ahava haus
to love, to give
Four letters: alef, heh, bet, heh. The root is ahav. It means to love. It also means to give, and Hebrew does not separate the two.
a roof over the heart
The heart, 心, sits in the middle, and 冖, a roof, sits directly over it. A hand reaches down from above. A foot arrives slowly from below.
meaning, connection, coherence
A house in civic San Francisco. Ten people at a time, one table, and a door that closes behind them.
Reading the table…
ten seats,
one table
TENET sits at the center of the square and translates as holder. It reads the same in both directions and appears twice, crossing itself, so one word about holding runs down both axes. Someone cut the square into a wall at Pompeii, and people carried it as a talisman for centuries after: as above, so below, the same pattern repeating at every scale. This table is cut the same way. Each seat holds the key to a different layer of coordination, and nobody holds them all.
Come hold one for a night.
some things only exist when ten are present
Ten is where separate people start acting as one body. A minyan is a quorum of ten. You can pray alone any time, and a handful of prayers only happen once ten are in the room. Judaism is blunt about it: some things stay closed to you privately. A conversation works the same way.
place is the solution
We kept having the same conversation in different rooms. Founders, funders, researchers, artists, civic people, all circling one question with nowhere to keep circling it. We were missing a room. A regular one, with a door that closes and a host who cooks.
at ten the count
returns to one
The Pythagoreans drew ten as a triangle: one, then two, then three, then four. They called it the tetractys and swore oaths on it, because at ten the count completes and begins again at one. A dinner behaves the same way. Under ten it stays a hangout. Over ten, the table splits and the host begins performing. Ten is the ceiling on one conversation everyone can hear.
Ten seats force us to choose, and choosing is most of the work.
Trust and connection
What makes a room safe enough that people say the true thing early, instead of on the way out the door?
Hover or tap a question
five hours,
one question
The evening has a shape and almost no schedule. The part people write to us about afterward is the inheritance, when the book you brought leaves with somebody else.
range over
seniority
We invite people building institutions, moving capital, running research, making art, and holding pieces of civic San Francisco together. We look for range over seniority. Every table needs somebody who will disagree with the rest of it.