I have created a real table with all of the dishes and elements that characterize a traditional home during the Friday night meal. Everything on the table – plates, bottle of wine, spice containers, salt and peppershakers and wine glasses – are made of glass, since glass is made of sand (earth) and the food on the table – like the fish for example – is made or, more accurately, coated with sand. The table also presents earth filled wine goblets, earth filled soup tureens, earth coated Hallah, earth covered kippa, the “Siddur” pasted together with sand and the earth filled consecrated wine goblet and bottle…

I am attempting to point out and demonstrate that it is not only the superficial side of humor that distinguishes between the heavenly and earthly. My intention was to actually show that in 2000 years of exile, despite the commandment forbidding other images or status, I understood that like the Far Eastern art of design – the Fung Sheui, the beautiful items of Judaism , considered to be holy and which every family enjoys once a week with its silverware, prayer book, two Sabbath candles and candlesticks and the white tablecloth – all of these are the aesthetic values that make Judaism unique, kosher and thus, heavenly, like a Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece that will never be desecrated or harmed by his admirers who will continue to hallow and render it sacred to them. The world aesthetic, starting from the days of Classical Greece, with the statues of gods and goddesses, the Hellenistic pillars and going on to David by Michelangelo, are values of the world surrounding us comparative to the order, cleanliness and purity of Judaism, and are an integral part of the Jewish culture for centuries. These are actually aesthetic symbols, just like admiring works of art from the western world to hearing the epiphany of a Yeshiva student who discovered something about the world or his life from reading the scripture and discussing a certain psalm.

The issue of desecration rises out of my secular-anxious side and, actually, out of the humor used in the heavenly-earthly verbal combination. The earth, using a play on words, becomes real in the sand of the seal, and it integrates with the heavenly, ridicules the divine and allows everyone to be touched by the holiness, while the earthly day to day, like the weekdays, are more local, shallow, popular and related to simpletons who do not obtain true sanctity.