Sacred objects

Please reflect on the fact that rather ordinary objects can be transformed into special, even holy, artifacts. Are there analogies to this phenomenon in other religious traditions with which you are familiar? In the broader culture in which you live? Please explain your answer.


Professor S. Brent Plate of Hamilton College uses the comparison of humans to the narwhal's tooth-tusk, in that it "senses what it needs to in terms of temperature, pressure, oceanic particles and such, and connects with the environment through those data most critical to its survival in the icy northern waters." He posits that we humans, in creating specific religious worlds filled with memories and objects and rituals, do the same.

We humans can only exist in the world in and through our senses, and we would die without our senses, failing to sense danger. Furthermore, we are creatures with bodies, and these bodies learn about our environment — whether social, familial, religious, or other — sensually as well as intellectually. We interact with others, our world, and objects through our senses.

For Jews, tefillin and mezuzot and sefer Torah et al are, in a sense, similar to the narwhal's tusk-tooth. In fact, material objects play a role in nearly all religions.  Sacred texts, lighting Shabbat candles, baptism, coconuts and ghee offerings, mummies and preserved body parts, burning sacrifices and incense, these objects bring in our senses and are imbued with a sense of the com­­­mu­­nity’s past and used to make that past present.

Religious objects are liminal points, as are rituals and moments, and religious structures. These liminal points are not meant to be permanent, rather they are transition points which can act to prepare one to move from one state to another. Indeed, the entire wilderness experience can be seen as one very long liminal journey! All of Shabbat can be perceived as a liminal space and experience as well.

Even Hebrew offers us hints and glimpses of liminality built into the language. The root ayin–resh–vet gives us the word erev, or evening, the liminal mixture of both day and night. Of note here is that all the words with this root have something to do with mixing: an eruv allows the mixture of physical space, while the erev rav were a group of people who joined along with the Jewish people despite their lack of clear Jewish identity. They were liminal people.

Some liminal moments and objects are more easily identified, such as life cycle events, graduation, ordination, first day of university, beginning a new job. Others are “less grand,” like  the moments between sleep and “Modah ani l’fanecha…”. Even crossing thresholds marked by mezuzot are points of liminality marked by a religious object.

Life, really, is a series of liminal moments, and the main role of a clergy person of any religious or spiritual tradition is to mark these liminal moments of life, and assist in our transitions through them.

As long as there has been a human civilization, there have been roads and intersections. In rabbinic literature, these are seen as liminal spaces, places of transition. The Talmud (Ketubbot 17a) stipulates that if a wedding procession meets a funeral procession at a crossroads, the wedding takes precedence. Each are important, but joy and promise demand more immediacy than sadness and loss.

When the civil New Year’s eve is celebrated, how much time does the clock actually spend at precisely 12:00:00 midnight? The exact “moment” of passage from one year to the next is nearly dimensionless. This is to say that liminality can be defined as finite, measurable, located in time and space, and dimensional. It can also be defined as having  none of those qualities, but is, instead, an inner perception and shift, a “micro” liminal moment, as it were.

In this way, ordinary objects can be transformed ino liminal moments wherein our senses are engaged as meeting points with the numinous and spiritual, transcending past and bringing it into a very present present-moment.