Speaking
of the Unspeakable,
Seeing the Unimaginable
and
Thinking the Inconceivable
For no other people, no other history,
and no other present political life is there such a range of denial, let alone
about so many fundamental issues that strike at that people’s heart and
standing in the world.[i]
It is so hard to argue clearly in
a world of denialism for the specific, subtle and witty ways in which the
Jewish imagination works. The process of
such a historical tradition have always been confronted by threats and acts of
violence, intellectual rejectionism and callous adaptation and outright theft,
deliberate misunderstandings and cultural obtuseness. Does turning away, turning
inward and refusing to engage with these oppositional forces, particularly when
they pretend to be open, friendly and eager to learn, make the task of
explanation any easier ? Must we pretend back, as it were, that we can
engage in dialogue, converstion and meaningful sharing of information ?
Though so much ground is already shared in terms of textual and image-based
learning, the misunderstandings seem greater than ever as soon as we relax, let
down our guard and try to answer specific questions or generously seek to
rectify errors.
Related but not equivalent to the
question of the artistic or aesthetic value in the Jewish plastic imagination
is that of iconography. What is depicted
or symbolized in Jewish art and to what purpose? From whence do these signs derive ? How do these visual images and objects come
into being before they are even conceived of as Jewish, and then where do they
function in the worship, meditation, and interpretation of the primary Judaic
endeavor—the interpretative as revelatory moment? Do they in any way coordinate or arrange
themselves into a set of extra-verbal texts supplementary to or extensions of
the written records of Jewish experience and rabbinical dialogue? Do they have any intrinsic meanings or do
they only gain such meaning through their integration into logical and judicial
practice ?
Once we have accepted
that, for the most part, there is no attempt within formal or informal Jewish
art to represent the image or tangible attributes of God, we have to accept that
there are illustrations of his affective and cognitive attributes and his moral
and spiritual effects. Certainly already
in the revolutionary emptiness of the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple
signaled the centrality in pre-rabbinic Judaism of a nameless, imageless
deity. Yet several factors need to be
said in modification of this absolute aniconic conceptualization which Albert
C. Moore uses to define Jewish symbolism[ii].
One is that fact that the Torah records (but
not necessarily describes in vivid imagery) a number of theophanies, that is, moments
when individuals or groups are privileged to experience the manifestation of the
Godhead in their presence: a god who walks and speaks in the Garden of Eden,
for instance. Since this manifestation
of God is normatively disallowed in subsequent history, it can be presented
only figuratively, through its effects
on the human characters involved, by focusing on the objects associated with or
through it, or by a set of displacing symbols, such as the hands of God which
stand for the Creator making the world.
Second there is the more frequent
appearance of angels or other mysterious and prophetic messengers of God who
bring into view, if not into more extensive tangibility, syndechdochic facets
of the divine Name: angels to be
wrestled with or served luncheon to and voices out of burning bushes to be
argued against, even pillars of cloud or fire to lead whole nations across the
desert. Again, the tendency is not to
depict the scene as such, that is, to focus on a narrative event, but to
abstract from it particular elements, the humans, the objects or place-signs
associated with it. Particularly
relevant here is the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, where it is the mountain,
the ram left in substitute, or the knife-wielding Abraham that are used to
allude to the fullness of the event as it is understood by rabbinical Judaism.
Third there is the development,
perhaps fairly early in post-Exilic times, of the concept of the Shekhinah, the Presence of God, a female
form historically generated out of ancient goddess cults, courtly love poetry,
and emblematic representation of Torah as Lady Wisdom; but this wonderful and numenous being,
Hochmah cum Shekhinah -- and later
the Sabbath Bride—would become, through a laborious process of purifying of the
imagination and coordination of aftfect with cognitive effect, a visual
centring device for the Jewish imagination, whether in the marginal decorations
of a wedding contract (a kitubah), in
the illustrations of an illuminated haggadah
for the seder service, or a cloth woven to hold matzoh, sabbath oil or spices,
or a cushion. Any and all brides or
wives are participants in the manifestation of the Shekinah, and hence all images of marriage, its preliminaries and
consequences, run the gamut of allusions to Wisdom , Israel
A fourth element arises in
rabbinical Judaism where the figure of God imaginatively becomes the archetype
rabbi, not just Moshe Rabbenu. God is
spoken of as though conducting talmudic discussions in the heavenly academy,
sometimes requiring the advice of still-living teachers, and sometimes being
bested in debates by mortal opponents.
In enhancements of these images in aggadah,
the familiar, close, fellow-rabbi type of God is developed, and subsequent
folk-tradition and learned anecdote crates the figure of a learning, studying
god. He is with each cheder-child learning the aleph-bet
as well as each yeshiva-bucher
puzzling out the most abstruse arguments or pilpul
of Gemorah. It thus becomes problematic
to identify the stereotyped figure of the little old rabbi in Jewish folk art
as a real person, an enhancement of Moshe Rabbenu, or a domesticated image of
the Master of the Universe.
Post-Emancipation artists, like Marc Chagall as we shall see later, draw
on this problematic ambiguity in their paintings, including even their
depictions of a Jewish Christ on the cross—but such a shocking, insulting depiction
needs greater clarification, because it is possible only when certain
historical circumstances collide with traditional memories and residual objects
familiar to the artist and his audience.
As we look through any collection
of Jewish art, from archaeological restorations of the First or Second Temple
periods, subsequent synagogue artifacts related to the talmudic and
post-talmudic ages, including wood carvings, textiles, and mosaics, what is
striking is not only what we have already alluded to above, the graceful,
fleeting lines of an imagination that grasps a numinous moment of actions,
persons or animals in the process of their sanctification of life, but, in the
midst of their stylization, a sense of their being within a continuum of real
existence. Except where highly assimilated
artists or communities adapt the neutralized conventions of the hegemonic
gentile society that presses in on them with imemdiate threats as well as the weight
of centuries-old persecution and exclusion, they are not arbitrary symbols,
virtual hieroglyphs, spelling out the mystical otherness of life on the other-
or under-side of this one. They are multi-layered
and distant manifestations of an inwardness that is no less real, if anything,
much more real—real in the sense of tangible, historical, existential—than that
existential combination of sensual perceptions which we normally see, hear,
feel, taste and smell as thr mortal, created world. It is an inwardness which does not deny but
intensifies the appearance and experience of the immediate. The world of humanity is mystically not
transcended but, through the imagination of the artist, revealed to be already
sanctified in history. The Jewish sense
of the sacred is more than an imminent theophany in history or in this
world. It is always already
participating in the textures of time and space, and its artistic representation shows that which is
there but not always visible or experienced, keyed by the living artist, of
course, to persons and places known through the holy texts to be sanctified by
special processes of clarification.
The Temple itself—as historical
object and as idealized memory—forms a privileged locus of such continuous and
dynamic process of sanctification and clarification. Hence, both before and (much more so after)
the Destruction of the Second Temple, allusions to the architectural features,
the furniture and liturgical objects within, and the persons and ritual actions
carried out in the Temple signal, above all else, the numinous manifestation of
the sacred. There are candelabra,
altars, tables for shewbread; priests
carrying out the sacrifice of goats and sheep;
goblets for wine and so forth. They are not only known to us today in a
realistic representation through the Arch of Tiberius but also symbolically
through countless Jewish manuscript paintings.
Each of these elements, can, and
in fact normally do, act as a synecdoche, as parts for the whole, processes for
the producer, or contained for the container.
Any one or any clustering of such allusions to the Temple recalls the
whole cultic service of ancient Israel, a holy nation dedicated to the
sanctification of the Name, and thereby of its own sanctification, its own
clarification into the imminence of the sacred.
Of course, the more the historical Destruction in 69 CE recedes into the
past, the more the memory of the Temple is idealized, with all previous party
strife and factionalization of the Judaic community absorbed into a simplified
vision of the chosen people. This is
enhanced by the exilic rabbinic reinterpretation of the cults of sacrifice and
temple service, evidence in the Mishnaic texts and their Talmudic enhancements
and adjustments. With study of the
sacred texts and synagogue worship taken as the superseding and perfecting
modes of Jewish endeavour and the earlier processes of intellectualization and
internalization of ethical standards made dominant in the community, the
meaning of the Temple and its attributes becomes at one with the ideals of
rabbinic Judaism. There may be allusions
in any iconographic decoration of a menorah or curtain to close a Torah ark,
recalling specific figures or happenings in the Bible directly or more
indirectly to passages in the Mishnah or Talmud or even more obliquely, through
visual and verbal puns on the names or attributes of patrons, donors and honoured
leaders of the community; but a primary value lies in the immediate, general
recollection of the Temple itself as a centre of Jewish consciousness. The memory of the actual Temple
There
are also a wide range of heraldric or emblematic beasts, lions and deer, as
well as decorative clusters of grapes and wreaths of various leaves that appear
with regularity on post-cultic Jewish architecture, tapestries and furniture
and in the patterned presentation of books and other ritual or domestic
objects. These, like the recurring
astrological signs and motifs gleaned from Greek, Roman, Bysantine, Persian,
and even later Christian and Islamic culture challenge our assumptions, first,
about the Jewish taboos on graven images and, then, about the Jewish
seriousness about manifesting the potential sacrality of the world. We can trace the lions and the grapevines,
naturally, to Scriptural passages where they function as formulaic images of
the sacred, sometimes as totem beasts and plants for tribes and clans and then
by extension of the Jewish people as a whole.
Many of the other elements in this iconography which strike us as
arbitrary or blasphemous should be restored to a prior mentality.
[i] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil that Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antiosemitism
(New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2013) p. 354.
[ii] Albert
C. Moore, Iconography of Religions: An
Introduction (London: SCM
Press, 1977), see the section on Judaism in Chapter 7 "Prophetic
Iconoclasm: Judaism and
Islam," pp. 204-227.
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