Abstracts

Rachel Verliebter (Bio)

From Wound to Womb: The Birth of Infinity as a Site for Hospitality

This lecture will engage with the mystery of the doe, a biblical myth about the Divine Feminine, as reflected in the artworks of the exhibit “The Doe of Dawn” that was showcased in the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem in 2024.

The doe is a figure with manifold meanings in Jewish lore throughout the generations, interweaving love, birth, nature, deliverance, and longing for God. The Talmudic Sages compare the doe to the Shekhinah, the Divine Feminine: “The most selflessly devoted among the animals who has great mercy for her children,” she appears as the rainmaker, who brings life and goodness, into our world.

In Rabbinic literature, the doe of dawn is connected to subterranean and heavenly waters, as well as to the star of the morning, shining with the light of Venus. By virtue of her loving deeds and acts of mercy, God hearkens to her prayer. Through these characteristics, the doe comes to symbolize the process of redemption.

Every night the doe gives birth to the dawn anew. She bears both the pain and the bliss of labor. On a symbolic level she also represents the birth of the female subject; All the shades of woman reflect in the image of the doe, who embodies the revelation of El Shaddai—the fertile nursing God—in our world.

This myth depicts the fateful encounter of the doe representing purity, grace, divine beauty, and nourishment—with the snake, that creature representing the forces of evil, but also, masculinity and healing. From this union of opposites, delivered in pain, redemption is born.

Initially, the exhibit was conceived as a celebration of the feminine mysteries. But then the horrid massacre of October 7 befell Israel; a historical catastrophe of such dimensions that the Jewish people have not witnessed since the Holocaust. The attack targeted not only Israel, but woman at her core, the feminine per se, motherhood, individuation, and female empowerment—the actual themes around which the exhibit was supposed to revolve, came under attack.

Some of the works bore witness to the brutal negation of everything the doe stands for, while concomitantly conjuring up the procreative force of life and its continuity. During the creative processes in preparations for the exhibit, the image of the doe accompanied the artists in every sense of her manifestations: She is the one bearing bliss, bearing catastrophe, bearing redemption.

The exhibit as whole took the motif of the Shekhinah in captivity to further symbolic depth in the light of current events. The gazelle, representing also the archetype of the Roman hunting goddess Diana, standing for the Divine Feminine in nature, and the mother of all living was herself being preyed upon.

While exploring the link between the myth of the doe and the snake in relation to birth, this lecture will also reveal the connection between artworks and texts focused on the primordial image of the doe and the consciousness of infinity. I will propose a phenomenological comparison between the pivotal bite —which enables the creation and gestation of life —and Emmanuel Levinas's concepts of the "Wound of the Infinite" and “Hospitality”. Emmanuel Levinas, who introduced the notion of hospitality into philosophical discourse, situates the event of hospitality in the ethical domain. Through the ethical dimension in Levinas's phenomenology of maternity I will show subtle threads that connect the myth of the doe with its implications in Levinas's ethics: "Unlike the usual meeting between person and person, which takes place externally when the subject meets the other outside of it, in pregnancy one person contains another person [...] Motherhood, as a phenomenological extension of pregnancy, includes the dimensions necessary for "being for the other". She receives meaning in being allows meaning different from it. She does not receive its identity from being for itself, but from being for the other."¹

The event of hospitality has recently been resituated to the aesthetic domain: According to Dror Pimentel’s aesth-ethics the event of hospitality does not only take place in the face of the other but also in the work of art. Drawing from this reading, I will attempt to show how the image of the doe’s womb bearing otherness acquired new meanings in the exhibit, that in itself became a site of hospitality for feminine mysteries in a time of war, where the collective body of women—the mother of all living—was cruelly attacked, murdered, and captured.

Hosting collective prayer rituals for the return of the hostages, the space fostered moments of hope and rebirth, while its artworks powerfully bore witness to that which was and still is unspeakable.