Sermon: Ki Tissa Greek Art and Jewish Art
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 21 February 2022
Yesterday, an exhibition of works by the great Impressionist artist, Jacob Abraham Camille Pissaro, opened at the Ashmolean in Oxford. Born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas in the West Indies, both his parents were Jewish, as were and are many of his descendants. But if we went around the exhibition, would we be able to tell from his work that he was Jewish?
Whether there is such a thing as ‘Jewish Art’ has been hotly debated among artists and art historians. Is Pissaro’s work ‘Jewish’ because he was? Or does ‘Jewish Art’ have to have a Jewish subject? But in that case, is a work with a Jewish subject but done by a non-Jewish artist ‘Jewish Art’?
The closest that synagogues get to any art might be in stained glass windows or in the silverwork on Sifrei Torah. These ark doors were designed by Ardyn Halter, who is Jewish. The ark doors downstairs were designed by non-Jewish artists. What we don’t see in synagogues, obviously, are statues or paintings.
The popular view is that it’s because the 2nd commandment prohibits making images of God – we are created in the image of God, so therefore human representation in synagogues is unacceptable.
Yet that’s not entirely true. We know of Babylonian synagogues with statues of the king where Talmudic scholars worshipped, apparently without problem (Rosh Hashanah 24b) The rabbis distinguished between images made for worship and those for decoration. “You can make an Aphrodite for the bathhouse,” we read in the Mishnah, “but not a bathhouse for Aphrodite.” (Avodah Zarah 3:4) In other words, a statue of Aphrodite as decoration is OK; a bathhouse dedicated to the pagan goddess Aphrodite is not.
Later codes of Jewish law elaborate. Much of the concern focusses on the fact that human representation imitates non-Jewish practice, rather than because it violates basic Jewish principles.
Last Shabbat we started reading about the mishkan, the portable sanctuary, which would accompany the people on their journey through the desert. The Torah goes into enormous detail about that sanctuary, its accoutrements and decorations. That’s virtually all there is in these last 15 chapters of Exodus – almost half of the book’s 40 chapters.
Almost but not all. In the middle of all the builder’s spec’ we read about the Golden Calf. The Israelites bring gold and silver for both mishkan and Golden Calf but with, self-evidently, different results. Perhaps the episode comes where it does precisely to establish the contrast: artistic work to enhance the mishkan is kosher; artistic work to build an idol is forbidden.
Today we read about Bezalel: this man, endowed by God with the spirit of wisdom and craftmanship, will oversee the construction – not so much ‘artist’ as ‘artisan.’ For does ‘artisan’ not suggest a certain moral probity, the honest craftsman, not working for ego-centric or commercial motives, but simply out of the love and joy of doing this holy task?
En passant, isn’t it interesting that one of the first cultural institutions of Zionist settlement in Palestine should have been a school of art, called (what else?) Bezalel. It was established in 1906, with the specific aim of creating a Jewish art indigenous to Palestine, expressive of the Zionist dream.
Bezalel is the son of Uri, grandson of Hur of the tribe of Judah. Usually a person is simply “so-and-so, son of so-and-so.” But with Bezalel we’re told his father, grandfather and tribe. Midrash suggests that when the Israelites wanted to make the Golden Calf, Hur tried to dissuade them and so they killed him. As compensation, his grandson, Bezalel, would be the one to construct the approved art-form: the mishkan. (Tanchuma, Vayakhel 4)
With the gifts we read of in the Torah, Bezalel could distinguish between art and idolatry, had the wisdom to steer clear of art slipping into idolatry.
For what is idolatry if not what happens when something material is taken to be the reality it tries to represent; when a value of relative importance is elevated into one of absolute importance.
For God was never in the mishkan. How could a spirit ever be? The presence of God was indicated by a hovering cloud by day, a pillar of fire by might. When the cloud moved, the mishkan had to be moved until it was once again under the cloud. In other words, however beautiful a building might be, however fine its fixtures and fittings, without the presence of God, it will always be soulless and empty. It’s not the outer forms that carry ultimate meaning but the inner spirit.
Part of our ‘difficulty’ is that we come to this text with eyes conditioned by Western art which seems to put greater emphasis on outer forms.
Leo Baeck wrote a marvellous essay entitled “Two World Views compared” in which he compares Jewish and Greek ideas about art. (“Vollendung und Spannung” first published in 1923 and then incorporated into “Wegen im Judentum,” 1933. Reprinted in “The Pharisees and Other Essays” Schocken New York 1966 pp125-148)
His starting point is that we human beings are afraid of or apprehensive about, change and want to take refuge in that which is fixed and unchanging. ”The eye that beholds the world,” he writes, “can only possess the instant and therefore really possesses nothing…. only in the work of art, it was felt, can we discover the blissful land of the always-the-same.” (p125) That is where you would find meaning and duration. The artist tries to express that which is permanent, the essence, the unchangeable thing. “Only the work of art is; only the work of art is true.” (p126)
The ultimate Greek artistic medium was sculpture because it sought to encapsulate the unchangeable, to be the ultimate expression of an idea and an ideal: beauty, love, strength, wisdom and so on.
The aim was perfection. Interesting but not coincidental that in the grammar of many European languages, the past tense is called ‘perfect’ and the future the ‘imperfect.’ That which is ‘perfect’ is in the past and has somehow been captured, seized. And so Baeck says, “Thus finality, pastness, becomes the ideal…. , or, expressed negatively, the ideal is future-less.”(p130)
And yet we have a profound need for the aesthetic in our lives. Visual art is powerful because it touches our imagination. And that gives it, obviously, potential for great creativity, or great destructiveness – art for a mishkan or for a Golden Calf. But aesthetics without ethics slides inexorably into idolatry.
If the Greeks struggled to express the holiness of beauty, Judaism took the other path, striving to express the beauty of holiness; well, not so much to express it as to experience it. In Jewish thinking we’re always on the way to becoming, ever the clay out of which something is yet to be fashioned. “Becoming and struggling,” argues Baeck, “the constant preoccupation with the path and the future …. this constant tension is what is understood as the meaning of life, the life of the world and the life of human beings.” (p137)
God cannot be trapped in wood or stone … or a statue of a calf … not even in a mishkan. Maybe that’s why the episode of the Golden Calf comes where it does in the long construction narrative: a a reminder that all this building work for the mishkan is for the glory of God. But don’t even begin to think you might have ‘housed’ God in that place.
God cannot be captured, cannot even be seen – “no person shall see my face and live,” Moses is told (Exodus 33:20) He has to squeeze into a cleft in the rock as God passes by, can only see the back of God, moving away, ever-moving.
Baeck is right to talk of two world views. The consummated Greek world in which we experience completion, being, existence as a perfect work of art; or the Jewish world of tension in which we experience the urge to the infinite, experiencing the world as an ongoing process of creation, a path on the way to becoming – but not yet there, not yet perfect, not yet perfected, always (to coin a phrase) ‘away from here.’ Nor is it coincidence that halacha, badly mistranslated as ‘law,’ really speaks about a journey, about movement.
The objection to idolatry is not about the materials nor that those materials can be worked into tangible images. It is when the material or the image is taken to have some intrinsic value, in and of itself. Easy to forget that the material presence is just a shadow, an inadequate expression of a reality that we try and reach – but knowing that it is ultimately beyond our reach and our grasp.