“Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning” is a massive art installation highlighted in the National September 11th Memorial New York City. Spencer Finch’s work depicts 2983 separate squares each shaded a slightly different hue of crystalline-blue that together create a sense of the impossibly clear sky the day when 2977 people were murdered by terrorists in an even more impossible assault on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and another planned target in Washington never reached by the plane forced down in Shanksville, PA. The multiplicity of tiles whose number includes the victims of the original 1993 bombing, is a way of emphasizing that each of our own recollections and experiences of that day's loss are a little different and yet they combine to create an indelible memory. Across the installation is a quote from Virgil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
It has been twenty-two years since that day when the violence intended to erase, wove so many lives and so many moments into a fabric of memory. The color blue has become part of remembrance in the beams of light that appear like ghosts of the destroyed towers every year on this day.
The blue that activates our memory also has resonance in the Jewish tradition through the commandment of tekhelet, the call to place among the fringes on every garment a thread of blue that “we may remember.”
According to the Talmud this memory is specific to the color itself. Tekhelet is a royal blue, the dye made from a particular snail. That blue reminds us of the color of the sea and the blue of the sea points to the blue of the sky. The blue of the sky brings our focus to the work of sapphire that is described as the foundation on which the Divine Throne is set.
The question arises as to why not just say the blue thread reminds us of the Divine sapphire. Why start with the ocean and move through the sky? A possible answer can deepen our understanding of the power of the blue tiled art installed in the National Memorial.
The sapphire throne is too removed from any sense we have other than the very edge of what could be conceptualized. To be reminded of it is a leap of imagination. The sky on the other hand can be seen but only on a rare day is the sky so blue as to lift our thoughts to the gleaming sapphire. The ocean is another story. Vast but tangible, indescribably beautiful but a recognizable deep blue. So we work from the blue we can touch to that which we can only even see in the mind’s eye.
So too with remembering those whose lives were taken twenty-two years ago. The iconic images of that day are made of fire and molten steel. The shimmering blue tiles transcend these horrors and remind us of the color of the sky that Tuesday morning and move us to remember every individual whose lives were taken that day.
On this anniversary of September 11th may we have clarity in recalling the life of each person who was taken on that day, the image of G*d within them indescribable as the exact blue of the sky and the Divine presence even among the ruins
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