כֵּיצַד הֵן עוֹמְדִין רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן וְרַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר חַד אָמַר פְּנֵיהֶם אִישׁ אֶל אָחִיו וְחַד אָמַר פְּנֵיהֶם לַבַּיִת וּלְמַאן דְּאָמַר פְּנֵיהֶם אִישׁ אֶל אָחִיו הָא כְּתִיב וּפְנֵיהֶם לַבַּיִת לָא קַשְׁיָא כָּאן בִּזְמַן שֶׁיִּשְׂרָאֵל עוֹשִׂין רְצוֹנוֹ שֶׁל מָקוֹם כָּאן בִּזְמַן שֶׁאֵין יִשְׂרָאֵל עוֹשִׂין רְצוֹנוֹ שֶׁל מָקוֹם וּלְמַאן דְּאָמַר וּפְנֵיהֶם לַבַּיִת הָא כְּתִיב וּפְנֵיהֶם אִישׁ אֶל אָחִיו דִּמְצַדְּדִי אַצְדּוֹדֵי דְּתַנְיָא אוּנְקְלוֹס הַגֵּר אָמַר כְּרוּבִים מַעֲשֵׂה צַעֲצֻעִים הֵן וּמְצוֹדְדִים פְּנֵיהֶם כְּתַלְמִיד הַנִּפְטָר מֵרַבּוֹ:
Continuing its focus on the cherubs, the Gemara asks: How were the cherubs standing? Rabbi Yoḥanan and Rabbi Elazar disagree about this. One says: Their faces were turned one toward the other. And one says: Their faces were turned toward the House, i.e., the Sanctuary. The Gemara asks: But according to the one who says that their faces were turned one toward the other, isn’t it written: “And their faces were toward the House” (II Chronicles 3:13)? How does he explain the meaning of this verse? The Gemara answers: This is not difficult, as their faces miraculously changed directions in reflection of the Jewish people’s relationship to God. Here, when it states that the cherubs faced each other, it was when the Jewish people do the will of God. There, the verse that describes that the cherubs faced the Sanctuary and not toward each other, was when the Jewish people do not do the will of God. The Gemara asks: And according to the one who says they stood as described in the verse: “And their faces were toward the House,” isn’t it written: “With their faces one toward the other” (Exodus 25:20). How does he explain the meaning of this verse? The Gemara answers: They were angled sideways so that they turned both to each other and toward the Sanctuary, as it is taught in a baraita: Onkelos the Convert said that the cherubs were of the form of children, as the verse states: “And in the Holy of Holies he made two cherubim of the form of children; and they overlaid them with gold” (II Chronicles 3:10), and their faces were angled sideways toward the Ark of the Covenant, like a student taking leave of his teacher.
(א) שנים כרבים דוגמא מין של עוף כדכתיב ביחזקאל את כרוב ממשח הסוכך, פירש עוף גדול בעל כנפים, ואעפ״י שאמר לא תעשה לך פסל וכל תמונה כאן התיר צורת הכרובים שהרי לא נעשו להשתחות אלא לישיבתו דוגמא כרובים דכסא הכבוד
(1) שנים כרובים, “two cherubs.” Compare Ezekiel28,14, את כרוב ממשח הסוכך, “like a cherub with outstretched wings;” they are a certain type of bird. Seeing that birds are both clean animals and move in a clean atmosphere most of the time; even though the Torah in the second of the Ten Commandments had expressly forbidden us to make anything that is like creatures on earth or in the sky, the reason why the making of the cherubs is exempt from this was that it was not made to be worshipped, but to remain hidden inside the most inaccessible part of the Temple.
The Cherubim. These are angels in the form of bulls and they are called Cherubim in reference to plowing. As the Talmud (B.Batra 12a) references the plowing season as "the days of karva" [when the ground is dry and takes longer to plow]. Similarly, Ezekiel refers to the image of the Bull in one place and Cherub in another when describing God's chariot. And, the Talmud [Sukkah 5b; Chagiga 13b], noting Ezekiel's contradiction, explains that a cherub looks like a child (i.e., a human). Moreover, Ezekiel was trying to rectify the image of God's throne by replacing the indicting image of the calf with the innocuous image of a child. However, the simple reading is that Ezekiel saw a combined image of a bull/cherub--as one and the same. Since, initially, Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and guard it. But, when he was expelled from the Garden, God put cherubs in the Garden--to work it (the cherub being a plow animal), and to guard it (hence the sword).
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Dr. Raanan Eichler, "What Kind of Creatures Are the Cherubim?", https://www.thetorah.com/article/what-kind-of-creatures-are-the-cherubim
The centerpiece of a typical temple in the ancient world was a statue of a god. The tabernacle (משכן) is different in that it does not have such a statue. What it does have are two golden statues of cherubim (כרובים) who spread their wings over the kapporet, the lid of the ark of the testimony. Above the kapporet from between these two cherubim, [Hashem] meets with Moshe and speaks to him. What, specifically, is a cherub? In other words, what form or forms of creatures does the word כרוב designate?
- Winged child
- Winged adult
- Bird
- Human-headed bird
- Winged bovine
- Griffin
- Winged sphinx
For we (Israel) are like a young boy, and G-d is our Divine Parent.
It is known that the heathen in those days built temples to stars, and set up in those temples the image which they agreed upon to worship; because it was in some relation to a certain star or to a portion of one of the spheres. We were, therefore, commanded to build a temple to the name of God, and to place therein the ark with two tables of stone, on which there were written the commandments "I am the Lord," etc., and "Thou shalt have no other God before me," etc. Naturally the fundamental belief in prophecy precedes the belief in the Law, for without the belief in prophecy there can be no belief in the Law. But a prophet only receives divine inspiration through the agency of an angel. Comp. "The angel of the Lord called" (Gen. 22:15); "The angel of the Lord said unto her" (ibid. 16:11); and other innumerable instances. Even Moses our Teacher received his first prophecy through an angel. "And an angel of the Lord appeared to him in the flame of fire" (Exod. iii.). It is therefore clear that the belief in the existence of angels precedes the belief in prophecy, and the latter precedes the belief in the Law. The Sabeans, in their ignorance of the existence of God, believed that the spheres with their stars were beings without beginning and without end, that the images and certain trees, the Asherot, derived certain powers from the spheres, that they inspired the prophets, spoke to them in visions, and told them what was good and what bad. I have explained their theory when speaking of the prophets of the Ashera. But when the wise men discovered and proved that there was a Being, neither itself corporeal nor residing as a force in a corporeal body, viz., the true, one God, and that there existed besides other purely incorporeal beings which God endowed with His goodness and His light, namely, the angels, and that these beings are not included in the sphere and its stars, it became evident that it was these angels and not the images or Asherot that charged the prophets. From the preceding remarks it is clear that the belief in the existence of angels is connected with the belief in the Existence of God; and the belief in God and angels leads to the belief in Prophecy and in the truth of the Law. In order to firmly establish this creed, God commanded [the Israelites] to make over the ark the form of two angels. The belief in the existence of angels is thus inculcated into the minds of the people, and this belief is in importance next to the belief in God's Existence; it leads us to believe in Prophecy and in the Law, and opposes idolatry. If there had only been one figure of a cherub, the people would have been misled and would have mistaken it for God's image which was to be worshipped, in the fashion of the heathen; or they might have assumed that the angel [represented by the figure] was also a deity, and would thus have adopted a Dualism. By making two cherubim and distinctly declaring "the Lord is our God, the Lord is One," Moses clearly proclaimed the theory of the existence of a number of angels; he left no room for the error of considering those figures as deities, since [he declared that) God is one, and that He is the Creator of the angels, who are more than one.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, "The Space Between", https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2016/03/the-space-between.html
Torah teaches that God spoke from within the empty space between the two kruvim. And Talmud teaches that the kruvim faced each other when we followed the mitzvot, and turned away from each other when we did not. What happens when we bring those two teachings together?
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Whether or not we hear the voice of God is up to us. Whether or not we receive continuing revelation is up to us. We can choose to act in ways which create the space within which that voice speaks, or we can choose to act in ways which will negate that possibility. The voice of the Infinite issued forth not from the golden statues themselves, not even from the holy text which was contained in the ark then and is contained in our scroll now, but from the dynamic space between the kruvim. God speaks to us from emptiness -- but not just any emptiness. God speaks from the spiritually charged space of relationship.
It would have been possible to construct the cherubs in a way that one was the figure of an adult and the other the figure of a child. Ezekiel saw it like this in his vision (Ezekiel 10,14) “the appearance of the face of one was that of a minor whereas the face of the other looked like that of אדם, “an adult person.” In his vision the message would have been that the love of G’d for Israel was like the love of a father for a son, a very formidable kind of love. However, in the Tabernacle the intention was to describe an ongoing close relationship. Seeing that it was impossible to inform us of the type of relationship which exists between G’d and the Jewish people, the Torah decided to describe this by means of the cherubs in the Tabernacle.
Make one cherub from one end and the another one cherub from the other end, etc: there is a great allusion here to what is written in the Holy Zohar, 'this world sits between two tzadikim, righteous ones'. This means, when there is a righteous one below to awaken the feminine waters, that awakening is reciprocated by the supernal righteous one to shower us with the 'male waters'. This is what the verse alludes to. The word cherub in hebrew, keruv, (כרוב) has the same letters as the word, baruch, (ברוך) blessing or pool.
Rabbi Zach Fredman, The Architecture of Presence
I have no idea what a biologist would say about the strange doubled architecture that is the shape of human beings, everything in mirrored pairs, the pelvis, the ovaries, the lungs, the chambers of the heart, the hands and eyes, ear lobes, shoulders and toes, as if God might have formed only half of us, and then with some non-digital magic, copy-pasted the other side. And then we were filled with lightning, beings that run on vibration, pulse, the beating of the blood a good sign of all of our wellbeing. But for better and worse our construction leaves us with a feeling of incompleteness that can dissolve when we are face to face with another human being. As Plato noted so many years ago, alone we are half circles, the sphere sings.
I am tender this week. I had fallen into deep winter blues, some unhealthy substance reliance, but it is lifted now. I am hearing the call again to build sanctuaries, everywhere, ceremonies large and small where wounded hearts can find solace in the presence of company, immaterial chambers that spirit cannot help but come down and plop inside. And I know how to build the temple. When human beings are face to face, when we play toward postures of lovemaking, when Marina Abramovic opens the ground of her being to faces unknown, when a child runs at you for a morning hug like a train all the inhibitions of love not yet learned, something in the design of two destroys the laws of plain physicality, 1 + 1 = 3. Deep calls unto deep.
Maybe the thing that unites all arts is the yearning that the work become a vessel for something more than the work itself to come and dwell inside. A song comes alive when a murmur of ears feels that by way of melody something more has entered the room, the poet’s marks on a page make living caverns for the heart, the chef’s dish, more than food, something which binds tongues together, remembers, fashions a portal for ecstasy.
In the wandering tabernacle of the wilderness, there was a single point wherein God's presence would descend into the world we inhabit, and Moses would hear the vibrations and the sound of God’s voice. The architecture surrounding that point was created by two golden cherubim set atop the ark fashioned from Acacia. But the cherubim were no statues, they were living, attentive, mobile. Their wings rise up to hold a place for God to live, when things are not well in the world they turn their faces away from one another. When goodness sails between friends and strangers, they turn toward each other, impossibly spirit suddenly can inhabit matter. The architecture of presence. The two angels represent all of the forces we perceive as oppositional, and the condition for divine inhabitance, is a face to face of those opposites. The greatest power is not created by force, but by tension, the dynamic engagement of opposites learning to live face to face.
The symbolism of angels is twofold. They are our aspirational beings, ascending a ladder to the heavens, they are a metaphor for our capacity to rise out of our animal inclinations and live grounded in our most majestic qualities. But their wings, butterflies of god, they are a sign of our own invisible but real energetic bodies. You can feel them. Stretching out from your shoulder blades sometimes they droop, sometimes they tense as blades, in direct response to the wellbeing of our soul, sometimes they rise in sweet tenderness with more delicacy than the intricate handiwork of a watchmaker or a master of the oud, and become the very instrument which holds the body of Shechina. Let’s build together. Angels face to face. God is yearning to dwell among us, and it takes two.