Wee Tales of my Life

Kikarun, er hat ayn pintel affen nas!

That’s what they said, the boys and girls next door, the religious ones, with their peyot flying and their tsitsit hanging out.  Look, he has a point on his nose.  That was me, with my blue dot on the side of my nose.

I don’t know why it fascinated them.  You could hardly see it.  I never thought about it unless people pointed it out, like those religious kids.

How did it get there?  Nobody else had one.  None of the boys in my class or the gang that played games on the street.  It didn’t matter to them. 

Not even my parents talked about it, or other relatives, like grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts or the close friends of my parents who were just like members of the family.  They had other funny stories about when I was a baby and a toddler.  But nothing about my blue dot, the mysterious pintel affen nas.

Though nobody talked about, I somehow knew why it was there.

I fell and almost poked my eye out, if the point of the blue pencil had just been a half inch higher and to the left slightly. 

Surely, someone must have noticed, if I cried out in pain.  My mother, all alone, since my father had departed for the war, would have panicked or called a doctor.  The next day or so someone surely would have given me a warning to be careful about such things. 

But only those religious children next door, with their melodious chant, kikaru, kikarun, they sang, er hat a pintel affen nas.

The Fatal Brew

I was studying for the end of term exams.  I propped myself up on the bed with three pillows, leaned over my books, read and occasionally scribbled notes on a large yellow legal pad, the kind I loved to use.  From time to time, I dipped the pen into the water-glass on the desk beside the bed.  On the other wise, the bed was empty, as my room-mate had gone home for the long weekend Thanksgiving holiday.  I had stayed behind to put in extra hours of study. 

Almost no one else was left in the dormitories, both male and female.  Anyone who might have changed his or her mind, well, they were out of luck.  The blizzard had come, and now the little village where the college nestled in its valley, was closed off from the outside world. 

I was able to concentrate completely, barely looking up as I dipped my pen into the water, shook it dry, and drew in some other colour ink.  I liked to vary the colours as I scribbled my notes.  No particular scheme for different themes or approaches.  Just to rbeak the page up.  Dip, shake, and draw in red or green or black.  Hour after hour.  Page after page.

Then I knew I was beyond drowsy.  My eyes could hardly stay open.  My brain seemed heavy and thick.  It was surely time for sleep.

I changed into pyjamas, glanced over the notes, and took a sip of water.

And another sip and lay down ready for sleep.

But suddenly my eyes opened.  What had I done?  I had emptied the glass on the desk, the mixture of various inks.  It must have been poison, though there had been no particular odour or taste.  A whole glassful of ink.

Instead of panicking or crying out for help, I relaxed.  No use fighting what was inevitable.  If this was to be my end, then so be it. 

Alone, isolated, out of reach of any aid, I lay back, closed my eyes, and waited for the final sleep to come over me.

‘Twas a Dark and Gloomy Night

The snow had been falling all day.  More than falling, it had swept across the road horizontally, occasionally from the side but often directly at us, with the windscreen wipers barely able to carve out a space through which to see.  My father insisted on driving, even though he no more experience of such conditions than I. 

He drove cautiously, slowly onwards, at 70 mph and then 65 mph and now 60 mph while around us, from either side, other vehicles and heavy trucks hurtled forward to pass our car.  They may have been familiar with these highways and driven through blizzards before, but still it was crazy, especially when the darker it became the more blinding headlights streaked up to us and then went by, making our car shudder with the pressure. 

We were somewhere in Ohio and heading towards Missouri.  It was late October and this was an early storm, unexpected, not warned in the AAA triptik maps we had received two days before.  The wind howled.  The snow fell.  The traffic kept coming at us and passing us, all out of the darkness.  It seemed a long time since there was any road signs, any indication of where we were and how far we might have to go to find a motel for the night or a café for a little hot food and a rest at least.

Neither of us said anything.  The tension, however, was palpable.  And the hours dragged by.  It would not be long, too, before we would need to find a gas station and fill up.

At the beginning of the trip I asked to share the driving but my father said no: he wouldn’t feel safe.  An insult, but he was my father.  I was only twenty-two.  He was taking me to Saint Louis to return to my first year of graduate school.  He insisted on driving me all the way, so he could see where I lived, meet my friends, and look around the university.  My mother was still too ill and weak to travel. 

Occasionally we would see a car or a small truck stuck in the drifts on the side of the road.  Then my father would slow down even more.  We had been driving all day, with one brief stop for gas and lunch.  We were now going at 50 mph, even 45 mph or less, and still traffic would zoom towards us or pass us, honking their horns. 

The headlights provided nothing better than a few feet of vision.  The snow was more like long needles or arrows of ice.  We were inching along.  Crawling.  Then we stopped altogether.  Nothing could be seen at all.  A white darkness all around.  We sat and waited for something to happen. 

Eventually the night passed.

At the End of Time

In the movies, the elevator shudders, the cable breaks, and the car begins to fall: then the screen goes red.

On the radio, someone shouts, Stop! there is the sound of squealing breaks, then Whopp! and everything goes silent.  After a while, you can hear the murmuring of policemen and ambulance drivers.  Then silence again.

In the distance, there is a rumbling and a roar.  I feel a bump.  My mind goes blank.

An Afternoon in LAX: A Good Way to Waste an Afternoon

The notices on the flight board turn and turn, and the latest news is that my flight will be delayed at least another hour.  That means two hours to waste.

I walk down the long corridor again, stand next to the left luggage with its row on row of  boxes to rent, each with a key waiting to receive enough coins to give you some relief from carrying your luggage.  I lean against the wall.

Someone waves.  It is a middle-aged woman behind a counter marked Travellers Friend.  I walk up to her.  She smiles.  She tells me there is a bus that goes all around the airport, stopping at each airline’s building.  You can waste an hour or so, and you can sit down too.  Good chance to look around. 

What the heck, I think.

I get in the bus and sleepily look at the travellers who get on and off, who stand with their luggage, who check their watches.  The bus goes on, stops, and then moves around.

In the distance I hear sirens.

The sounds get louder.

We come around to the place where I first got on.  There  is a commotion.  Fire engines, police cars, ambulances.  Crowds of people standing across the road watching.

The left luggage compartments are twisted and black are blackened.  The desk where the Travellers Friend desk stood has broken into several pieces and is charred.  The woman is not there.

New Sayings for the End of the Old Year

Random Aphorisms, Apothegms, and Proverbs

I am here to keep the Christ out of Christmas, put the fun in Fundamentalism, and enjoy the sin in Synagogue.

Ecopalians have had the piss scared out of them.

A British publishing house should be established with offices on the Scilly Isles and in Gigglewick.  I would gladly work for it.

To improve the contents of your mind you need seychel, so go to the Seychelle Islands.

They’re all mishuggah in Michigan.

Mind the company you keep when your business goes into liquidation.

Never believe your enemy when he says he wants to kill you: he doesn’t mean it—it’s just rhetoric.  

Always believe the worst about your friends because you can’t trust them.  Why? because you know them too well.  Besides, my enemy’s enemy must be my enemy too.

They used to say that to be a Jew you had to know that the whole world was wrong in what it said about Judaism, even if it made you squirm to believe yourself paranoid.  But now we know the rest of the world is paranoid.  You have to squirm even more.

I thought you were dead years ago.  Now you emerge, it seems, from under some rock, where you absorbed the primeval sludge, and write such an anti-Semitic screed. Better you had stayed hidden.

No matter how far you run, you always take yourself along.  Sometimes, like a shadow at noon, it disappears in the bright sunlight, and at night, in the darkness, it hides in waiting for a single lamp or candle to jump out at us.  At such times, it is hard to know who you are.

Ordinary people make pious general statements about human nature and the evolution of moral customs, whereas they are at best describing a small group of their friends in the last several decades, or perhaps their own families when they were children.  They know little of how others lived two or three hundred years ago, let alone hundreds of thousands, and certainly not about the origins of human consciousness, language or society.  It would be foolish to try to correct them.

d sentences, as though they were reading scripts, and scripts translated from misunderstood foreign languages? One says that it is because it is to give an effect of the old-fashioned.  Another because people actually spoke that way.  A third because to our ears, unused already to formal speech and discourses adjusted to diverse levels of occasion, find ourselves estranged from the recent past of our grandparents and great-grandparents, as though they lived in another universe of ideas and feelings.

I do not remember young children squealing and screeching so much in the past.  Nor every baby you saw in the street had a dummy stiffed in its mouth sucking away like a mad creature. No wonder so many adolescents drink themselves into silliness at such an early age.

Once not too long ago, a bookshop held an Alice in Wonderland tea party in the afternoon.  M any young children were there with their parents; no one fussed or bothered.  A group of young adults, dressed in appropriate costumes, walked among them, passing out platters of sliced cake and cups of tea.  For a few hours, in a small space, the world seemed surprisingly civilized.  By the next day, to be sure, everything reverted to chaos and madness.

“Why do you write books?” she said, as she agonized over the page layouts.  “Isn’t the process too much at your age?”  I answered as best I could, unwilling to say I would be dead if writing were impossible. “You never get reviews. The sales are meagre. Only a few dozen friends send email to comment on what you do.”  “Yes, that’s it,” I said.  “I write for them.”  “Well, then,” she said, “next time, let me know before, so I can set everything up for you.”

Sparrows flutter in the branches waiting for me to throw them bread.  I crumble several slices and toss it out on the grass.  They flutter down.  One or two start to chew away small bits.  One or two fly off with their morsels. A cluster hop from crumb to crumb, not sure where to turn and peck.  Three black birds dance around, back off, dart in to take their share.  Three white eyes sneak in undeterred.  When everything is almost gone, the tui swoops down, takes his portion and returns to the tree.  After they have disappeared, I put off the litter from the kitchen floor and watch a few brave souls come in for a late breakfast.

Everyone, it is said, believes he has made the most important discovery which for some reason or other everyone else missed out on, and worse that no one dares to recognize.  Even those whose work leads them to fame and fortune are supposed to wonder if they are not shams and why everyone else is foolish enough to take their explanations seriously.  It would be better, the pundits aver, to wait a few hundreds of years to see what posterity will make of us all.  The trouble is, not that we will never know, but that we actually do: since why should the future treat us differently than we do the failed great thinkers and the would-artists of today?

On the dumbing down of society: I don’t know what it means? There is too much clatter and squeaking to understand what they are saying. 

The destruction of Palmyra: evil, pure and simple.

There are four calamities and five miracles in life.  The four calamities: (1) the realization we cannot have everything we want; (2) the shock of seeing that we cannot become all we want to be; (3) the disappointment when those closest and dearest do not understand your hopes and ambitions or your disappointments and frustrations; and (4) the acceptance of your fate.  The five miracles: (1) the joy of being alive, (2) the understanding that the sun will probably arise and you will be awake and conscious the next day; (3) the acceptance that most pains, humiliations and unfulfilled dreams will fade away in the course of time; and (4) the pleasure in knowing that everything you suffer eventually comes to an end; and (5) the knowledge that no matter what anyone else says, they too will be forgotten.

.

When they push you in the ovens, said my grandmother, they don’t give you a quiz on the laws of kashrut: for I had asked what we believe as Jews.  Now when they run you down in the streets of Jerusalem, they don’t ask your views of Maimonides’s commentaries on Holy Writ, nor do they inquire whether you attend synagogue regularly or at all. But when you attempt to speak at a politically-correct university, they investigate your views on the Palestinian Question, and then exclude you anyway because you hesitated to agree to your own murder.

Flowers and wreaths were placed for memorials of those who were once loved and honoured, but now balloons, pinwheels and little fluffy dolls, as though our grief and sadness has been dumbed down.  Mourning has become infantile.

Morose, stodgy and implacable in his ideas, Schopenhauer cuts a sad figure, hardly worthy of our respect. The more I read about him the less I find to pity.

Cobalt and indigo make wonderful shades of blue.  But nothing is evident at the beginning in the ore or the plant, and only long and complicated processes prepare the colour for use in the making of cloth, porcelain or anything else.  How did our ancestors discover what to do?  Did the ritual use and mythical meaning of such blues arise in the alchemy of their preparation, or were they first dreamt as premonitions of beauty and spirit?

When the eyes in a Classical or Renaissance painting stare out at us from a museum wall, obliterating centuries and great distances, do they envy our nonchalance and misunderstanding?

In the Dominican Republic, there is a village where virtually everyone is born a girl, and only later in adolescence do the signs of manhood appear in some.  It happens without choice but by now not unexpectedly.  For some of the adults later their female names continue, as well as sensitivity and softness, but not homosexual desires.  For some perhaps there is a nostalgia for the original condition.

I keep noticing how birds behave in the yard when I throw them crumbs of bread.  Some sparrows bounce about unable to find what they know must be there by past experience.  Sometimes they stand on the bread unaware of what is going on.  They wait until some other member of the flock begins to peck and only then recognize the object as food.  They push aside their fellow and start to eat.  Others have learned to fly away with as large a piece as they can handle, hide under a bush, and eat alone.  Smaller birds, like white eyes,  come later and search for fragments in the grass.  Last of all, the big black birds hop up the kitchen door to remind me I should service them as well.  Do they wonder what happens in the big nest I live in?

A line of elephants crosses the plain.  They pass a jumble of bones.  The larger, older elephants surround the skeletons, gently run their trunks on the bleached bones, and seem to dream in a sad way.  The naturalist tells us they recognize their ancestors, as though they had memories revived by the sight and feel of these ancient remnants.  Memory of the past is one thing, to be sure: the momento mori as a sign of death.  But do these elephants see in their own selves and fellows something under the surface of their skin? 

Publications Update for 2015

Norman Simms, Publications Update  2015

1.   “Jesus the Jew: Who Says So?” in Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis, ed. Zev Garber  (New York and London: Routledge, 2015) pp. 121-132.

2.   “Forerunner of the Science of Psychoanalysis? An Essay on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition” Journal of Psychohistory (Spring 2015) 295-309.

3.    “More Words to be Aware of and why They Matter” Family Security Matters  (8 March 2015) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publicatioms/detail/print/more-words-to-be-aware-of-and-why-they-matter

4.   Review of Phyllis Chesler Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015 in Family Security Matters (19 May 2015) online at http:www.familysecuritymatters.org/ publications/detail/living-history-on-the-front-lines-of-history-for-israel-and-the-jews-2003-2015

5.   “Catachresis Got Your Tongue? When Words Fail You” Family Security Matters (1 June 2015) online at http:www.familysecuritymatters.org/cataxchresios-got-your-tongue-when-words-fail-you

6.   “Bernard Berenson: Art Historian, Court Jester and Alta Kaka” The Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies (Spring 2015) 20-39.

7.   “Psychohistory at the Crossroads of History, Science and Art” Clio’s Psyche 22:1-2 (2015) 43-45.

8.   “Mentalities” 9-page entry in Vocabulary for the Study of Religion,  eds, Robert A. Segal & Kocku von Stuckrad. Brills Online Reference (December, 2015).

9.       “Strange Metaphors and Sudden ideas: The Light Bulb Lights Up” Mentalities/Mentalités

10.  Review Essay: “Jewish History in a Hostile World: Alan Levine.  Scattered Among the Peoples: The Jewish Diaspora in Ten Portraits (Toronto, Canada: McCleland & Stewart, 2002)” in .Literature & Aesthetics 25: 1 (2015)

11.   “Time to Dig our Heels in and Stand up for Principles”: A Book Review of Dvir Abramovich, Flashpoints: Israel, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Melbourne, Vic: Hybrid, 2014) Family Security Matters (30 September 2015) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/time-to-dig-our-heels-in-and-stand-up-for-principles-a-book-review

12.  Review Essay of Jan Assmann Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion, trans. Robert Savage  (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) in

13.  Review Essay of Maite Ojeda-Matae.  Identidades ambivalentes: Sefardíes en la España contemporánea  (Madrid: Sefaradí,  2012) in Mentalities/Mentalités“Paradigms of Determination or Arts of Defiance: A Nightmare of Confusion” Family Security Matters (23 October 2015) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/paradigms-of-determinism-or-acts-of-defiance-a-nightmare-of-confusion.

14. “Paradigms of Determination or Arts of Defiance: A Nightmare of Confusion” Family Security Matters (23 October 2015) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print /paradigms-of-determinism-or-acts-of-defiance-a-nightmare-of-confusion.

15. “What is to be Done?” Family Security Matters (29 October 2015) online at http://www.Family securitymatters.org/publications/detail/print/what-is-to--done.

16. “New Zealand to Save the Middle East and Establish World Peace Forever” Family Security Matters (2 November 2015) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/new-zealand-to-save-the-middle-east-and-establish-world-peace-forever

17.  “The Land that History Forgot” Family Security Matters (5 November 2015) http://www.family securitymatters.org/publications/detail/print/the-land-that-history-forgot

18. “Contemporary Ritual Suicide and Mass Murder” Clio’s Psyche 22:3 (2015) 130-137.

Shadows of Jewish History: Part 4

What Does the Shadow Know? 

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?  The Shadow knows.

One we move away from the notion that a shadow is only a dark nothingness, the blocking out of light, we can explore the nature and implications of alternative concepts; and all the negativity, as in the chiaroscuro of painting and the reversed alternations of light and shadow on a photographic glass plate or chemical film, emerges as positive—creative and dynamic. 

The 1930s radio show with Lamont Cranston as The Shadow— the title character both in pulp fiction by Walter P. Gibson and on radio in various forms—is a mysterious and invisible person, and former aviator, who lurks in the shadows and interprets the evil motives of criminals.  He has a power, it was said, [1] “to cloud men’s minds,” to mesmerize them and make them reveal themselves.  He is also able, with a kind of double-jointed dexterity, to squeeze through small openings in a door or wall.  He could defy gravity, speak all languages and unravel any code. He is, in other words, a phantom avenger, separate from his own supposedly real existence as a man about town that is, someone with a celebrity status, ostentatious display of wealth, and useless life, the persona of the Shadow who is uncanny and canny at the same time. 

The presence of shadows on a two-dimensional surface gives the illusion of depth and volume to an image, and also suggests that there is more to the picture than can be represented by normal traces of perception, the shadows thus standing in for something tangible, that is, occupying a space where other objects, actions and modes of reality cannot otherwise be depicted.  What is blocked out is not just the source of light but the moment in which the beam is interfered with, and it thus represents a past shaped into a silhouette captured as a silent and petrified figure. 

If the shadow is not the absence of light, but a form of light, not an empty intangible illusion, but a thing that exists, then the metaphors can be read in a new way.  O?r rather, in a suite of new ways.

Me and My Shadow

Like the wallpaper sticks to the wall,

Like the seashore clings to the sea,

Like you’ll never get rid of your shadow

You’ll never get rid of me.

Another version of the Shadow appears in the lyrics to a popular song whose words are adjusted to the performer and the situation in which it is sung.  Here the voice singing and identifying himself as a doublet of “me and my shadow.”   He seems, on the one hand,  to be an integral part of or manifestation of the inner self and whoever he is in love with must accept both of these facets of his personality, the supposedly normal figure who can be seen and heard, but also the other more mysterious persona who sticks, clings and remains inseparable from the woman he pursues.  On the other hand, however, the singing voice identifies himself with the shadow who attaches himself to the love-object, always stalking her, always there in public and private, his love a kind of manifestation of herself as the beloved.  The internal, tautological metaphor, compares the pursuing lover to the woman’s shadow, the natural phenomenon that shows itself when she is seen in the sunlight as a dark silhouette of herself and in the artificial play of light in the dark as a more ambiguous presence chiaroscuro. 

Because in this song the persona and the shadow are so close together as to be the same with all distinctions of identity virtually absent, invisible or merged into a new third version of both, there remains nonetheless a difference, in that one seeks to be free of the other and the other seeks to glue itself to the persona. 

This game or dance of light and shadow, real image and reflection or refractions, comes down to, as well, a bizarre play of the eye trying to capture the prey-colours of the real world even as the elusive creature creates its own camouflage out of the skin, hair, and other attributes of its appearance.  In recent years, new insight into the concept of light, colour, perception and the evolution of the eye has transformed how we can approach the question of shadows as both a phenomenon in nature to be understood and as a metaphor to unlock the key to many mysteries of Jewish history.

José Faur wrote about Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos as existing in the shadows of history, that is, out of the mainstream accounts of European and world affairs at least since the fifteenth century.  Others have puzzled over the ways in which Judaism and Jews could be understood as existing in a pre-historical enclave, away from the main currents of politics, philosophy, science and technology, as well as social life shared by peoples inhabiting the Christian and Muslim civilizations.  Both by choice and by coercion, Jews stepped or were -- swept aside after the Fall of the Jerusalem Temple in 60 CE; by reason of their exile and dispersion—the Galut—and lived as though virtually unaffected by what was going on around them.  If they participated in world affairs, it was not as a people or a nation, but as individuals or small family groups.  Not only are these grossly exaggerated generalizations, albeit offering some small insights into the actual events of history, but they work with now outdated rhetorical figures of speech and thought.

A dream world, that was yet realer than any reality; that, by the sheer intensity of its, turned the real into the dream.  A world in which appearances were unmasked, pretences seen through: where stark truth reigned.  Where soul spoke nakedly to soul, stripped of convention’s veneer.  —A terrible world.  For the harsh white light of truth that was its essence, shedding its beams on every hand, lit up one’s own poor life with the rest.; and, playing full on things one had hugged to oneself as virtues—compromises and concessions, pity and consideration for others—showed them up for the shams they were.  And so remorselessly, that all one had hitherto one endured, connived at, made the best of, seemed suddenly to row unbearable. —From the mirror here held up she would between herself and the hideous reflection.[2]

Although this paragraph speaks about a moment in Richard Wagner’s life when his relationship to his future wife Cosima (née Liszt) at a time when she was still married to Hans von Bulow, the complex conceit concerning perception, self-insight, shadows may be unpacked in a different way and made to serve as a lens for the subject of this series of essays.

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[1] Albie, “RKO Orson Wells: The Shadow—radio recordings: panstv” Reviews (19 November 2013)  online at http:archive.org/details/RkoOrsenWells-TheShadow-RadioRecording

[2] Henry Handel Richardson, The Young Cosima (North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1976; orig. William Heinemann, 1939)    p. 254

Shadows: Part 3

The Green and Blue Shadows of Impressionism

One of the great discoveries of Impressionism in the nineteenth century was that shadows have different colours, and thus are part of the light itself that shapes, substantiates and projects meaning in painted scenes.  But more than that, as we shall argue, the discovery of shadows as both part of the otherness of light and the spectrum of colours opened the possibility of depicting world that was neither chiaroscuro nor registered in classical schemes of tone and value.  There could now be subjective and psychological impressions, with the artist as the metaphorical lens through which physical sensations passed before being painted on canvas and images that filled the picture that were composed of colour, light and form without undue regard to representation, symbolism or existential reality. 

The European painter no longer depicted the world as it ought to be according to academic traditions and scientific positivism.  The space of the canvas did not contain harmoniously arranged representations of objects and actions discretely set forth as they were supposed to be by rules and regulations, but rather now as the sweep of reflected and refracted light passed through the organic apparatus of perception and registered as a subjective image, it embodied an inner state of aesthetic sensibility.

Yet while learning to paint what was felt in the mind in response to the stimulation of the retina through perception of things seen en plein aer, the artist and the spectator no longer had to validate the accuracy of the representation of reality, whether in terms of a historical moment or of an imitation of previously produced works of art.  Instead, they would respond to the work with their own aesthetic sensibility.  

The Shadows of History

A second great discovery at the same time as Impressionism in France and other nations of western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century is that Jews—despite everything that Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other racist, volkisch and similar modern anti-Semites had to say—could be artists, composers, performers and critics of the same calibre as non-Jews in various movements of art, thus no longer standing in the shadows of art history or even outside of the development of art altogether, and they could do so with the capacity to draw on their own rabbinical and family traditions just as Christian artists did from their ecclesiastical traditions and national cultures, that is, sometimes directly in accord with the feelings and needs of the community and sometimes more obliquely in opposition.   

This second discovery about Jewish art, however, is still contested by many, including many Jews. One can see this, for instance, in Chaim Potok’s two novels about Asher Lev,[1] where the title character, as he grows up feels and is told by his new advisers in the art world, that he has to move away from the Chasidic community and special practices and beliefs if he wishes to make mark for himself. In these two American post-War novels, this is shown to be a matter, on the one hand, of Lev proving himself as an artist through copying the great tradition of European painting that is based on Christian iconography  and, on the other, of manifesting an individual expression based on nineteenth-and twentieth-century notions of a secular, romantic and even non-religious self, the very opposite of the  spiritual, Talmudic and communal identity of all Judaism, but especially of Chasidismus as taught on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Thus, even when it is recognized that individual Jews, on their own and in small groups could develop their own unique and personal modes of expression as artists, sometimes even as leaders in their fields, it is presumed that they either had to leave the shadows of Jewish life altogether or, if they wish to remain to some degree Jews in their own eyes and those of their own parents and other community members, they would have to live like aesthetic and psychological Marranos. In brief, they had to learn to exist in two separate parts of their experience, as artists in the full light of day—that is, in terms of what they paint and how they pursue their public careers—and as Jews in the shadows—that is, in terms of the private, inner and domestic, even intellectual and spiritual, portions of their minds and souls.  This kind of split-personality and style of living is unacceptable for Asher’s parents and most of the pietistic community, with only the Great Rebbe showing some sympathy, but confirming to the young man that what he is choosing in deciding to become a painter is one that is always going to be painful for him and try his soul to an intolerable level.  Compromise, at best, must be kept strictly in private, as with the uncle who collects objets d’art for his own pleasure but must keep them secret from his own family.  Any attempt, further, to express his Jewishness in works Lev puts on sale

However, Chaim Potock’s two novels on the fictional artist Asher Lev, for all their other values as a literature and as social commentary,[2] contain two essential historical flaws, perhaps now more evident in the twenty-first century than all those decades ago when the two novels first appeared.  In the first place, the strict norms of hasidism into which the boy with artistic talents and genius was born are not completely comparable to other communities of Jews, just as the specific time and place of the fictional settings of these books represents a crucial period in the development of post-Holocaust Judaism, but again only in regard to American Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and not necessarily to other ways of living and believing oneself as a Jew in the modern world, whether in non-American areas of the Diaspora or in Israel in the decades following Independence, within different branches of Sephardic tradition, and with varying degrees of religious intensity or commitment, if any at all. 

Moreover, before political and social emancipation in Europe during the course of the nineteenth century, there was not just a Jewish tradition of art—despite what Chaim Potock rather disparagingly still saw as merely the craftsmanship of folk art or liturgical decorations through to more refined and accomplished achievements in performing, structural and expressive art forms—and a thick body of aesthetic thought: thick in the sense of having historical depth and intellectual diversity.  For Potock, as for the art historians he relied on, such as Cecil Roth or E.R. Goodenough, Jewish art in its millenial forms—in its cultural origins going back into medieval, antique, biblical and probably pre-biblical days was dismissed as a mere shadow of the “real” art discovered in non-Jewish civilizations.  At best, from their dismissive point of view, ancient and later Israel could only imitate what the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines or Christian cultures created as part of their material and spiritual identity.  With both the production of “graven images” interdicted by the Law to prevent the return or influence of idol worship and the aesthetic sensibility repressed and denied as a valid mode of experiencing a spiritual relationship to the deity, Jews merely made decorations and useful objects, any “beauty” inhering in them taken as incidental or a diversion of the study of the sacred Writings and performance of other mitzvoth. 

For that reason, Jewish craftsmen might indeed produce objects for their pagan, Christian or Muslim neighbours but without regard or consideration of what the art might mean to these others in their private and public devotions;[3] and, similarly, wealthy Hebrews might commission non-Jewish artists to construct small cult objects for use in their homes, such as hannukiot, incense containers and calendar pictures. Some of these craft-workers—silversmiths, weavers, dancing masters, performing musicians—probably would have superimposed on the product made for others in a purely mechanical way a sense that they were anticipating a time when they would be called upon to refurbish a restored Temple in Jerusalem or infusing the work with a Jewish meaning and spirituality. Nominally, the non-Jewish aspects to the objects they created would not be recognized, even though hindsight lets us now see that Christian motifs were incorporated into Church frescoes, emphasis re-arranged so that New Testament scenes contained Jewish persons, actions and ideas and “Old Testament” prototypes looked more like contemporary rabbinical scholars than ancient priests and peasants. 

When Christian architects, designers and artists were commissioned to create Jewish cult objects for domestic use or public display by Jewish families, the modern art historians tend to dismiss any negotiations between the patron and the manufacturing workshop or individual as purely commercial, with any discussion of what the objet d’art might mean or function as within the Jewish ambit of sensibilities as merely incidental to real meaningful.  This is partly because it is assumed that rich merchant or banking families who hired the services of gentile craftsmen and artists did not fully appreciate their own rabbinical traditions and only sought to imitate the tastes and pretensions of the dominant society around them, and also that the non-Jewish workers could not understand or respect the specific qualities of a Jewish aesthetic—mostly because such an aesthetic did not and could not exist. 

Even if there had been some mutual discussions of how to fuse the two sensibilities and traditions, the commentators usually do not take seriously[4] the possibility that the non-Jewish artist might have his own intellectual or spiritual reasons for wishing to explore the creative potentials of Jewish tradition, whether as a means of satirizing or more subtly criticising his own Christian metier and the restrictions imposed in ecclesiastical contracts, or following his own intellectual or spiritual attractions to Judaism itself. However much these may be mistaken or misguided, as when the Florentine Neoplatonists engaged with Italian Jewish kabbalists to advance their own understanding of mystical thought.  On the Jewish side, just as when we know there were rabbinically-trained musicians who composed orchestral pieces and operas attempting to merge Jewish motifs and insights with Renaissance developments in art , there well may be room for investigating the Jewish intellectual and aesthetic input into the hiring practices of Jewish intellectuals of goyish painters, sculptors and metal-workers.  

This was all, strictly speaking,  avoda zara, idol worship both in the sense of service to alien cultures and gods, but more significantly it was a misapplication of Jewish thought, feeling and worship, especially when the craftsman or woman attempted to rationalize their labour as a production of beauty on behalf of the Hebrew cult. In reality, however, when we remember that not all of Jewish life in Europe was framed by the harsh, cramped conditions of Ashkenazi life in Eastern or Central Europe, but there were small communities of Sephardic and Italian Jews who attempted to maintain continuity with their own more liberal past and to remain open to interaction with the Christian culture around them, then we should be prepared to examine sympathetically the illuminated manuscripts of Haggadot, rabbinical debates, philosophical discourses, love poetry, kattubot,  and megillot, as well as other non-liturgical documents, both when painted by Jewish artists and by Christian workers as examples of fertile inter-faith or cross-cultural  creativity. 

In the case of Asher Lev, who is made typical of the Jewish artist, genius, talent and a “gift” can be successful only by separating oneself from the rabbinical community, with the achievement recognized by the surrounding culture through adaptation of its aesthetic ideals and its formal principles of beauty.  Like the young violinists and pianists who became star performers in nineteenth and twentieth century concert halls and who were praised for anything but their Jewish identities, the Jewish painters and sculptors who were at the heart of modern art did so, in Potock’s now outdated view, not only in spite of their Jewish heritage, but brought nothing particularly valuable from their backgrounds to the performances or products of their work—that is, other than their diligence and concentration.  The Jewish community, or at least the more liberal and secular sections that emerged during the same period, were proud of the achievement and basked in its reflected glory, but also did not perceive anything essentially or specifically Jewish about the art.  It was presumed that their success was a useful riposte to the anti-Semitic charge that Jews could be neither creative nor aesthetically sensitive, and that just as Jews could excel in mathematics, science or medicine what they contributed was an individual talent and energy—but that there is nothing Jewish about Einstein’s theory of relativity or Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine.  Sigmund Freud was worried that his new psychoanalysis would be mistaken for a Jewish science if he could not enlist sufficient goyim into the movement, such as Karl Jung. 

That Jewish reality of art and aesthetics, to be sure, has seemed dominant throughout the twentieth century in art historical studies, in social analysis, and in literature and the popular mind.  We also must concede to Potock his views in terms of accepting the lack of general recognition outside the places where Jews were marginalized and restricted in their direct influence on the mainstreams of European and Mediterranean civilizations, and so indeed an occluded and hence unseen area of creativity—and in due course in the centuries of ghettoes and shtetls in Eastern Europe and repeated persecutions and expulsions in Western Europe overlooked by most Jews themselves and therefore all but forgotten by the time when modernity dawned.

By the start of the twentieth century, among intellectuals and other cultured persons, Romanticism, Impressionism and Symbolism, had all been movements developing variations on the ideas of creating art forms, art places, and artists away from the older places of Church and aristocratic courts, through the previous hundred years of revolution and restoration were over.  A few artists might follow the new techniques and styles of these named schools, but they could no longer think feel or experience the world as the nineteenth-century innovators did—that is, as acts of rebellion and separation from the past.  Whether defiant post-Christians already or reluctant secularists, these men and women of the fin de siècle reacted now less against society at large—the bourgeois monster states that had replaced the ecclesiastical and feudal monarchies—than against the art traditions generated by their forbears in painting, music, architecture, sculpture and poetry.  Indeed, one of the ways they could spit in the face of their predecessors—either specifically older artists themselves, or those agents and dignities of the new order created along with them, such as art dealers, museum directors, teachers in the academies, impresarios, newspaper critics and rich patrons of the arts—was to become reactionary secessionists of various sorts.  More often than not, though, they assumed to be true and real the intellectual and aesthetic territories created by the schools of nineteenth-century arts, and built vast new edifices of theory and practice on them, embracing the new sciences and technologies, with their enriched palettes of colours impossible to see or imagine before, new dimensions of sound, and malleable materials artificially produced by chemists and physicists.  Thanks to telegraphy, telephones, photography and cinematography, time and space gained new vistas, depths and heights of experience.  While hindsight may allow us today to follow the unfolding of these new dimensions and vistas, developing from the interaction of science, philosophy and aesthetics in technology, social relations and structures, and practical accomplishments in various creative arts, in the years immediately leading up to the Great War of 1914-1918, it often seemed to people that something radically new had been created, some unexpected border had been crossed, and some vast and frightening realm of experience had as within and without the other dimensions of art.  been entered.

It is in this matrix of experiences that Jewish artists as Jews began to be recognized and to recognize themselves.  When a Jew had entered the company of art, he or she saw that move as a way of assimilating into European society and culture, finding some comfort and welcome in the fact that the others, the non-Jews, were also in a state of rebellion and rejection of their own religious, social, and cultural traditions.  No matter how real or illusory these sensations of joining together without any concern for prior differences of language, national identity or religious affiliation may have been, there was always something different about the Jew, and this difference became more and more marked as the underlying tensions between various parts of Europe became irritated by the very forces creating modernity and which finally exploded into the gigantic world-wide conflagration of a world war.  The more older national identities asserted themselves, the more the Jew was excluded.  The more people returned to some sort of religious faith, whether reactionarily into the arms of one church or another or into the other arms of politicised nationalisms based on racial superiority and historical mythology, again the more Jews could not find an acceptable place.  At this point of breaking—sometimes a few years before and sometimes a few afterwards—the Jew had three choices: (1) he or she could try to bluff it out and throw his or her own self into the illusion of being French or German or Austrian or Italian, for example, sometimes through formal conversion or some other patriotic act of commitment, including a seemingly defiant act of becoming a socialist or anarchist opposed to nationality altogether; (2) he or she could join the emergent movement of political Zionism and thus assert a language, nationality and historical mythology exclusive to Jews and supposedly equivalent to any other; or (3) he or she could re-discover in him or herself the value of ancient rabbinical traditions of art and aesthetics, transform them into secular, modern theories, and pursue a career and identity in art outside of the conflicted areas of European civilization.

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[1]. My Name is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990).

[2] Some of the depictions of young Asher discovering his propensity towards drawing and appreciating the values of colour, texture and  tonality are the closest to understanding of what it means to be an artist, and can be used in conjunction with Oliver Sacks’ studies of children and adults thinking in ways other than intellectual or purely verbal—that is perceiving, processing and storing their experiences of the world in terms of aesthetic feeling, and in refined, sensitive and sophisticated ways, in visual, auditory or tactile ways.

[3] From time to time, archeologists addressing the problem of how to explain the presence of pagan icons or other design features in early Common Era synagogue mosaics, wall-paintings or tomb carving, suggest that that there may be more to the phenomena than merely unconscious or unacknowledged influence from without—nearby Roman and Christian temples, palaces, cemeteries or public works, either that the influence could have went in the other, if not in both, directions simultaneously, with the same designers and craftsmen working on the same projects; that the images and designs may have become neutralized of specific religious meaning they could be used in more general ways by patrons from all local communities; that later rabbinical strictness of interpretation of principles against “graven images” and assimilation of contextual aesthetic developments were more liberal, tolerant or indifferent.  On the one hand, in scriptural passages there are very detailed measurements and directions on how to build and decorate the First Temple; on the other hand, the royal commissioners are sent outside of Israel for materials, craftsmen and architects.  In other words, cooperation and negotiation between Hebrew and non-Hebrew patrons, artists and public can be seen in the formative notions of art and beauty.  Still later, not only did visitors from around the Roman Empire come to Jerusalem to visit and study the magnificent Second Temple restored by Herod, using the best designers, materials and artists he could find from around the Mediterranean world, but representatives of various religions worshipped in the outer precincts of that temple, partly in accord with the priestly and Levitical cult, partly in their own terms, so long as it did not violate basic protocols of behavior.  Later events, persecutions and responses to those negative experiences set in motion less tolerant traditions, not least in reaction to the rise of an aggressive Christianity.

[4] The books and articles on this subject tend to be of a sensationalist character, as when suggesting that Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel—at the very cult centre of Catholic worship—might contain secret Jewish images, if not to satisfy the artist’s resentment against papal interference with his work, then to hint at radical reformist notions circulating among advanced thinkers in Renaissance Italy.

Shadows Part 2

צּלּ       TSEL

What Colour is a Jewish Shadow?

From the Holy of Holies issued two flames of fire, as thin as threads, then parted into four, and two each pierced the nostrils of Nadab and Abihu, whose souls were burnt, although no visible injury was visible.[1]

If we are ever to understand this strange description of what happened to the two pious and righteous, and yet egotistical and impetuous young men, the sons of Aaron the priest, we have to go beyond the usual midrashic interpretations that discuss the text in moralistic and ritualistic terms.  We need to grapple with the oblique and allusionistic imagery of the passage.     The sacred writer here puts into words an ecstatic moment in which power that issues from the Holy of Holies, like light diffracted through a prismatic lens, divided into its constituent streams of energy.  Like four threads of pulsating electricity, this energy penetrates the sons of Aaron who, in their eagerness to shine not only in the light of God’s eyes as impressive servants of the Temple cult but also to prove to their father and their uncle, Moses, the intensity of their faith and their worthiness to replace those brothers of the older generation of Exodus and the reception of the Law at Sinai.  But instead of inspiration of the divine through their nostrils, God sends to them a fiery punishment, in the form of invisible flames that sear into their souls deep within their bodies, leaving no outward trace of the action. 

This is metaphor within metaphor within metaphor, imagery inside a conceit inside a mystical code.  What the young men experience, unseen by others, especially their father and uncle as well as the rest of Israel, is at once punishment and reward, suffering due to transgression of the Law that allows no spontaneous or idiosyncratic display of service (avodah) at the altar or in the Temple or at any of the earlier forms of Ark and Tent; and at the same time, this is a reward, as much for Aaron who is saved the humiliation of seeing his children disgraced by God before all the people and in the light of history, and for Nadab and Abihu whose zeal is recognized as meant to sanctify the Name of the Lord.  What is invisible, so thin it cannot be seen, yet is able to be divided and travel through space and time at an incredible speed, but does this mean (in modern scientific parlance) the speed of light?  Here the terms of reference, the shape of the conceptualization, and the sacred rhetoric show that this is a Light that is at the same time the Shadow of God’s luminous and powerful presence in the world of flesh, life and history. 

The Metaphorics of Space

Putting aside anachronistic scientific discussion of the relationship between light and colour in terms of the length of diffracted rays and the various mixtures of beams (e.g., prisms and lens) and liquids (e.g., stains, dyes and paints), we need to begin our midrashic elaboration of this passage in Leviticus by showing how colour and light were understood in ancient Israel as well as in various other pre-scientific societies.  Then, when we understand the mataphorics of such a conceit—an elaborate and intricate figure of speech and thought—It will be possible to talk about the nature of shadows in literal, allegorical and anagogic senses.

There will be a discussion on the way the aesthetics of light and atmosphere in the mid-nineteenth- century led to new ways to see and discuss the nature of shadows.  There came about at the end of that same century, in art and cultural historians such as Any Warburg, a more subtle vocabulary to prise apart notions of how the “shadow of history” could be conceived, in terms such as Nachleben, Distanzierung and Zwischenraum—thus within the penumbra of a primal explosion of energy that casts its way into the darkness of creation one can trace the trajectory of an afterlife, the shadowy and ephemeral revenants that return in recreated form, where the darkness is separated from the light, and the liminal space opened between makes metaphor possible as an expression of such distancing.  The metaphor, let it be remembered, is a vehicle or device for carrying something from one place to another; and hence, figuratively, is at once the process of carrying, with all the transformative power of one lexical or imagistic meaning relocated in another conceptual space, the metamorphosis of the conjunction, mixing and memory of that reconfiguration, that is, the creation of a new set of words, images, concepts, and memories of that complicated experience; as well as, through even further extension, this time as metonymy and synechdoche, that is, through words, images and ideas, as the shape of the new conceptual space, its real, potential and imagined volume, its outer dimensions seen, felt, remembered from without, before and after, and the relationship to what was, is and may be new existential and mnemonic spaces around it.  Once the metaphor has been set in motion through the opening of a space by separation or distanciation it finds some form in which it may be perceived, remembered and re-experienced, although the perceptions, memories and speculated or imagined form is a shadow—adumbration, revenant, shaded or tinted or tainted beam of light.

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[1] Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham, “Musings of the author Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham”, Midrash—Parsha Shemini/Shabbat Paraha (5771) based on Leviticus 9:1-11:47 online at mhtml:file://F:\Rachel-Esther bat-Avraham <<Blog Archive>> Midrash—Pa (seen 25/07/2011).