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The Creation of Beauty by Its Destruction the Idoloclastic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Jewish Art

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The Creation of Beauty by Its Destruction the Idoloclastic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Jewish Art MELISSA RAPHAEL The creation of beauty by its destruction The idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art ontemporary commentators are well aware that with him, not least because characterising their trad­ the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far ition aniconically as the prototypical Word smoothed Cfrom suppressing art, the Second Command- the passage of their integration into Protestant cul­ ment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses ture (Petersen 2015: 181–98). But by the late nine­ halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to pro- teenth and early twentieth centuries, the promises duce figurative images that at once cancel and restore of the German Enlightenment were looking hollow the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests and modern Jewish thinkers such as Franz Kafka and that Jewish art’s observance of the Second Command- Walter Benjamin began to take aesthetic inspiration ment’s proscription of idolatrous images (a command- from other sources, including the art of the Italian ment that belongs indivisibly with the First) is ever more Renaissance (Biemann 2012). By the second half relevant to a contemporary image-saturated mass cul- of the twentieth century, the Holocaust had broken ture whose consumption induces feelings of both hubris the spell of German philosophy and culture over and self-disgust or shame. The article revisits Steven modern Jewish thought, and the significant contribu­ Schwarzschild’s interpretation of the halakhic require- tion of Jews to modern art in Europe and the United ment that artists should deliberately mis-draw or dis- States had become ever less deniable. It was further tort the human form and Anthony Julius’s account of becoming apparent to several Jewish commentators Jewish art as one that that mobilizes idol breaking. As that, far from suppressing Jewish art, the Second an aesthetic consequence of the rabbinic permission to Commandment’s proscription of idolatrous images mock idols – and thereby render the ideo logical cults for (not all and any images other than images of God) which they are visual propaganda merely laughable or could actually produce it. absurd – distortive, auto-destructive and other related In this article I want to present an account of forms of Jewish art are not intended to alienate the the sorts of images that are produced because of the sanctity of the human. On the contrary, by honouring Second Commandment, not in spite of it. Defining the transcendence of the human, especially the face, modern Jewish art as an engagement, whether secu­ idoloclastic art knows the human figure as sublime, lar or spiritual, with Jewish experience and tradition, always exceeding any representation of its form. Idolo- and distinguishing between idoloclasm and icono­ clastic anti-images thereby belong to a messianic aes- clasm, which latter is a violent means to gain unmedi­ thetic of incompletion that knows the world as it ought ated access to truth, or the vandalization of everyone to be but is not yet; that remains open to its own futur- else’s objects of veneration but your own, I will argue ity: the restoration of dignity, in love. that intentionally Jewish art is idoloclastic. By this I mean that it is an approach that takes active measures to prevent captivity by false ideas, or idols. One way It is well known that Kant thought that one of that it does that is by refusing to render beauty as a Judaism’s few redeeming features was the Second perfection of the human. An artist must not depict Commandment’s proscription of images (1987: 135). the beauty of human beings in ways that compromise After their emancipation, Jews were happy to agree their humanity. Jewish art, instead, bears witness 14 Approaching Religion • Vol. 6, No. 2 • December 2016 to human finitude; its images have pathos. Jewish must be incomplete, defaced or broken – made just a images of the human locate beauty in the endurance little less beautiful by being given, say, only one eye, of history, not its brute conquest; they limit power or a chipped nose. not by violence but by aesthetic subversion and irony, To claim that human creativity must not compete and they assume the natural transience of beauty and with God’s, but express its relation to God’s creativity the beauty of transience, so preventing the alienation (Soloveitchik 1965: 18–20; see further, Wurzburger of beauty from the human by its commodification. 1996: 219–28), is not to suggest that the rabbis are Steven Schwarzschild, in 1975, was one of the hostile or indifferent to art. Before the nineteenth first of several commentators who have characterised century no observant Jew would have understood Jewish art as actively counter­idolatrous, an approach art as having its own purpose: it was an essentially which he traced back to early medieval rabbinic rul­ decorative, occasionally pedagogical, phenomenon ings, especially those of Maimonides, restated in and served ritual and domestic purposes, often the sixteenth century by Rabbi Joseph Caro in his both of these at once. Of the modern rabbis, Rav codification of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch.1 Abraham Issac Kook was far better disposed to art Because any image of a human being created in the than most rabbis of his time, but his view of art is image of God is thereby a second­order image of not wholly unrepresentative. In a letter he wrote to God, here, two­dimensional paintings of human fig­ Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel Academy of ures are judged to be permissible as long as the artist Art and Design in Jerusalem, he described the new takes pains to visually prevent their being mistaken school of art as a sign of national redemption, bring­ for God or gods.2 In particular, the face, where the ing life, hope, and comfort to the Jewish people. ‘Our (surely unpaintable)3 image of God is made manifest, people’, he wrote, ‘look well on the sweet beauty of art’. However, he also observed that this relationship is limited: ‘As we draw close with the left hand, we 1 Ch. 141, ‘Laws about Images and Forms’, Caro’s ruling, push away with the right (cited in Kadden nd: 97). Schwarzschild writes, leaves us ‘only one legitim­ Nonetheless, it is important for the purposes of this ate way of depicting the human: to indicate in some article to note that the rabbis have not been dismiss­ physical way that the physis is only an inadequate manifestation of real nature; and since spirit cannot be ive of human physic al beauty. In fact, the first sight of pictorially added to the body image, something must a heart­stoppingly beautiful person, animal, or tree is be taken away from that appearance’. Paradoxically, in the proper occasion of a blessing, though some rabbis doing so, Jewish art effects ‘not a reduction but an are of the view that men shouldn’t make this bless­ expansion of the human form. The negative com­ ing on a woman because they shouldn’t be looking mandment prohibiting the depiction of the complete 4 human person is in substance a positive command­ admiringly at women other than their wives. ment to introduce the human spirit into the human But having said that, there is a wariness of aes­ form. In short the slashed nose is the symbol of the theticism. Credit for physical beauty goes to its divine soul’ (Schwartzschild 1990: 296; see also Schwartz­ creator, not its bearer, and when making an image of schild 1998: 5 and Julius 2000). The practice of dam­ a person, it is a category mistake to advert to their aging images has not disappeared. In Haredi retail dis­ spirit by means of adverting to the beauty of their tricts it is still sometimes possible to see mannequin heads displaying wigs for Orthodox women where the body. Therefore, when making an image of a living end of the nose has been chipped off. person (making an image of a corpse would not be 2 Note that by the time the Talmud was compiled, the prohibition of service to alien gods was no longer construed as the literal worship of divinities from category mistake of assuming that the image of God other religions. This, the rabbis believed, had ceased in the face has the kind of visual phenomenality that to be a threat to Jewish observance during the Second can be mimetically represented in an image. Temple period. Modern and contemporary rabbis 4 Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, 225:10, based on BT also have no reason to suspect contemporary Jews of Berachot 58b. However, on the basis of BT Avoda literal idol worship. See further, Kadden nd: 111. Zara 20a, where R Shimon ben Gamliel uses Psalm 3 Rembrandt’s and Chardin’s late self­portraits may, 104:24 to rejoice in the creation of an exceptionally perhaps, have come as close as it is possible to come beautiful woman he sees in the street, the Elya Rabba to evoking the image of God in the human face, and the Shulchan Aruch permit this blessing to be though this is a personal, illustrative judgement that said by a male even at the sight of an idolatrous non­ cannot pretend to objectivity and it is not to make the Jewish woman. Approaching Religion • Vol. 6, No. 2 • December 2016 15 helmets, crowns, or rear views, to portray the human face.6 In 2013 Marc Epstein published a theory that seemed to overturn previous readings of the manu­ script as exemplifying the counter­idolatrous aes­ thetic of distortion I’ve just described. He claimed, rightly I think, that the birds’ heads are not in fact birds’ heads.
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