The Filthy and the Beautiful,
the Loathsome and the Lovely
Two-thirds
of the town population are Jews, filthy and loathsome creatures, living in a
state of abjectness which exceeds all imagination. Nowhere is the spirit of fanaticism and
religious hatred carried further than in this country [Poland], nowhere are the
passions of men more often cloaked under the name of godliness. Jew-beating is a good deed in a Christian
country. To rob the Christian is the
sole aim and object of the Jew.[i]
Though there is a tendency to
sentimentalize and idealize life in the shtetls of rural Eastern Europe, thanks
in part to the musical version of Fiddler
on the Roof and the stories of Shalom Aleichem and other Yiddish writers of
the turn of the cnetury, most Christians saw the Jews in their
« abjection » as suffering the fate properly due to them as murderers
of Christ, stiff-necked fools unwilling to accept the Messiah born in their
midst, and exemplars of what is evil and despicable about and in the
world. Henriette Renan sees the
Ashkenazim—and probably the Hasidim—as hypocrites and thieves. There is nothing beautiful about their
appearance, and nothing sensitive or spiritual in their lives. Where we today see the « world of our
fathers, » the lost civilization of Yiddishkeit, and the struggles of a
suffering nation to endsure the bigorty and violence of those around them,
Mademoiselle Renan, whose brother would eventually go on to write about the
historical Jesus and try to understand the Jewish culture he grew up in, sees
nothing admirable or courageous about their existence. Yet she would probably blanch at the thought
of her being an anti-Semite. She knows
what she sees, so she believes, and cannot see beyond the prejudices of her own
upbringing and education. In that, of
course, she was far from alone. Only a
very few non-Jewish writers could appreciate the historical truths and see past
the illusions. When she says that their
condition « exceeds all imagination » we have to ask what is the
difference between her sense of imagination and that of our own, or more
precisely, how does the Jewish imagination differ from that of a good Christian
woman.
The
Proof is in the Pudding
This
[musical] faculty is, as oit were, the mental hand with which we play on our
own emotional nature, a hand not shaped for this purpose, not due to the
necessity for the enjoyment of music, but owing its origin to entirely
different requirements.[ii]
If we follow this statement by
Weismann in his Gedanken ũber Musik as
a suggestive g uide into the stuidy of Jewish aesthetic tastes and proclivities
over many generations, it should become more evident than before possible to
see that what we call the creative arts—from humble crafts through ceremonial
performances and on to the refined arts of secular society—are at once
expressions (conscious and unconscious) of deep emotional states of anxiety and
desire, matters subject to hormonal and genetic development and also, at the
same time, matters of peronal predeliction and volition, stemming from
intellectual and artistic propensities.
The form, content and impact of such willed and unimaginable feelings
and actions are constantly in flux, always in response to external
circumstances, albeit at times delayed and proleptic due to heightened
sensitivities, and guardedly attuned to
style and ideologies. In fact,
Jewish art more often than not in the times when it has been allowed to come
down to us—when not destroyed by our enemies or undermined by our own protective
actions—is marked by the characteristics of discoordination (scrambling and
reassembly of dominant tastes and styles), subversive integration of
specifically Jewish symbolisms (themselves assimilated into a variety of
disguises and displacements) and ironic or parodic modes of self-mockery.
As we said at the end of the last
section of this essay, it is very hard for historians to grasp the nature of a
Jewish imagination, with its aesthetic and moral qualities, a sensibility that
can be traced back into ancient times, and whose vigor and robustness are
articulated past the apparent structures of the Second Commandment. And what is the proof ? There is in the figure of Bezalel, who is
referred to in Exodus 31:3-5, the ideal Jewish artist. His name means "in the shadow of
God", and the shadow must be taken as a numinous relationship, rather than
in a pejorative sense, in that he participates in the same process of
beautification as God himself in the creation.
Where parallel traditions in the ancient world offer mythic cult-heroes
at the beginning of time or legendary kings magically adorning their temples to
the gods, Judaism retrojects to the period of the First Temple a very human
artist-craftsman, one of a family and guild of craftsmen, "intimately
involved with the ultra-sacred function of furnishing a sanctuary for his
God"; and, in the words of Joseph Gutmann, "a legendary artistic
genius".
Examining these and related
Biblical passages, Menachem M. Kasdan in an essay on "The Voice of God is
in Beauty: Judaism and Aesthetics", asserts that,
From an
absolute perspective all the scenes, sounds, and odours of the Temple service
are indistinguishable. Man alone
differentiates between the aesthetically pleasing or offending, for only in
terms of the bio-intellectual aspects of man does any meaning accrue to
aesthetic values. Hence, as a living,
dynamic guide for man, the Torah provides for these humanly meaningful
values. The Torah not only provided
passively for the incorporation of relative aesthetic values, but commanded
that such beauty be actively interwoven into the fabric of religious
observance.[iii]
In a world that was created by a God who looked at
it and said it was good, the representation of the world or its visual
enhancement through artistic talents would not be an offensive activity. There is indeed a special prayer to be
recited, recorded in the sayings of Rabbi Akiva, "Blessed be He that it is
so in His world", a prayer appropriate to that sense of awe which comes
over a person who regards some wonderful perspective in the natural world or
some gorgeous appurtenance in the synagogue.
The recording of a scene of this encounter with the beautiful in
representational art is not denied, nor the expression of one's awe before God
and his works or an interpretation of those feelings in diverse forms of
art. What is forbidden by the rabbis,
however, seem to be "any art forms and any experience, aesthetic or
otherwise which may, or usually do, arouse hedonistic urges," according to
Kasdan.[iv]It
is forbidden to turn away from contemplation of some sacred thought or to look
up from a holy text in order to please oneself with its beauty; that is hedonism. But the contemplation or the creation of
something beautiful may be an extension, a midrash, in non-verbal terms, of
that study. The Pirkei Avot thus warns, "He who is walking by the way
reviewing his learning and breaks off his learning to say, How beautiful is
that tree...him scripture regards as if he were guilty of his life." As Kasdan argues, the keyphrase here is
"and breaks off his learning";[v] if the lernen - a Yiddish term for the intense meditational study,
interpretation, and practice of the text - continues into the appreciation of
the scene or object, "then a blessing is to be recited over the
beautiful...for it is recognized as one of the most important values imparted
to this world by the Creator".[vi]
Nevertheless,
of more value within the scheme of Jewish things is human action in the service
of justice and loving kindness. Hence
this note appended to Kasdan's essay:
True beauty is spiritual and finds
expression in the reflection of Torah values.
The same verse that teaches us to create an aesthetically pleasing
relationship with the Ribbono Shel Olam [Master of the Universe] by
interplacing religious experience with beauty, teaches us to emulate His
ways. "As He is compassionate and
merciful, so must you be compassionate and merciful" (See Shabbat 133b). True beauty results from man's actions, not
his paintbrush. "How good and how
beautiful it is for brothers to live together [peacefully]" says the
Psalmist. A life of goodness (rather
than the "good life"), constantly reflecting the values of God is
undoubtedly the noblest work of art.[vii]
This kind of moral trivialization
of artist and art before the scholar-rabbi and his ethical principles, so clear
in the difficulties faced by the twentieth century Jewish artists whose
biographies are known and the artistic characters created by contemporary
Jewish novelists, must be seen squarely for what it is: not just a cultural predeliction for one kind
of articulation over another, for the intellectual over the imaginative. But it also should be seen, as Martin Buber
suggests, as the privileging of the oral/aural over the visual/plastic. Significantly, then, as Cecil Roth points
out, it was not a matter simply of negatives -- of ritual taboos and social
discrimination -- which inhibited the fuller development of the aesthetic
sensibility in Judaism; but the fact
that other positive forces were competing with.
The whole inward and intellectual turning nature of Judaism was in a
privileged place, above that of the monumentally or ritually expressive. Though study and ethical action are valued,
they are not mere abstractions, no more than the spiritual ideal itself in
Judaism is separated from the present, physical reality of the world.
Nowhere is this more
clearly seen than in the comparison of the synagogue to the church. Michael Avi-Yonah speaks of the revolutionary
nature of the synagogue, at once spiritualizing divine worship beyond any of
the coeval New Eastern cults and even those of the Greek mysteries, and
focusing itself not on a god or relic of a diving being, but on the Word
itself, the Torah, and the assembled worshiping of its revelation.[viii] So that even before the Destruction of the
Temple and the installation of Pharasaic Judaism as the norm, the structures
for the new faith were in place. I cite
Roth here:
The
synagogue was essentially a place of intimate prayer; it was not a place of assembly for a dramatic
public function. Public worship among
the Jews had as its focal point the Scroll of the Pentateuch, not the altar at
which the perpetual miracle of the Mass was performed. The Scroll demanded indeed meticulous
penmanship and received deferential treatment.
But the appertunances of public worship, not being associated as among
the Christians with the conception of human salvation and the perpetual
manifestation of the actual Divine presence, did not impose such elaborate
treatment. Scholarship, or charity, was
the highest form of service....The centrality of cult-objects, which was almost
fundamental to Christianity and was thus responsible for the finest artistic
achievements of the Middle Ages, was hence absent in Judaism.[ix]
Roth here is not being completely
fair to the rich artistic realities of the Jewish Middle ages, neither in
regard to the mitigating circumstances which have hidden or destroyed most of
the actual elaborate and gorgeous art work associated with synagogue worship,
from the rich hangings and silver or gold appurtenances, as he calls them, to
Torah and Ark; nor to the near worship
accorded to the torah itself during services, particularly in such processional
festivals as Simchas Torah, the joyous celebration of the giving of the Law on
Mount Sinai. Nor should we forget that,
granted all prohibitions and inhibitions, there were times when images,
symbolic and representational, verged or ever overstepped the boundaries of
allowable depiction in Judaism. Hence we
are driven back to consider the historical dialectic between what is
intellectually inscribed by Judaism as its ethical and spiritual standards and
what it accomplishes actually at given times and places.
Rabbi Jules Harlow argues
for one view which is present in the tradition but not dominant, that art in
itself can be understood as one of the mitzvahs incumbent upon Jews, insofar as
art adds "pleasure to obedience, delight to fulfilment.
Thus," he goes on, citing in his turn Abraham Joshua Heschel's
book, Man's Quest for God,
"the purpose is achieved not in direct contemplation but in combining it
with a ritual act; the art objects have a religious function but no religious
substance.[x]
Joseph Gutmann, in this
same context, points out that in Jewish worship, the work of art neither
mediates nor affects the nature of the divine communication, as in Roman
Catholic sacramental celebration;
instead, the influence is on the worshiper only—it helps dispose him
more towards God and enhances the intensity of the commandment performed. Rabbinic interpretation of the line,
"This is my God and I will glorify him" (Exodus 15:2), takes glorify
in the sense of enhance or beautify.[xi]
Rabbi Harlow disucsses the
ritual act, hiddur mitzvah, by
analyzing this proof text from the Song of Moses further.[xii] Other authorities like Michael Koniel show
that the enhancement belongs to the category of the seven rabbinical ordinances
added to the Talmud's 613 mitzvot.[xiii] Thus an aesthetic consideration is not a
central facet of Jewish worship and ethics, but appears nevertheless as a prime
enhancement in their articulation.
Where the enhancement has
been usually taken to refer to the wearing of tzisis or ritual fringes, the
laying of tfillin (phylacteries), or
other cult object, all to be decorated by rich decorations and made by careful
craftsmanship, the principle is now carried beyond sukkah-making and carving
lulav-boxes to a general aesthetic notion cited from Beit Hamidrash: "One should always try to fulfil a
mitzvah with the choicest means at his disposal... Be lovely before God
according to the means graciously granted you." And Michael Koniel shows how this fulfilment
is specifically stated to mean spending "up to one third more than the
normal cost in the purchase of ceremonial objects in order to the fulfill the
mitzvah in a proper aesthetic manner.[xiv]
There may be more or less art present in the synagogue or elsewhere in Jewish
life, depending on the historical circumstances -- the wealth of the community,
the degree of hostility from without, the pressures towards assimilation of
contextual idolatry or iconoclasm—but as Avi-Yonah writes, from the start of
the synagogue's presence within Jewish consciousness, there is another
extremely important quality to be considered, what he calls the "victory
of the conceptual over the perspective and of the optical over the plastic
principle", [xv] a phenomenon he parallels to Jewish
linguistics, where Jews are always shifting and transforming their normative languages
-- from Hebrew to Aramaic from Aramaic to Arabic from Arabic to Yiddish or
Ladino and so on -- maintaining an inner integrity while seeming to adopt but
actually to adapt the contextual languages, and, we would add, artistic or
aesthetic codes. Is there, then,
something really distinctive in the Jewish imagination defining it as Jewish,
so that we can really speak of Jewish art at all, and not merely as
"craftsmanship" and popular or folk traditions, as the young
rebellious artist in Chaim Potock's novel My
Name Is Asher Lev seems to assert in a dismissive way?
[i] Ernest and Henriette
Renan, Brother and Sister: A Memoir and
the Letters, trans. Lady Mary Loyd (New York and London: Macmillan and Co.,
1896), p. 90. This passage comes from
the letter of 30 October 1842 that Henriette, then in her thirties, to her late
teen-age brother Ernest Renan. Working
as a tutor to aristocratic children on a rural estate some sixty miles west of
Warsaw, Henriette is isolated, lonely and worn-out; she is almost the sole
support for her mother in Brittany, her young brother Ernest in a theological
seminary in Issy, and an older brother Alain beginning his career. In this same letter, Henriette tries to comfort
Ernest in his struggle to decide whether or not to devote his life to the
priesthood, though he, like Henriette, have profound doubts about the Roman
Catholic Church as a proper representation of their more rational and esistic
version of religion, and their more vociferous anti-clericalism. Yet despite all her sisterly love, her
daughterly sense of duty to support the family, and her intellectual doubts
about Christianity, she cannot hold back her animus against the Jews she sees
living in abjection and poverty in the shtetls of mid-nineteenth-century
Poland.
[ii] Cited by Havelock Ellis, “Analysis of the
Sexual Impulse” in Studies in the
Psytchology of Sex, vol. III (1927) available on Project Gutenberg.
[iii] Menachem
M. Kasdan, "The Voice of God is in Beauty: Judaism and Aesthetics," Gesher 3:1 (Sivan 5726 - Jun e 1966) 89.
[viii] Michael Avi-Yoneh,
"Synagogue Architecture in the Classical Period," in Roth, Jewish
Art, p. 157. See also the essays
collected in Lee I. Levine, ed., Ancient Synagogues Revealed (Jerusalem: The Israel
Exploration Society, 1981).
[ix] To
be fair, Roth seems to have come round to a more generous view by the time of
the second edition of his Jewish Art.
[x] "Jules
Harlow, "Jewish Textiles in Light of Biblical and Post-Biblical
Literature," in Barbarba Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Cissy Grossman, eds., Fabric of Jewish Life: Textiles from the
Jewish Museum Collection, Vol.
I. (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1977), p.34.
[xi] Joseph
Guttmann, "The 'Second Commandment' and the Image in Judaism," in No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the
Hebrew Bible, ed., Joseph Guttmann (New York: KTAV, 1971), pp. 4-7. On Bezalel, also see Joseph Guttmann, Jewish
Ceremonial Art (New York and London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), p. 11 and Barbara
Gingold, "Jewish Art Comes Home in Jerusalem," The Forward (New York, 23 April 1986) 271
[xii] Harlow, „Jewish Textiles“ p. 34. Cp. Michael Koniel, The
Art of Religious Judaism (Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1979), p.
58.
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