Local Symbols

The Star of David is good against a Jewish vampire, but if we tried to use it on a Muslim vampire, it would just make him angry!

This wonderful joke is on the Warners' DVD of The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967, Directed by Roman Polanski). It shows brilliantly how local are our symbols.
Another example is to try and tell this joke to different villagers in remote places all over the world (like in the Amazons) and to watch how they react to it – I'm sure nobody will laugh, and if some of them will giggle it will be because of the wrong reasons.

Visual Palindrome

This Palindrome picture is copied from Wikimedia where it appears in black and white; I, using Photoshop, added the colors.
The Star of David is a visual palindrome: from every direction it looks the same:
From above as from below
From the front as from the behind
From the right as from the left
This shape expresses the concept that the opposites, any pair of contrasts, are united on a level, which includes them; like breath includes inhaling and exhaling.
The Star of David is the place where it doesn't matter if you are rightist or leftist, rich or poor, at the top of the social ladder or at its bottom.
It is interesting to note that this visual palindrome attracts another visual palindrome - the Roman magic square called sator, where each word can be read the same way from right to left and vice versa, from top to bottom and vice versa. M. Costa in his book about the golden section and Solomon's seal bring a photograph of a whole page of a book from the Middle Ages in which a Star of David surrounds this magic square.
The Star of David attracts also Hebrew verbal palindromes:
The word David (DVD), which appears in the name of this shape
The word Six (Shesh in Hebrew) indicating the number of triangles that surrounds the hexagon, which dwells inside this shape. Shesh is the stem of the word Shoshan (lily), the flower that looks from above like a Star of David. Researcher Uri Ofir claims that the Shoshan is the origin of this shape.
The word Choach (thorn) from the verse in the Song of Songs
"Like a rose among the thorns"

White on Black Star of David

Star of David engraved on a black tombstone 

Wilkiecoco wrote to me:

The photo is part of a series I took one Sunday morning at the Montreal Jewish Cemetery on de la Savanne Street. It is where my father and many other members of my family are buried. The photo is of one of the many headstones marked in the traditional Jewish way of leaving a small stone to commemorate your visit to the grave.

Copyright: Wilkiecoco from Flickr 

Star in daylight sky

Yellow Star of David, outside the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam
Tamara Eden wrote to me:

I simply took it because I liked the starkness of the yellow against the clear sky. It was quite rainy most of the time in Amsterdam so this photo just popped when
I saw it.

Copyright: Tamara Eden from Flickr.

Militant Shield of David

Copyright: Andrew Carton  2006 who published it on Flickr under the title War It Is which alludes to Hezbollah, who forced Israel to draw the sword.
Sometimes we tend to perceive this symbol out of context, but here it is hard to forget that it all started when David fought Goliath.
BTW Hezbollah is more famous than I thought - if you enter search word Hezbollah into Google you get 188,000,000 results...

Good Old Friends

The Menorah was for generations Israel's national emblem - archeologists found a lot more Menorahs than Stars of David in their excavations. Nowadays it seems that the Star of David is more prominent, but still they often tend to appear together, like good old friends...
Picture is courtesy of C. Holden who published it on Flickr and sent me the following:
I took this photo within weeks of purchasing my very first digicam. I wanted to shoot everything I could see. As we were in the Chanukah season my congregation was decorated. I decided to shoot this in order to remember that night. I decided to post it because it represents something about my worldview.

TikkunGer's Star of David

I like this shiny ambience - it glorifies the Star of David and suits its inner meaning...
Photographed by TikkunGer from Flickr (a very catchy WWW-name) who sent me the following:

The photograph was taken last winter, either in late January or early February. I just purchased a digital camera and was entering the world of photography for the first time in my life. I have no real photographic background or experience taking pictures. Anyhow I was learning the different features on my camera and wanted to practice with macro and super macro settings, so I gathered all of the subject items I could find to photograph in my apartment and began snapping pictures. This picture is out of my Hanukiah and is one of my first Judaica purchases, as I'm just recently becoming more involved with leading an observant life. There really isn't much spiritual significance, other than I'm trying to capture my growth as a jew in all sorts of interesting ways including through photography.

Copyright: TikkunGer 2006