Educating a Jewish Artist for the Future: A Dialogue between Prof. Menahem (Mel) Alexenberg and Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror. (IsraelSeen, July 29, 2021)

ALEXENBERG: Most literature dealing with the education of the visual artist asserts the need for the development of aesthetic judgement and for refinement of craft skills. The goal of course, is to enable the artist to express a unique artistic vision. We, however, are faced here with a paradox, for the very uniqueness of the artist’s vision takes shape within a social fabric. The artist who creates works of significance simultaneously transforms herself into a conduit through which the cardinal values of her culture are materialized.

Educating the Jewish artist involves a deepening of Jewish consciousness so that the Jewishness flowing out intervenes with personal self-expression.  Expression of the individual-self and group-self become inextricably and inevitably one. It is as if the entire Jewish people wells up from within the individual soul and achieves form in the material world.

Although each Jew is a unique universe, everyone plays an integral part and has a special role in the life of a greater whole. This idea of group-self, that the whole of the Jewish people is like a single organism, is a powerful concept that is instrumental for a full understanding of Judaism and its attitudes towards the artist.

It is as if the whole of the Jewish people acts like a single living organism with each of the body’s cells is the repository of all genetic information for the whole, so each Jew is the carrier of the entire Torah hidden deeply within. Each of the body’s cells reveals only a small part of the information encoded in the chromosomes, but at the same time they contain the full set of genetic information for the entire organism. In like fashion, partial and different aspects of Torah are revealed through different Jews. Every Jew is a filled vessel out of which a particular and uniquely valuable manifestation of the Torah may pour.

The artist is endowed with the gift of being able to transform mental impressions into environmental structures, to express patterns of thought as physical forms. The Jewish artist needs to learn how to reach deeply into one’s consciousness to draw out the Torah hidden within. Only when one is genuinely rooted in Jewish modes of thought, behavior and consciousness, can self-expression assume forms expressive of the soul of the Jewish people. Otherwise, the Torah sensibility that should propel art remains concealed.

DROR: I think it is worth dwelling on Bezalel’s special biblical role and attributes because any serious discussion of the role of the Jewish artist must circle back to the source. It’s worth understanding that the name Bezalel means “under divine inspiration.” The defining qualities of the Jewish artist are located at the vital center of Jewish experience. This is especially noteworthy when we bear in mind that the Hellenist-influenced Western tradition has generally viewed the artist as a suspect figure, a potential subverter of the social organism, and more of a functionary than principle player. The Jewish tradition sees this quite differently.

The Torah ascribes four attributes to Bezalel: wisdom, understanding, knowledge and skill. These terms together appear in four parts of the Bible. Initially they are ascribed to God Himself in his creative work of fashioning the world. The Isaiah employs the same terms in referring to the characteristics of the Messiah, at whose coming the world itself will require restructuring – a renewed creation. Finally the other two instances relate to Bezalel fashioning the Miskkan (Tabernacle) and the creative enterprises of Hiram at work on the First Temple.

In short, the creative artist requires not merely technical abilities but the highest governing vison that the Jewish imagination can encompass in order to successfully realize one’s vision. Particularly when we recall that the Second Commandment creates difficulties for the visual artist, it is critical that we bear in mind the positive and inspired role of the artist in Judaism.

So the education of the Jewish artist is no light matter. As much emphasis must be laid on a learning environment conductive to imparting Jewish knowledge, understanding and wisdom as they impinge upon and inform the artistic process.

ALEXENBERG: The divinely inspired role of Bezalel helps to clarify the basic differences between the Jewish artist and the artist in other traditions. European culture charged the artist with the task of creating a copy of nature, imitating it as if were a pre-existent ideal. Judaism, however, conceives of nature as incomplete. Less is it nature that is to be imitated then the creative process itself in which man and God are necessarily partners. Rather than imitating the creation, the Jewish artist is charged with imitating the Creator.

Rabbi Akiva demonstrated that human creation can be more elevated that God’s to a dubious Roman official by offering him a choice between a plate of wheat grains or a plate of cakes. Indeed, human creations re understood by Judaism to be not competition, but a continuation and compliment of those of God.  The non-Jewish idea of as mere mimesis is carried as well by the very overtones of the word.

Art is the root of the words “artificial” and “artifact.” It is an imitation, a copy, a counterfeit, a falsification. On the other hand, the Hebrew word for art is omanut, allied to truth, faith, craft and training. The English and Hebrew terms express opposite implications because the Jewish idea of an imperfect reality that requires human intervention to help in its very creation precludes the notion of an ideal nature to be copied.

DROR: That connects to the Jewish idea of learning, which is not conceptually yoked to courses, credits and a quantity of finite knowledge to be absorbed. Rather, our greatest sages are always questioning and searching a past that is continually renewed in themselves. An eighty-year old sage is called a talmid haham  – a wise student still learning.  It seems to me that such a model of continual probing is particularly appropriate to our rapidly evolving digital culture. We perceive an infinite, unfinished world for which the traditional heuristic approach of Jewish vintage, of constantly refining the questioning process has contemporary value.

ALEXENBERG: According to tradition, the first Jewish school was established by Abraham in the same Negev desert where we are now learning and teaching. In the Torah, it is called Eshel Avraham. Eshel is a tamarisk tree spelled with the same letters as the Hebrew word for questioning. It can be argued that formation and formalization of fixed and final answers is the very characteristic of idol worship.  The Decalogue, according to rabbinic tradition, forbids the creation of representations that are perfect and complete.

The Western ideal glorifies perfect representations by genius artists. They are framed in golden halos or elevated on pedestals set off in a museum-temple where they are worshipped.  This is close enough to the golden calf to chafe Jewish sensibilities. Our ideal is to make the everyday extraordinary, to sanctify the ordinary. It is not confined to exceptional or miraculous events.

We inject the daily, material world with spiritual dimensions through action called mitzvot. Beauty is found in the elegant way in which we act called hidur mizvah. The observant Jew begins his day by washing hands with a beautiful two-handle cup and saying a prayer that links a most ordinary action – hand washing – to the creation of the world and the return of one’s soul after a night of sleep. To the Jewish psyche, the Western notion of “High Art” for display in museums is alien. Art is highest when it reaches down into daily life.

DROR: Your reference to the culture of museums is cogent. The very word derives from the Greek muse-on, a temple to goddesses.  Most contemporary museums, often in spite of the vaunted designs of “with it” directors, inevitably function like cathedrals of dying cultures. I would conjecture that the first Jewish museums were established when Jews stopped using ritual objects Jewishly in their daily lives. They “elevated” Jewish art into disuse and veneration.

ALEXENBERG: The most valued object for the Jew is, of course, the Sepher Torah, the first five books of the Bible hand-written on a scroll. How is Jewish reverence imparted? Obviously not by framing it in gold and posting a guard to keep people at a distance. The Jew, rather, hugs the holy scroll, dances with it at times of celebration, and passes it from hand to hand. The relationship is an intimate and embracing one.

DROR: Our Torah often partakes of the qualities of a living person and is treated accordingly.  At times it is dressed, held and kissed. In short, it is treated like a beloved with a sacred and living personality,

ALEXENBERG: We are labeled “The People of the Book” by others, but the Sepher Torah is not a codex-type book at all. It is a scroll. Indeed the very word sepher, spelled SPR in Hebrew, can be found in the root of the word “SPiRal.” It is linked to the words “SPiRitual” and “inSPiRation.” The spiral form is found in the DNA double-helix that holds the codes for all forms of life. This offers a fundamental clue to the nature of the Jewish spirit as an open-ended living system. Reading the Bible from a book does not fulfill the religious obligation of the Jew. That it must be read from a scroll is a clear demonstration of medium subsuming the message. Form and content complimenting each other covey what is definitively Jewish.

The incipient Jewish artist must learn to move beyond merely plugging Jewish content into alien forms. All one’s senses should be attuned to discovering the geometry of Jewish mind as expressed though flowing open-ended forms. One can begin with the interpreting the form of the basic staple of life – bread. Look at mass-produced bread sliced into rectangles and set off from tactile and olfactory contact by plastic wrap.  Jews fashion a spiral loaf – challah –spiraling strands of dough merging in an integrated form like the life systems of palm trees and snails. The spiral challah also contrasts with the pita of the East, a flat, round, closed-system bread. Rectangles and circles are closed forms that Judaism rejects for open growth forms of spiral and branching systems – the Torah scroll and the menorah.

DROR: Rav Kook, chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, bespoke the need, now that our people are returning to the Land of Israel, to establish the physical, sensual connection to Judaism rather than only verbal links. We must develop an artistic kollel-bet midrash wherein students express, argue and create visual midrash – dynamic, tangible, artistic commentaries on their Jewishness.