Kabbala Tensegrity (Jewish Tensegrities II)

Many Jewish people, enacting one of the world's oldest continuous cultural traditions, build a small portable dwelling once a year. Called a sukka, sukkah tabernacle, or booth, it is erected and used for a week in the fall beginning under a full moon. Many moods and motivations are engaged and inculcated by the practice. A sukka builder and dweller is physically reminded that physical homes are ephemeral. The sukka's physical embrace echoes the loving embrace of God who freed the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery and provided magical shelter for them as they began their long trek to the Land of Israel. The roof is deliberately incomplete, allowing light and rain to penetrate the fragile shelter; this porousness itself is interpreted as expressing aspects of the relationship between humanity and its aspirations, reminding us that we see glimpses of our potential, between episodes of darkness and spiritual loneliness.

The Jewish tradition offers complex interpretations of the holiday using Kabbala. For example: "We move out of our confined outer space (sealed, inflexible, housing) through the birthing canal to the greater world filled with hope and promise, looking skyward to draw infinite light to break into the filter of ego." The Kabbalistic model is rendered as a mathematical graph with nodes and edges (see below).

Three years ago we covered in this blog the Sukkah City in New York City (see post here). Since then the Jewish Festival of Booths has returned three times, so we took a look to see if there was any tensegrity innovation in this space. And, um, we found no new sukka tensegrities. But we did find some new images of the three-strut tensegrity sukka displayed back then, see below.

The use of a net with tensegrity brings to mind Snelson's mesh tensegrity, see below or here.

The original Jewish tensegritists wrote:

The sukkah is conceived as a simple kit-of-parts easily transported by a single person. Using the principles of tensegrity allows for a light weight structure that offers adequate space for rest, feast and contemplation. The net that wraps the structure creates a soft veil, transparent enought to be inclusive, but dense enough to create a sense of being. One enters the sukkah by lifting one corner of the net. At the top, the net dips down to become the carrier of branches and leaves offering shade and a natural touch. The seemingly magic organization of forces in space gives the sukkah a cosmic atmosphere.

Illustrations below:

• Kit of parts: 3 poles, a rope and a net
• poles and rope form a basic tensegrity unit
• plan
• the net wraps the structure
• one enters by lifting the corner of the net
• a simple cap connects ropes and poles

The sefirot graph above is quite popular among new age seekers. Domes and tensegrities are as well. Could the classic kabbalistic mandala be rendered as a tensegrity? Has anyone tried? Let us know!

Links

SO-IL entry to the Sukkah City in 2010: http://www.sukkahcity.com/sukkah/in-tension.php

Our previous post: http://tensegritywiki.blogspot.co.il/2010/09/jewish-tensegrities.html.

Kabbala: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah