How to Fill a Room

Many personalities are associated with building in the Tanach (the Hebraic Bible). One calls to mind Betzalel, the chief artisan, who fashioned the Mishkan (Tabernacle). God addresses him and his special gifts in Exodus 31:2-3:

“See, I have called by name Betzalel the son of Uri, and the son of Hur, of the tribe of Yehuda; and I have filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdom (chochmah), and with understanding (tevunah) and with knowledge (da’at) and with all manner of workmanship.”

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

In order to make heads or tails of what’s really going on in this passage we have to bring up a number of intertextual links. For starters, the ‘spirit of God’ or ‘ruach Elokim’ expresses a sense of how to direct the natural world, in that ruach can sometimes be used in the sense of ‘directionality’ (as in the dalet ruchot ha’olam–the four directions of the world), while the Divine name Elokim has the connotation of God manifest as nature. Thus, the consciousness of Betzalel–whose name literally means the ‘shadow of or emulator of God,’ betzal-Kel–becomes filled with or inspired by the Divinity within that natural world. Biomimicry for instance, represents a source of inspiration for all sorts of technological achievements and serves and the basis for our scientific modeling. The ‘intelligent’ design in nature can be reconstructed by human craftsman and utilized as part of our Divine service.

The most important hyperlink for this phrase would be to its first appearance in the Torah in Genesis 1:2: “…and the spirt of God (ruach Elokim) hovered over the face of the waters.” For the sages in the Midrash, this is a reference to Moshiach (the Messiah). As a result, the design skills of Betzalel could be said to be of messianic proportions. Modeling the universe is a redemptive pursuit as we have already suggested in our previous articles.

In Kabbalah, the mind itself has many rooms. Less literally, we might rephrase this as the ‘compartmentalization of our intelligence.’ Certain cognitive abilities have site-specificity (a room of their own) but they are simultaneously highly interconnected (all the rooms are joined by passageways, doors, windows and common walls). The three generalized ‘chambers’ of the mind are that of chochmah (wisdom or intuition), binah (understanding or comprehension–a variant of tevunah in the above verse) and da’at (knowledge). The problem is that no one translation can really capture the nuances of these terms. In our present context, we need to render them intelligible within the languages of architecture and interior design.

Why was Betzalel gifted with these three things?

For the answer, we have to turn to another master builder–King Solomon (Shlomo HaMelech)–who is famed for constructing the first Temple (the post-Tabernacle residence for the Divine presence). Besides politics and real estate development, Shlomo HaMelech wrote a number of seminal texts including canonized books of the Bible such as Proverbs (Mishlei). If we jump to Proverbs 24:3-4 we will encounter the most important Torah basis for understanding the relationship between Architecture and Interior Design:

“By wisdom (chochmah) a house is built; and by understanding (tevunah) it is established; and by knowledge (da’at) its rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.”

By reiterating the threefold cognitive powers that were given over to Betzalel, Shlomo HaMelech’s replication of them highlights the significance of attaining all three for the completion of one’s building. To build the first Temple he also had to have all three.

Chochmah, in Kabbalah, relates to vision. Having an inner vision or intuition about something that one would like to build may be likened to the planning stage. For instance, there are many architectural plans that look great on paper (or onscreen as the case may be) but do not work in reality. Just because I can draw something on a drafting board does not mean that it will be structurally sound, conform to known rules of engineering, satisfy the needs of the client or prove economically viable. It’s just theory. It’s an attempt to articulate pure potential.

Not every seed (chochmah is likened to a seminal insight) is planted. Not every project is pushed through to the development stage. For that it must advance to the binah phase. Binah, as understanding, entails the unpacking of the details of chochmah as well as the movement from what’s relatively more theoretical to the practical. Once more, binah finds etymological kinship with the word boneh meaning ‘to build.’ From out of a flash of insight we construct a full-fledged concept. In the same way, from the architectural plans we build our house.

Finally, da’at or knowledge has to penetrate into the interior. We might think of it as the conclusions of a thought process as in ‘to derive knowledge.’ For any finished mental product, we must pass through all three levels of cognition with da’at as the last stop.

Da’at too fills rooms. But which rooms are these? They are the different aspects of our inner subjective experience. In particular, they are the emotions of the heart. Aesthetically and spiritually speaking, houses should evoke emotion. They need to be permeated with feeling.

Perhaps the most famous use of da’at is knowing someone in the Biblical sense–a euphemism for procreative relations as in Genesis 4:1 “And Adam knew his wife Eve; and she conceived…”.  The creative union enacted by da’at transports the content of my consciousness (muda’ut also from da’at) down into the emotive sphere.

In the Zohar, da’at is called ‘the key that includes the six’ i.e. the six emotions. Emotion is e-motion–to put into motion (an insight of psychologist Rollo May). We appropriate spatial metaphors all the time to describe our feelings: I’m high or low, attracted (forward) or repulsed (backward), liberal or conservative (a left-right bias). Lurianic Kabbalah echoes this idea, with the statement that da’at is the soul of zeir anpin (literally the small face). Zeir anpin is the constellation of emotive qualities or character attributes that are correlated with the six extremities of space. Its ‘smallness’ may be understood in a number of ways: ‘Small’ implies ‘immaturity’–like a young child who is all emotion and cannot be reasoned with. ‘Small’ can also mean ‘limited’ or ‘brief’ in terms of time frame. My mood ring rapidly changes colors. Emotions are ephemeral. They shift constantly. As the soul of our emotions, consciousness (da’at or muda’ut) ‘opens’ up our feelings. It enlivens our senses.

Our verse in question sets up a two-fold parallel to architecture and interior design:

One, we are speaking of the unfolding of consciousness from theoretical insight to a fully realized conception that is built-out but then becomes inhabited by our own connection to it. Living within this object we develop feeling for and from it. Two, Divine cosmology follows the exact same pattern as God creates in this manner.

In fact, we have worked backwards and rediscovered the nature of Divine creativity from our first person experience of human creativity. In Psalms (104: 24) we find: “Everything You have made with wisdom (chochmah).” God is even said to look into the Torah as the blueprint of Creation, in order to actualize that Creation. From Torah as the architectural blue print, God takes that set of instructions and executes them in order for the heavens and the earth to be put into place. Once the concrete is poured and the house is framed, the interior design work must begin to furnish its rooms (i.e. the various aspects of Creation).  The consummation of any building process, therefore, is its interior design.

Since chederim (rooms) are mentioned in the verse we might want to know how many? What are the basic archetypal rooms that require interior design? As stated before in our last article, malchut or kingdom is the house itself. In Kabbalah, there are six emotions of middot that shine forth as they are manifested through our domain of influence or are communicated as part of our overall self-expression. Emotions, inner experience, and even consciousness itself, may be ‘housed’ in Language. Language is the ‘house’ of our being (ontic) and not just the ‘house of Being’ (ontological).

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

The initial three of these six emotions–lovingkindness (chessed), severity (gevurah), tiferet (beauty) are all alluded to in the word for “room” (cheder) itself. Spelled chet, dalet, reish– [חדר]–the acronym formed corresponds to chessed (lovingkindness), din (an alternative term for gevurah or severity which means judgment) and rachamim (mercy or compassion–the inner dimension of tiferet or beauty as taught in Kabbalah). Thus, our first three rooms inaugurate dialectical tensions of attraction (lovingkindness), repulsion (severity) and synthesis (beauty).

The second three rooms relate to the first three much like the secondary colors relate to primary colors. Derivative in nature, they are not pure emotions but behavior modes that  bestow character to a person. Sometimes, in Kabbalah we differentiate them by upholding a distinction between aroused emotions (stimulus required) and innate emotions (automatic or entrenched response). Embedded both in the self and in this verse from Proverbs, these second three ‘rooms’ fill out the first three with precious and pleasant riches. In the Hebrew original, “precious” (hon), “riches” (yakar) and “pleasant” (na’im) have as their first letters hei (for hon), yud (for yakar) and nun (for na’im) which match the next three emotive spheres (those which are classified as behavioral in character): hod (spender or acknowledgment), yesod (foundation) and netzach (victory or endurance).

Each of these second three reflect in a certain way the first three. So in total we have six ‘types’ of rooms in our ideal house. Six rooms that we must decorate and design. Six rooms to fill with spiritual knowledge or consciousness that can circulate within them and penetrate within us.

In Part Five, each of these familiar rooms will have new kabbalistic dimensions superadded as we walk through them.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/inspiring-interior-design-part-5/

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