The Gate of the Faith, Old Jaffa

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Daniel's crowning achievement in sculpture, The Gate of the Faith, was commissioned in 1974, one year after the Yom Kippur War, by Mordechai Meir, the owner of the Shalom Tower, in Tel Aviv. Initially, Meir intended to put the sculpture on the Tel Aviv beachfront, but the sculpture was ultimately placed in Old Jaffa. In making the commission, he gave Kari a free hand in determining its subject and design. Daniel spent two years on the work, completing it in 1977.

I went to see the sculpture again to see its effect on the area, to view the expressions of visitors meeting the work for the first, or second, or third, time. I saw soldiers on a tour led by the IDF's Education Corps studying the work, tourists peering at the sculpture, listening intently to their tour guide's explanation on our right to the Land of Israel, and school children from religious and secular schools staring at it in awe. Young men and women about to wed come on the eve of their wedding day, their photographers in tow, with some subconscious feeling linking the personal ties between them with the ties of the Jewish people to its land.

In sculpting The Gate of the Faith, Daniel sought a way to return the entire Jewish people to Torah observance, much as he had returned. The Jews' settling of the land and their moral right to it, Daniel believed, are based on God's promise to Abraham, the covenant in which the Jewish people promised to obey the Torah and its commandments. The "gate" symbolizes the move to the Promised Land. The "key" enabling the Jewish people to pass through the gate is fulfillment of the conditions that give it the moral right to inherit the land.

The gate has two pillars and a stone beam stretching from the top of one to the other. Each pillar is three meters tall and weighs nine tons. The first depicts the sacrifice of Isaac, the highest expression of faith. The way Daniel sees it, the sacrifice of Isaac symbolizes a "willingness," for such an act cannot possibly occur in reality. So he sculpts Abraham on his knees on the ram, lifting his son for the sacrifice. Daniel brings the verse, “And offer him for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (Genesis 22:2), in the practical meaning of the phrase. Abraham is not engaged in the "slaughter" of his son, as all other artworks depicting the sacrifice have done, but lifts him physically to a higher place, symbolizing the value of innocent faith derived from the willingness to carry out the sacrifice. It is this readiness, and not the idea of slaughtering Isaac, that is the essence.

The second pillar tells the story of Jacob's dream. The patriarch in old age is depicted with a stone under his head and angels ascending and descending, as told in Genesis. Daniel sculpts the ascending angel with his head facing toward heaven, and the descending angel with his head facing downwards. The angels are intertwined. The contours of one form the contours of the other. The wings are crossed in opposite directions, giving an illusion of a ladder. The dream is the expression of the promise to Jacob that his seed will be given the land. The three patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – on the two sides of the sculpture lead directly to the beam bridging the two pillars, which depicts the conquering of the land by Joshua. Joshua's success depends, of course, on the two pillars that justify the biblical conquering of the land. The beam contains the Jews and the priests moving through Jericho, carrying the Ark of the Covenant, the supreme force that is an active participant in Joshua's success. As we have seen, the two pillars present the patriarchs to whom the Creator made his promise, a clear retort to all those who doubt the right of the Jewish people to settle and live in the Land of Israel. In Daniel's mind, no more need be said to prove the Jewish people's right to inherit the land. The sculpture is Daniel's expression of this belief. Despite the conflict between art and Halacha (Jewish law), Daniel manages in The Gate of the Faith, as he does in many other works, to create a sculpture that unites the two worlds in peace and harmony. This is Daniel's unique contribution to Israeli art.