Jewish law), given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
Among the revelers is good King David himself, splendidly played in the film by Gregory Peck (did this role as the young monarch groom him to play the just and moral Atticus Finch eleven years later?). Divine spirit along with music and dance makes a pretty great parade – a combination that has been cause for rejoicing ever since.
And those cherubim! Fashioned of pure beaten gold (which I painted with both copper and gold metallic paint), their arched wings spread over the Ark in a gesture of honor and protection. The divine presence is thought to have hovered between them, above the Ark – so the story goes. Artists have rendered this image for as long as such images have been allowed. The earliest examples I found are from the 13th century.
But to me the most amazing of all is the presence of the broken tablets inside the Ark (along with the intact ones) – the very ones that Moses smashed when he came down from Mt. Sinai and found the Israelites engaged in wild animistic worship of a golden calf – a shiny object, not the maker of one, not the author of Creation, but something created by human hands. The broken tablets must surely symbolize the break of humankind from idol worship AND the flawed nature of humanity that is broken and remade. Having overcome error and weakness, like a fractured bone that has knitted back together, the new tablets are stronger than the old ones. This is just one of countless ways the Jewish fondness for forgiveness, or Teshuva (Hebrew for "return") manifests.
Teshuva is the reigning theme of Rosh Hashanah, when we take our broken selves and build ourselves anew. Out of our errors come conviction and clarity. Out of weakness comes strength. Out of our foolishness grows wisdom. Every year is a fresh start.
Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown tomorrow night. To all my Jewish readers, L'Shana Tova – Happy New Year!
You can find The Procession of the Ark in my new calendar The Jewish Eye 5780 / 2020 Calendar of Art. I invite you to view the entire calendar here. Your can order it from my webstore here, or from Amazon here. Many of the original paintings are for sale; please inquire if you're interested.
D Yael Bernhard