I am haunted by these photos.
Back in the not-so-olden days, Israelis used to make fun of the so-called "ugly American" tourist, caricatured as obnoxious, overweight and tacky, with the telltale camera dangling from the neck. Yehuda Amichai's classic poem Tourists expressed that disdain:
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.
"But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family.
Amichai was right about the need to focus on the real, living person rather than the ancient artifact. I have stood near those very same steps a thousand times, and each time I have been captivated by the person holding the vegetables, not the old dusty stones. I’ve taken thousands of photos of people, in Israel and elsewhere, and especially of children. For in those faces I see the image of God.
One of the most dramatic moments of any visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem is when entering the Hall of Names, where the visitor stands suspended between two cones. If you look up, you’ll see a display featuring 600 photographs of Holocaust victims, and their faces are reflected in the waters below. And from there the visitor goes immediately right to one of the brightest and most photogenic sights imaginable, a vista of the bustling hills of modern Jerusalem. But it is the faces of the victims that are indelibly burnt into our souls. Yad Vashem’s Shoah online database now has accumulated more than four million eight hundred thousand names.
And now to those millions we must add the 1,400 from the war that began on October 7, a conflict that will soon have its own database, it’s own memorial - and quite likely its own Yad Vashem. Tourists will flock there some day, to see the bucolic kibbutzim, the peaceful small towns, and the blood-stained monuments to courage and inhumanity. And we’ll see displays with hundreds of photos of faces, all depicting the image of God. We should upload these faces to our synagogue websites and project them on a loop onto our arks and JCC facades and our cell phones and on billboards in Times Square. A moment shouldn’t pass when we don’t have those faces before our eyes.
The word "to photograph," I'tzalem, contains within it the Hebrew word for image, tzelem. And the first chapter of Genesis informs us that all human beings are created b'tzelem elohim, "in God's image."
In Israel, the ugly American has been replaced by the hug-ly American - led by the gentle octogenarian from the White House who can’t stop hugging everyone in sight. American tourists are no longer mocked but welcomed with gratitude, and even that dangling camera has become an instrument of salvation.
I came to realize the redemptive power of the photographed face several years back when visiting an absorption center for Ethiopian immigrants at Kibbutz Merhavia, near Afula in the Jezreel Valley. As soon as my group arrived, the children began clustering in front of us, begging “Titzalem oti!” "Photograph me!" The kids loved seeing their images instantly on the back of digital cameras, so when I took their pictures with my ancient Instamatic and told them there was nothing to see until the film was developed, they walked away.
A couple of weeks later, I visited Yad L'Kashish, an artist's workshop in Jerusalem for the elderly and infirmed. It's called “Lifeline for the Old,” but it's really a lifeline for the rest of us, reminding us of the light that can shine from any human face no matter what the age, when people are able to live out their years in dignity.
After a brief introduction, the guide escorted us into one of the workshops. There, an elderly woman sat knitting by the door. She was demonstrating some of the secrets of her craft when I walked up, having snapped a few photos of the room, when suddenly she turned to me, gestured to my camera and said, "Titzalem oti."
I took her picture, which is amazing, because I was in a state of utter shock. Whose voice was I hearing? Was it the old Russian woman or the tiny Ethiopian child? I could understand why the kids wanted to be photographed because it's exciting to see yourself in this magic technological mirror, because it's cool. But why this woman, who at the other end of the lifecycle would ostensibly have had little reason to want to be photographed by a stranger? But she said it again: "Titzalem oti."
And in that request I heard:
Remember me! Let my life be made meaningful through your camera's eye; my years of enslavement to the communists, my long journey of exodus; the miracle of my return, to a faith I never knew, to a land I'd never seen -- and to a people who never forgot me.
That entire trip to Israel had been framed now, at the beginning and at its end, with the lingering mantra, at first playful and now haunting: Titzalem oti.
When we are asking “Titzalem oti," we're not merely asking to be photographed. We're saying: Imbue me with 'tzelem'.
See my face for what it really is -- a reflection of the divine image. See what is eternal in me. Love me, with a Godlike love. Look at me rather than at the Roman arch to the right of my head.
And those photos of victims from October 7 are screaming out:
Redeem me from a wasted life and meaningless death!
God looks like the faces of all the victims. In each smiling visage there is a spark of eternity that was so cruelly snuffed out. God looks like their faces but acts with our hands. And now, we are saying kaddish, not merely for all these beautiful human souls, but for a little bit of God, too.
(I first explored the themes of this essay in a High Holiday sermon in 2005.) | 
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