National Scholar Updates

I cannot sing this place.

I stand on ash, balance
on the platform. The audience of ten
faces, hollow and ghostly, urges—
Try not to fall into those earthen jaws,
moats of dust mixed with rain.
Looking into the deep troughs, dizzy
from time-induced nausea, I think
of that lullaby, Sleep, sleep,
one day you will have raisins and almonds.

I try to make a song here.

The air drips with inky streaks,
bus fumes and burnt hair.
Charred scrawls on the station
wall condemn me to death,
Stars of David replace Xs, cross
out hearts, point to the letters in Polish,
need no translation: Gas the Jews.
I want to scream old songs, erase
these coal marks that smudge, but do not fade.

My voice is no vandal.

One small voice: I hate
the green narrow barracks
These icy beds, cracked,
gravel under boots. Bones
ache, thinking of boots,
and breaking bodies.
Bald and fleshless,
song keeps me human.

And another: Labor
at poems—no ink, no scraps of paper
bags, cardboard packaging. Try
to sing my words, help commit
them to memory. Others make simple
tunes, children's nighttime songs. I do not
want to lose my words. I cannot
lose them. They are all I own.

I do not always remember.

A raspy once-tenor: The tattoo on my
arm wrinkles as my body fades. I
listen to folk songs, rock
to jagged breathing. My fellow men,
dying, sing German songs with
dulcet words. They chant as though still
in taverns, men with real clothes,
reeking of ale-splotched wool.
Their songs transport me
to another town, to a place where one
need not stumble onto a crowded train
with suffocating grandmothers.

When I try the first note, my throat constricts,
closes around a small D.

And a voice like a tin bell: I drew a picture
yesterday, with two pieces of colored
wax. I snuck them in here, and
a few envelopes, and I drew a bird
with long feathers and lots of corn to eat.
I was told that if those men
find my envelope-bird they will take it
away. I have no pockets to hide, I want
to put it on the wall, by my splintery bunk,
where women sometimes sneak to tell stories and
sing quiet songs. My favorite one
is about a white goat that eats almonds.
My bird would like to eat almonds, too.

No lullaby is needed here, I think.
Everything already sleeps.
I am alone with my family of ghosts,
ready to sing to them:
Rozhinkes mit mandlen, shlof, shlof.
But the words are foreign.

(How can I sing these words?)

I grab the gnarled black fence,
rusted and thick. I do not care
that this border is sharp, I just want
to sing, to have a soft note leave
my body, some small solace—
a salve of words to cover these
bitter marks in my palms. Bloody lines,
here an alef, there a jumble
of burning crossroads.

And still my scarred throat demands:
Where is the song?

I.

A fellow art student—we’ll call him Tal—once described to me how it felt to wear a skirt for the first time—jubilant, liberated, correct, and uncomfortable. The skirt exposed a deep truth; but even as he felt whole, wearing a skirt meant sacrificing the convenient comportment he had once used as a shield. Since he had always been an unassuming person, the stares took some getting used to. Tal worried that wearing a skirt was overly flamboyant; he didn’t want to be a drag queen, he just wanted to be a gay man who wore a skirt. His conclusion, and I have thought of this often, was that joyously idiosyncratic behavior is almost always viewed as extravagant, whether it presents as a man wearing a skirt or a woman wearing a headscarf.

All this poured forth from Tal as we sat in a studio waiting for the model, spiderlike, to refold her limbs for the next pose. We were the only two in the class wearing skirts. Tal’s commitment to joyous idiosyncrasy lent his demeanor a peace I envied. I longed to feel as at ease in my skirt as he, his hairy leg propped up on the orange bucket of a plastic chair, apparently did in his. But I’m still coming out to the art world as Orthodox, and to the Orthodox world as an artist. So, on that particular day, I did not wear my skirt with aplomb.

I have failed to find a comfortable home for myself at the intersection of contemporary art and Modern Orthodoxy. Perhaps someday I’ll easily inhabit both realms, but most days I feel like a barely viable chimera. Until recently, I have kept art and religion as separate as milchigs and fleishigs. But in the past year, I have become involved in the Jewish Art Salon of New York and Jewish Art Now. Hesitantly, I look around and I see pockets of religious Jews, more hopeful than I, who desire a place for art within Orthodox life.

If they endeavor to carve out such a space, they may encounter some of the tensions I outline below. Or not. The challenges I list presuppose an orientation toward contemporary, secular, and liberal art, and there exist other art forms—beautiful ritual objects, folk traditions, and meaningful illustrations—that integrate with Orthodoxy far more readily. Further, these challenges only exist if the Orthodox world wishes to co-opt my work. I make no claims about the inherent Jewishness or Torah value within the product, process, or audience of my art. While I can try to convey the foundation for my work and the cultural prerequisites for its production, ultimately, the Orthodox community arbitrates which types of art they value.

II.

As an artist, my aim is fidelity to the thickness of experience, experience being the sine qua non of art making. Watching a pink towel flutter or a carp gasp for breath in the market can serve as the kernel for a piece, or the impetus can be something more dramatic, like driving through Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Inspiration depends only secondarily upon the material and primarily upon one’s mindset during the encounter. Now, I am too much of a structuralist to wait around for transcendent or ineffable experience. Although I despair of escape from Barthes’ ubiquitous web of meanings, I concede that one might bounce above that web briefly, like the kid who becomes momentarily airborne while jumping on his trampoline on shabbos afternoon. While aloft, the readjusted lens of perception renders anew the subject of encounter. One always returns to earth, but if you are an artist or a poet, you get pretty decent hang time.
I refer to these episodes as “getting hit” because they have a passive quality, and because they are often violent in their power. Salvatore Quasimodo wrote a few lines that capture the quality these experiences brilliantly:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
Traffito da un raggio di sole:
Ed e subito sera.

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world
Pierced by a ray of sunlight,
And suddenly
It is evening.

The heart of the world represents the territory trodden most regularly by humanity, falling in love, giving birth, or simply watching a pink towel fly from an open window. People pass back and forth over essentially the same experiences, yet, paradoxically, they stand alone. The bounds of sense swell in reaction to being pierced, or hit. When that occurs there is a constriction of all but the subject of experience. Then the ray of sunlight. As a painter, I prefer to think of this not as an epistemological metaphor, but as a sharpening of the senses. “And suddenly it is evening.” One returns to the mundane, which is the matrix but not the location of this event, and finds it dim.

Frequently, but not necessarily, these episodes are correlated with states no polite religion condones, like drunkenness, lustfulness, shock, anger, or mania. Whatever else one might say about them, these states sometimes help launch the artist away from his demons: the verbal, the propositional, the prosaic, the linear, and the assumed. To the extent that Orthodoxy deifies these modalities, it becomes hostile territory for art making.

The Orthodoxy I know is fairly risk-averse, favoring replicable, consistent behaviors over sensual experience, which is neither predictable nor controllable. To be risk-averse is prudent when sin is the price of a bad gamble and, in light of the concept of commanded-ness, replicable behaviors make good sense. Unfortunately, being risk-averse is not a great way to approach art, and predictability does not tend to foster the seed experiences that produce art. However, once that seed experience is had and the artist sits down to draw or paint or sculpt, Orthodox culture dovetails rather nicely studio practice. The sense of personal responsibility for and dogged pursuit of meaning that Twyla Tharp describes in “The Creative Habit” is one of my favorite characteristics of religious life.

I do not believe that religious and artistic truths are fundamentally at odds. Although religious text might structure some experiences, there remain broad tracts of lived meaning that I have never heard a Jewish text or voice address. Torah does not usually answer questions such as, what did it feel like to give birth? (Not what should you feel like, but what did you feel like?) Or: why does a red wheelbarrow standing in the rain make me feel both full and empty? Or: what is the quality of this widower’s pain? Or: how do I experience space, fantasy, memory, fur, lust, displacement, meat, or glee? Torah may dictate that we experience this meat and not that one, but it is silent on the topic of the meat’s redness. All these are phenomenological questions and narrative truths that religion does not address and, perhaps, cannot answer.
The artist, however, does ask these questions and, while chipping, gouging, and shaping, he must continually recall the seed experience until it instantiates as form. As Dewey wrote, “while that initial thing is certainly experiences, it is not experiences in such a way as to be composed into experience.” To that end, the artist must spend long nights at the drafting table. The painting or sculpture she creates in the slow after burn of inspiration is the best answer to a question like, “how do I experience space?”

III.

I asked a student of mine, a talented painter from a kollel family, why she thought painting and frumkeit were compatible. She answered that learning something of perceptual painting gave her self-confidence and cultivated her appreciation of Hashem’s physical creation, so, nu, what was the problem? This is a legitimate, and quite beautiful, way to combine art and piety. But I remain dissatisfied with this answer because it treats art as therapy. What is the distinction between art as therapy and art as aesthetic experience? Audience. Art does not blossom into aesthetic meaning until someone other than the artist sees it. As John Dewey puts it, “expression is not merely a process of discharging personal emotion. It is a rhetorical stance, a technical stance.” And for a rhetorical stance, one needs an audience.

The scarcity of Orthodox gallery-goers hinders the cultivation of an Orthodox aesthetic culture at least as much as the dearth of Orthodox artists does. Capturing an audience requires compromise and subtly, the essence of rhetoric. For the sake of an observant audience, one might refrain from unnecessarily crass imagery. For the sake of a broader audience, one might abstract cultural particulars.

Sad to say, I have run up against this “audience problem.” I make paintings that are walls, not windows. This concept stands in counterpoint to the art historical notion of perspective as a metaphor for infinite space. My idea is not a purely “Jewish idea” anymore than Alberti’s original description of drawings as windows is not an unalloyed “Christian idea.” Even so, this formal concept has deep roots in my experience as an Orthodox Jewish woman, specifically in feelings of claustrophobia and containment. After getting married, but before the birth of my daughter, I made a drawing based on an old class portrait. While working through these drawings, I discovered that the neurotic repetition of childish faces reflected my ambiguous feelings about motherhood; these faces were hypnotic and compelling even as they overwhelmed me.

The first private creative space I ever had was my graduate school studio; dark perhaps, but utterly precious—Woolf’s paradigmatic room of one’s own. This cubbyhole became ground zero in my fight to protect the space for intense art-making. Within, I drew an infestation of the almost-children who threatened the boundaries of my creative practice. The work showed nationally and won a major prize, but more than one critic complained that the work was irrelevant because the art world had dealt—apparently conclusively—with these “women’s issues” 30 years ago. Within the contemporary art world, visual art emanating from a life predicated on a non-liberal religious tradition is almost impossible to pull off.

I regrouped and tried another version of this project. My original problem was partially one of audience. Few, if any Orthodox Jews saw the work, and secular gallery goers on whole could not relate to the experience of having limited access to birth control. My solution to the first half of this problem was to abstract. Instead of speaking about the commandment to procreate, I spoke of threatened interiority. Gaston Bachelard description of the process of abstraction is more eloquent and precise than I could ever be. While he speaks of language, his concept also applies to painting:

Words—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in foreign commerce on the same level as the others as the passer-by who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an etymology, looking for treasures. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

Bachelard’s poet employs registers where looser bonds obtain between signified and signifier. The downside to abstraction as a rhetorical tool is that the piece often loses emotional and political urgency. In the case of this project, abstraction only solved half the problem. Although the second, abstracted, version of my project was more accessible to a secular audience, still, few observant Jews saw the work.

IV.

The first step toward making art and Orthodoxy friendly is to clearly demarcate the boundaries between phenomenology, the realm of art, and ethics and ontology, the territory of religion. Once we have avoided a turf dispute, there remains the issue of risk-taking behaviors and the cultural value of experience. But an even bigger source of friction is the texture, not the authority, of religious truth. Modern Orthodoxy imagines revelation as mainly proscriptive, rather than descriptive, logical rather than evocative, cerebral rather than sensual. From the Orthodox vantage point, then, so too must all truths be. This cultural bias does not welcome my particular brand of art making.

Finally, there is the problem of audience. From the standpoint of contemporary art, audience is key. Because the Orthodox audience for art is small, there is only a very limited possibility that a sculpture or painting will significantly impact the religious mind.

Some of these problems are potential fixable, but there are so many, and some of them are ponderously deep. I remain somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of a vital art scene welling up from within the Orthodox world. And yet, I’m not going to stop being an artist and I’m not going to stop being Orthodox. I might just have to ignore some of these obstacles, while trying to solve some and waiting for the cultural climate to change. In the meantime, I will focus on being joyously idiosyncratic.

Would you like to study Torah with a Rabbi who has mastery over the text, depth of understanding, and breadth of knowledge? Do you want a teacher who not only is steeped in classic rabbinic interpretation, but who is aware of and sensitive to the literary features of the text, the relationships of Torah narratives with ancient stories of the Near East, insights of modern biblical scholarship?

All of us should want such a Rabbi and Teacher of Torah.

We have such a Rabbi and Teacher of Torah: Rabbi Moshe Shamah.

Rabbi Shamah is a remarkable man and a remarkable scholar. He has been serving for many years as Rabbi of a Sephardic Congregation in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. Over the years, he has taught and written about the Torah texts, and has engaged in lively conversations on the various interpretations of the words of the Torah. A close disciple of the late Rabbi Solomon D. Sassoon, Rabbi Shamah has learned from his teacher to study the Torah text with great care and exactitude, patiently extracting meanings that most readers would miss.

Rabbi Shamah has published a monumental commentary on the Torah: “Recalling the Covenant: A Contemporary Commentary on the Five Books of the Torah,” (Ktav Publishing House in association with the Sephardic Institute and Tebah Educational Services). This commentary takes the reader, patiently and thoughtfully, through the texts of the Torah. In its over 1000 pages, it reminds us of things we always knew (or always should have known!); and it opens new channels of information and interpretation that awaken our own intellectual faculties.

This is not a book that one could (or should) read in one quick sitting. Rather, it is a volume to be studied slowly and carefully; we need to imagine ourselves as students in Rabbi Shamah’s synagogue, listening carefully to his explanations and his methods of text analysis. Indeed, as we read his book, we feel that we can hear his voice—the book is a fine reflection of his style of communicating ideas.

This is a book to own. One shouldn’t buy it and then place it on the bookshelf. Rather, one should keep the book handy and study it week by week, reading the comments on each weekly Torah portion.

A RECEPTION IN HONOR OF RABBI SHAMAH AND HIS NEW TORAH COMMENTARY WILL BE HELD ON TUESDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 13, AT 7 P.M., AT CONGREGATION SHEARITH ISRAEL, 2 WEST 70TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY. COPIES OF THE BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE.

THIS PROGRAM IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

“All who are thirsty: come for water…”

—Isaiah 55:1

As a poet, I am often asked to explain poetry. Webster’s defines it as 1. the art or works of a poet, and 2. writing in metrical verse.[1] Although this may be true, it is like trying to define Torah as a book of sacred writing. Such definitions do not do justice to either poetry or Torah. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defines poetry as “best words, best order.” To paraphrase Yvor Winters, a poem is a statement in words about a human experience with particular attention paid to the emotional connotations of language. Edward Hirsch, in Poet’s Choice, says that “poetry puts us in touch with ourselves. It sends us messages from the interior and also connects us to others. It is intimate and secretive; it is generously collective.”[2] Robert Frost asserts that “like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”[3] And poetry is as simple and difficult as that.

We don’t speak poetry in our daily lives. Poetry is manipulated language. The poet leads the reader. The word choice, the resonance(s) each word conjures, the line and stanza breaks, whether the poem is written as formal or free verse, and how much information the poet chooses to reveal all go into making a poem.

In Passwords – Teaching Wislawa Szymborska: In Praise of the “I Don’t Know,” Sarah McCarthy writes,

Wislawa Szymborska believes poets pursue truth by engaging in what she calls the continuous and unutterable, ‘I don’t know.’ In her Nobel Prize speech, Szymborska declared, ‘Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was absolutely inadequate.’ According to Szymborska this declaration of uncertainty ‘expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.’ In this, she joins a long tradition of poets who engaged in what Keats called negative capability, or the state ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ For students, this can be terrifyingly difficult to grasp. In fact, it can be so overwhelming that teachers, writers, and students alike prefer not to acknowledge it at all. We rarely teach our students to embrace what they don’t know.[4]

As soon as I’ve completed one poem and start the next, I do feel “wholly inadequate.” I have nothing to say. I have no faith in my writing, in my abilities. But once I allow myself to write something, anything, I begin to be filled with wonder, and that allows me to keep finding out what I don’t know and to keep writing. If, at the beginning of a poem, I know exactly where I am going, exactly what the poem should be, there is no discovery, nothing to be learned.

I am not equating poetry with Torah, but I think my writing and studying poetry is much the same as studying Torah. Torah is so vast, has so much to show us, that a lifetime of study would not yield all it has to teach. “Just as water stretches from one end of the world to the other, as it says, ‘To him that spread forth the earth above the waters’ (Psalms 136:6), so the Torah goes from one end of the world to the other, as it says, ‘The measure thereof is longer than the earth’ (Job 11:9). Just as water is a source of life for the world, as it says, ‘A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’ (Song of Songs 4:15), so the Torah is a source of life for the world…” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah, 1:19).  

Poetry, using metaphor and a variety of other literary techniques, gives the reader more than one way to view the text. Torah, with its seventy faces, gives us the opportunity to view the text from many different angles and points of view. Poetry and Torah employ some of the same literary techniques. They both invite us in, invite us to have that initial reading (p’shat) and then call us to dig deeper, to explore, and learn more (d’rash). Poetry has many definitions and so does Torah. Good poetry shows and doesn’t tell. Torah, even when it seems to tell, shows.

Martha Collins, in an interview in The Writer’s Chronicle, states “I’m from a family of musicians; I played piano and violin. But I hated to practice because I could always hear in my mind what I was supposed to be playing before I could play it. That was not interesting to me. What I discovered when I began writing poetry—unlike a term paper where you plan and then write it, unlike a sonata where you know what it sounds like before you can play it—was that I never knew what was going to happen when I started. That was exciting.”[5]

“Just as water is from heaven, as it says, ‘At the sound of His giving, a multitude of waters in the heavens’ (Jeremiah 10:13), so the Torah is from heaven….Just as [the downpour of] water is accompanied by loud thunderings, as it says, ‘The voice of the Lord is upon the waters’ (Psalms 24:3), so the Torah was given with loud thundering…” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:19). When I study Torah, I try to keep in mind that all I know is that Torah, like water, is a source of life and I don’t know what will happen, what I will discover. What an amazing gift Torah gives me—it folds and unfolds like origami before me and invites me to see more and more each time I engage with the text. Martha Collins continues, “I really believe that poetry is a dialogue between oneself and the poem….For me, it’s the poem on the page–it’s talking to me and I’m talking to it.”[6] There are times when Torah comes to me with loud thunder, and I have moments of great clarity and think I definitely understand, but mostly I have these quiet moments, ice melting slowly on the page, that elucidate a word or if I am lucky, a pasuk. Torah is talking to me, and I am talking to it.

In her essay “The Pen Has Become the Character: How Creative Writing Creates Us,” Sarah Porter writes,

To be a writer means, perhaps, exactly this: surrendering the defined, expressible self to the wider possibilities of the page. It means giving up the belief that you know who you are, in exchange for a chance at discovering who you are, again and again; after all, the self that jumps up at you from your writing might exceed anything you had previously imagined. For me, and I believe for most other writers, the exhilaration of writing comes exactly when the words pick me up and carry me with a will of their own: when I look back, dizzy with momentum, and can hardly believe that I’m the one who wrote the lines I’m reading….By giving us a new perspective on ourselves, a new point of view, the words we read are helping to create us: they promise to make us bigger, freer, more authentic human beings: What could be more truly loving than that?[7]

If I keep this in mind when I write, how much more so should I keep it in mind when studying Torah. Torah gives me the opportunity to discover myself over and over again, to be dizzy with momentum from wrestling with the text, to gain new points of view, to grow in ways I had not previously imagined.

Netziv says in Ha'amek Davar, his commentary on the Torah, poetry is not simply characterized by meter, rhyme, alliteration, etc. The essence of poetry is that it contains many deeper allusions packed into fewer, more powerful words. One who treats poetry as prose will gain only the most superficial understanding of the material, and will not catch all of the allusions that the author intended us to find. Similarly, the Torah contains much depth—one who just understands the basic prose meanings, will miss much of the intended meaning.

My study of Torah has been enhanced by seeing its poetry, and my poetry has been informed by Torah. Torah is sacred, and I believe that all great poetry reaches toward the sacred.

“Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.” (Christian Wiman).[8] I go to Torah for the same reason. I can still recall the exact moment I knew I wanted to join Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City. During the kedushah of Shabbat Musaf, I was listening to the hazzan sing o’me’reem pa’a’mayim b’ahavah. In Ashkenazi services, it is o’m’reem pa’a’mayim b’ahavah shema o’m’reem. The word ahavah, love, carried me into the Shema. Once I heard that shift in the order of the words, the poetry in the prayer, I knew I was in the right place.

Mary Kinzie in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry writes, “The best poems satisfy by surprise, either because they reject something more familiar, or because they teeter on the edge of confusion in knowing something else. Understanding the poem we are reading is a process that moves from ignorance through partial insights to higher levels of understanding.”[9] Torah surprises, it invites and challenges me to live a fuller, more holy life. Poetry gives me another way to live a fuller, more holy life.

When I began this piece, I knew two things: 1. I am committed to Torah and believe poetry has much to teach, and 2. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write. It can be terrifying to be in a place of not knowing—it’s not how many of us are taught to navigate this world. But Torah and poetry are always there, inviting me to teeter at the water’s edge of knowing, of not knowing, and to be open to surprise, mysteries, and doubts, to stay in the not knowing for a while, and to be willing to listen to all Torah and poetry can show me. What could be more truly loving than that?

An Orthodox synagogue finds itself in an unusual position as an educational institution. Although there are growing numbers of Conservative, Reform, and multi-denominational Day Schools, it is often a synagogue-based religious school that provides the primary Jewish education for non-Orthodox youth. An Orthodox synagogue, however, has no such imperative, since most of its constituents send their children to Day School.[1] The Orthodox synagogue may ask itself: if our children already attend a Jewish Day School, what is our further role in Jewish education? The problem is that this question is not even asked.

Why isn’t this question asked? Many parents are satisfied as long as there is something for the children to do while the adults pray. Other parents expect the synagogue to reinforce what the children learn in school, but do not expect it to add anything to their children’s Jewish development. Often, the youth programming at an Orthodox synagogue is of a social nature. At best, the Shabbat morning groups offer a place for the children to pray at their own pace, and at worst they provide glorified babysitting.

An Orthodox synagogue can, and should, see itself as a serious educational institution, even if it does not have a formal religious school. In order to do that, as members and staff of Orthodox synagogues, we must challenge our assumptions about children at synagogue. We must think outside the box—in fact, outside of several boxes. I have framed the conversation below in terms of four of these “boxes,” which represent our assumptions and the resulting limitations we place upon ourselves. Some of these ideas represent efforts I have implemented at my own synagogue in Chicago, while others are dreams and musings of what could be possible. The goal is not to be exhaustive, but to stimulate conversation and to help us rethink what we assume to be true about children and synagogue. Once we free ourselves from these assumptions, we can think creatively about what children can gain from their synagogue experience. We can build innovative models of synagogue youth education.

Box #1: We think like a school.

One of the biggest advantages of providing Jewish education in a synagogue context is that a synagogue does not have the constraints of a school, such as grade levels, testing, and curriculum requirements. This may be obvious—“shul” is not school![2] So then why are we thinking like a school? For example, why must our youth groups be organized by grade level? There certainly are advantages to dividing children by age: they share a similar level of knowledge and ease of social interaction, and it also is the easiest way for everyone to know which room to go to. But the grade model might be an unnecessary limitation for a synagogue.

What if we organized the youth groups by neighborhood? What if each Shabbat morning children of a range of ages, who live near each other, gathered together to pray and learn together? What if each child in grades K–6 was paired with a child in grades 7–12 who lives in his or her own neighborhood, and these partnerships formed a mentoring relationship? In small groups, the older children would teach the younger ones, under the guidance of a well-trained educator, who would guide and facilitate these interactions. What if these children then saw each other later that afternoon on their block where, on long summer Shabbatot, they would gather in someone’s home for hevruta learning and Seudah shelishit? This is just one possible model, but we can simply recognize that there are many ways to organize the children into groups, and the grade division is just one. Once we let go of the assumption that “shul” needs to think like school, we open up richer and more creative ways of engaging the children.

The youth program could also tap into what is perhaps a synagogue’s greatest asset—the synagogue’s membership. This includes, but is not limited to, parents and grandparents who would be eager to participate and offer their presence and expertise. Young adults in the community are ready role models for teens especially. We have one older member of our congregation whose family has been with the synagogue for five generations. He possesses a wealth of knowledge about the congregation’s history, and some wonderful anecdotes about former rabbis and deceased members. He accompanied our B’nai Mitzvah group on a hessed outing to help clean up the synagogue’s cemetery, which is over 100 years old. He was able to regale the children with stories of past members and give them an appreciation of the heritage of our community. What a treasure.

Box #2: Just as long as the kids enjoy coming to synagogue…

I recently asked a parent (not a member of my synagogue) what she hopes her children will gain from the Shabbat morning youth program at her synagogue. She presented me with something of a hierarchy of goals. First and foremost, she said, it needs to keep them out of my hair so that I can pray in peace. If they enjoy it enough to make them actually look forward to coming to synagogue, all the better. And if they even gain something educational from the youth groups, then that’s wonderful.

Why have we set the bar so low? Shouldn’t we expect the synagogue to actively contribute to our children’s growth as Jews? Even in the best-case scenario, synagogues place unnecessary limitations on the education they offer. Some provide an extensive Tefillah program, where the children pray together at an age-appropriate pace, increasing the number of Tefillot as the children get older. In addition, they may talk about the parasha or play a game. These certainly are positive things for children to do, and these activities reinforce the skills and knowledge the children are already gaining in school. But can’t we offer education that children are not already receiving elsewhere[3]?

The synagogue is a place that is ripe for compelling and immersive Jewish experiential education. Encourage the children to ask their “big Jewish questions,” to explore ideas that their teachers do not have time to cover in school. Even within a parasha discussion, have the children get up and act out the characters in the story, or ask them what they might do in the same situation. One of the favorite games that our children like to play is “Agree/Disagree,” where the youth leader makes a statement (for example, “All Jews should make aliya, and the children respond by voting with their feet—standing on one side of the room or the other to demonstrate whether they agree or disagree with the statement, or anywhere in the middle to show where their opinion falls on the spectrum. They then defend their stance, which leads to rich conversations, and gets the children thinking about important Jewish issues.

If children are spending their time in engaged in these innovative and creative activities, when do they pray?

It is not necessary to eliminate praying from a youth group program. One can split the time wisely, or even weave some of these creative activities into the praying. However, there is another option: children can pray where the adults do. Which leads us to…

Box #3: Children and adults pray separately.

Most children who are readers are able to sit in synagogue and pray what they know. Even my two-year-old notices when we say “Shema,” and she covers her eyes and approximates the words. I recall that when I first knew the aleph-bet, I would sit with my mother for a few minutes and “daven,” reading the aleph-bet that was printed in the back of our siddur. After that, I could go outside and play with my friends. (Our tiny shteibel had no youth programming to speak of.) Sitting in synagogue is the best way to teach children about praying, and to show them the ways that the Tefillah is different on Shabbat than during the week. Bringing a book and a quiet snack also teaches children synagogue-appropriate behavior—to sit quietly and be respectful. Each parent knows his or her child, and knows what length of time is appropriate for that child. Bring your children to synagogue before groups start, and spend some time together in the sanctuary.

The youth groups can be designed to assume that children will be in synagogue with their parents beforehand. At our shul, we encourage our B’nai Mitzvah group (the 6^th- and 7^th-graders) to arrive for at least part of Shaharit and Torah reading. About halfway through Torah reading, the group meets for what we call “Tefillah Off the Deep End.” They start by praying Mussaf together, then break for a short Kiddush of their own, and finally engage in meaningful and “deep” discussions, often driven by their own questions.

It is a shame for children to experience synagogue in a vacuum, away from where synagogue happens for the adults. When they walk in and go straight to groups, and get picked up by a parent at the end, they never set foot in the sanctuary and never grow to understand what actually happens in a Bet Knesset. There are many ways to integrate children into the sanctuary. Our Yeladeinu group (1^st- and 2^nd-graders) comes into synagogue at the end, and sits together for the completion of services. They’ve learned to follow Ein K’elo-heinu and Aleinu, and they are even beginning to learn Anim Zemirot simply by hearing it each week. One rabbi I know has a “Bring Your Child to Shul Day” to encourage children to arrive before groups start. During Torah reading, he asks parasha-related trivia questions before each aliya, and the children search for the answers as the aliya is read. This is a great way to teach children to follow Torah reading, and to help them feel comfortable in the sanctuary.

An unexpected benefit to having children in the sanctuary is for the adults. There’s nothing like a child to make an adult take his or her own synagogue experience more seriously. When we are aware that the children are looking to us as models, we are challenged us to be our best selves.

Box #4: Youth Education is the job of the Youth Director.

I have encountered rabbis who are not tuned into what the children are doing in their synagogues. A Youth Director would benefit greatly from guidance and vision of the Board, the rabbi, and other stakeholders. Synagogue activities often operate in silos—the youth program, the hessed committee, and the adult education classes, for example, have minimal interaction. Instead of each one operating in its own bubble, these functions can coordinate their efforts. If the social action committee is organizing a drive for winter coats for the homeless, then have the children learn about the concept of a sukkah as a temporary dwelling (coordinate the timing with Sukkot), and think about those who do not have permanent homes. Offer a similarly themed class to adults on an appropriate level. Have the children participate in the coat drive, along with the social action committee.

Ideally, the youth education, as well as every other area of programming, is an extension of the mission and vision of the synagogue itself. The Board should give the Youth Director its mandate, to reflect the goals and values of the institution. The Youth Director often feels like they have the lowest job on the totem pole and that community members don’t respect the position. I believe this can stem from a lack of support and input from the synagogue stakeholders. The Board should engage the Youth Director as a partner in the synagogue’s growth in carrying out its mission.

Challenges

Our Sages teach us, “Emor me’at v’aseh harbeh” (Say little, and do much). It is easy to pontificate but harder to take action. Challenging the status quo is especially difficult when the general sentiment is that everything is “fine.” The children like coming to synagogue, and they’re even praying a little… what’s the problem? The greatest challenge is tapping into our creativity, peeking outside these constricting “boxes” and asking the question, “What if?”

It might also be challenging to motivate the children to actively engage in creative and thoughtful activity at synagogue. Jewish Day School students often see synagogue as a break from learning. They look forward to hanging out with friends or getting a good snack. However, children respond when they see that their time is being well-spent, and that they have much to gain. At our shul, I have parents who tell me that their kids jump out of bed on Shabbat morning because they don’t want to miss their group. For many children, however, jumping out of bed on Shabbat morning for anything will entail a real paradigm shift.

Often, the difficulty of motivating the children stems from the parents. Adults have a variety of reasons they come to synagogue, as well as their own baggage about what it has or hasn’t been for them. Parents who want their children to be happy about going to synagogue often hesitate to make it a requirement for their child. They worry that if they force their child to attend the youth group, it will make their child resentful. Some parents may recall their own feelings of being forced to go to synagogue when they were young, and do not want to recreate that for their children.

The problem with parents bringing their children very late, or not at all, is that they are depriving their children of the opportunity to develop an appreciation for the synagogue. How can your children enjoy something they barely get to experience? By trying to ease up on their children, parents are depriving them of a formative Jewish experience. Instead, parents should focus on modeling the desired behavior. Show your children how important it is for you to go to synagogue, and show that you are going in order to pray and to learn; that will send the message loud and clear that synagogue is worthwhile. If parents see the synagogue as place of growth and Jewish development, children will do the same.[4]

There are also some logistical challenges. In order to create a real youth education program you need real educators. Appropriate staffing can be difficult. Often, high school students are the ones running the Shabbat morning youth groups, but that makes it hard to create and implement high-level programming. At our synagogue, we hire graduate students and young professionals who are experienced educators to run our Shabbat morning program. However, in order to retain this level of employee, you need to pay well. We have made the commitment to pay them as would a competitive urban Hebrew school. That means devoting significant funds to the youth program.

What Lies Outside the Box

In the face of these challenges, it is extraordinarily helpful to constantly remind ourselves of what creative and engaging youth activity could look like, and where it can lead young people. One recent Yom Kippur, I had a group of middle schoolers arranged in the four corners of a classroom. I had asked them to stand in whichever corner represented their own metaphor for God: parent, monarch, best friend, or guide. Only one girl stood in the corner that represented God as a best friend. When I asked her for her thoughts, she said: “I think of God as my best friend, who knows what I think and is always on my side.” I was genuinely moved. To go from this exercise into an examination of the “Ki anu amekha…” prayer, where we lay out numerous metaphors for the relationship between God and the Jewish people, enriched the discussion immeasurably. If we can create this kind of atmosphere of curiosity and thought for our youngsters, they will grow up feeling more connected to the synagogue and to their Judaism, and will be ready to contribute to our community.

“It’s strange the way circles hook up with themselves.”

—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, p. 288

I

            When he begins to play we are transported to pre-war Europe, a world all but destroyed by the Nazis—outside, unsuspecting pedestrians are startled by each clear note as they stroll down West 4^th Street. The dilapidated room, holding an American flag and a threadbare parokhet, is filled with Village hipsters, pruriently dressed clubbers, a rag-tag group of local musicians and artists, Doc Marten-wearing bridge and tunnel folks, an NYU professor or two, three yeshiva students from Melbourne on holiday, and a group of curious onlookers who have stumbled in to see just what the sign bearing a blue imprint of a Lubavitcher Hassid beneath the large block letters “BLUEGRASS,” really foretells. Weaving in and out of all these questers, an impish-looking shamash, Herman Lowenharr, sporting a Yechah-style straw hat, carries a frighteningly large bottle of Jim Beam Rye tucked expertly under his right arm. I stand in the Charles Street Synagogue with a large group of West Texans—my students from the University of Texas at El Paso—adding yet another layer to this absurdly cosmopolitan mix of faces crammed into the tiny, well-worn synagogue. The place seems to be on the verge of collapse—until the first note escapes Andy Statman’s clarinet, and then the rickety contraption of a shul comes alive, shedding not just decades, but centuries, from its grimy façade. In that moment, Statman’s clarinet points our motley crew in the direction of the old country and into the future of Jewish imagination. [See Figure 1at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

II

            For the past decade Andy Statman and the other inspiring musicians in his trio—Larry Eagle on drums and Jim Whitney on bass—have been playing a mixture of traditional Hassidic niggunim, Klezmer, Bluegrass, Jazz, and Country music to ecstatic audiences at the Charles Street Synagogue in the West Village of Manhattan. To hear Statman is to be immersed in the vitality of an imaginative culture that has borrowed and invented from every civilization Jews have called home before their eventual expulsion or murder. Statman’s clarinet is aural cosmopolitanism. Statman is a Lubavitch Hassid, which means he plays with a large black velvet yarmulke perched on his head, his tzitzith elegantly twisted and modestly tucked into his black pants pockets; he sports a trim Lubavitch-style beard above a tightly buttoned white shirt. In contrast, his two band-mates are not Hassidim—they, in fact, are not Jewish, and yet, they too, have imbibed the spirit of the Hassidishe music that they all transcendently play together.

As a great-grandson of the Modzitzer Rebbe, I always wait for the moment when Statman will segue into a Modzitzer niggun as part of his repertoire. This particular evening, on a painfully hot, early summer day in 2010, Statman begins the concert with the plaintive notes of the Modzitzer Rebbe’s niggun for Mizmor L’David—a mournful tune that the Rebbe, my grandfather’s grandfather, titled “The Song of the Homeless” after watching the thousands of refugees streaming through the streets of Radom, Poland[i] during World War I. Looking around the room, it seems as fitting a melodic place as any to begin. To my right is one of my students, who earlier that day uncovered his Jewish grandfather’s difficult immigration history at the Ellis Island museum and confided in me as we waited for the shamash to open the doors to the synagogue, that he couldn’t remember ever having stepped foot in an actual synagogue. Through Statman’s music my students and I, as well as the others in our eclectic group, experience not just a working, living synagogue and tradition, but each of us in attendance becomes a part of the musical tapestry of contemporary Jewish imagination. It is as if Statman himself is a sort of timeless, musical genizah—a repository of thousands of years of history and texts. His musical compositions are the shemos, the many pieces and fragments of a collective Jewish culture throughout the world in different eras bound into a meaningful whole.

The very texture of these almost lost cultures can be felt in each of Statman’s compositions. His version of the Modzitzer niggun for Adon Olam, known the world-over as a welcome song to the weekly Shabbos, day of rest, also, in Statman’s recasting, becomes an invitation to explore other realms of being—uncovering perhaps, just what Shabbos, ideally, should be about: experiencing another way of living.

Although Statman is a unique, almost legendary figure in the New York music scene, he is also, in many ways, a representative of the contemporary Jewish imagination.  It seems the further Statman digs into his own Jewish past and the roots of Jewish liturgical texts and rhythms, the farther ahead he surges within contemporary American culture. And, in this regard, Statman is not alone. In this essay I seek to answer biblical scholar David Stern’s challenge to literary scholars, issued in his pithy volume, Midrash and Literature (almost two decades old), to begin the real scholarly work of linking midrash to literature and contemporary literary theory. As Stern writes:

Now that the buzz and flurry of the initial excitement has passed, the time has arrived to reap the fruits of the original linkage and to begin the real work of reading midrash theoretically, as literary discourse—that is, to use the theoretical sophistication appropriated from literary studies to describe midrash’s literary forms in their specificity and full complexity; to use the language of midrash as the base from which to discuss its hermeneutics in the light of the history of interpretation, and perhaps, most importantly, to employ our growing knowledge of the social, religiopolitical, and gender constructions of literature in order to analyze the singular forms of Rabbinic writing. (9)

Indeed, this is precisely the issue I examine in my soon-to-be-completed book, Midrash and Modernism: The Making of the Jewish Imagination. What I seek to do here is to take up Stern’s analytical challenge by discussing several examples of midrashic storytelling in a variety of contemporary art forms. My aim is not only to connect midrashic modes of storytelling to literary criticism alone, but also to look at the myriad ways that midrashic modes of composition have infiltrated and empowered the contemporary Jewish imagination. From the music of Bob Dylan and Andy Statman, the stories of Isaac Babel and Gary Shteyngart, and, lastly, to the graphic art of Ahron Weiner and Tobi Kahn, midrash and midrashic modes of composition link all of this Jewish imaginative work of modernism through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

III

“The midrash says…”—how many memorable stories and lessons from my childhood days in yeshiva began with this deceptively simple declaration? From stories of Hassidic masters’ perfect faith and holy men performing miracles in the old country, to story-like interpretations of talmudic discussions, midrashic storytelling for generations of readers, has often filled in the many gaps and fissures encased within original biblical passages. In contemplating the current state of Jewish culture, I have found that the ancient biblical exegetical method of midrash surprisingly offers key insights in understanding the contemporary Jewish imagination.

            So just what exactly is midrash? Midrash is an exegetical tool of biblical scholarship that assumes that every word and letter of the Torah has meaning.[ii] In his study, Midrash and Literature, Stern says that the popularity of midrash has much to do with the “wayward antic features of midrashic interpretation that had often been considered scandalous in the past” (3). Rather than seeming disreputable in the postwar American academy—it was precisely this outlaw and subversive quality that drew proponents to midrash and midrashic interpretation. In his study, Stern defines just what this type of interpretative storytelling entails:

The typical midrashic predilection for multiple interpretations rather than for a single truth behind the text; its irresistible desire to tease out the nuances of Scripture rather than use interpretation to close them off; and most of all, the way midrashic discourse mixes text and commentary, violating the boundaries between them and intentionally blurring their differences, flourishing precisely in the grayish no-man’s-land between exegesis and literature—all these features that once had seemed (since the time of Maimonides at least) to be the most problematic and irrational aspects of midrash now became its most intriguing and fascinating qualities. (3–4)

This subversive quality that blurs boundaries and genres is, in my mind, a hallmark of much of contemporary Jewish American literature and culture.

In Reading the Book, Burton Visotzky says that once a canon is closed, the problem facing a person and a community is one of “searching out the meaning of a text before our eyes” (5). Put another way: how does one find a “useful reading strategy” (5) and method of analysis for making the biblical text personal and relevant? As Harold Bloom suggests in Kabbalah and Criticism, through the ages, what all Jewish writing attempts to interpret is the Bible, or more specifically all Jewish literature worthy of the moniker implicitly asks the difficult question, “How to open the Bible to one’s own suffering?” (xxiii). Ideally, this is precisely what Torah study should accomplish: through the stories and lessons of the Hebrew Bible, the full range of human experience is illuminated.

Contemporary Jewish American writers and artists—using midrashic interpretive and storytelling techniques—then, often make the ancient, foundational texts of Judaism relevant to our postmodern, contemporary American lives. According to Visotzky, midrash is a method of reading the Bible as an “eternal text,” and is the result of applying a set of hermeneutical principles evolved by the community to guide one in reading the canon, in order to focus one's reading. The ultimate goal of midrash is to “search out” the fullness of the biblical language. Visotzky explains that the word “midrash” refers to a “homiletical exegesis of Scripture—the ‘reading out’ of moral lessons,” (9) and that midrash means a “searching out” (10) of this biblical interpretation.

In analyzing biblical language there are two schools of thought: the first suggests that biblical language is no different from the language of regular human discourse, and is subject to the same redundancies that we all encounter in everyday communication; the second view, on the other hand, holds that since scripture is the word of God, not one word is superfluous. Every apparent mistake, or seeming grammatical error, has some encoded meaning. This is where midrash comes in to play. Midrash ultimately minimizes the authority of the wording of the text as normal language; instead it places the focus on the reader’s moral application of the text, allowing for an endless variety of interpretations.

            In his blending of poetry and criticism, modernist poet Wallace Stevens writes in “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of / finding / What will suffice” (1–3). Although, he surely does not have Jewish American literary texts in mind when he writes these lines, Stevens’s ideas about the conflation of theory, criticism, and poetic diction woven together, bears much light on Jewish writers and artists steeped in the traditions needed to find a language that will suffice—a vessel capable of containing the thousands of years of textual history while being modern and contemporary in its outlook. For the writers and artists I will be discussing in this essay, midrashic storytelling is that sufficient language. Using midrash enables these Jewish writers and artists to uncover and illuminate their own culture, while deeply connecting to and extending the thousands of years of Jewish textual history as well.

            I would add to these definitions on midrash, my own ideas on the ways that modern or contemporary midrash functions.  I believe a key component of midrash is that it extends and completes[iii] an earlier (often biblical or medieval) text. A midrash fills in gaps and creates new meanings and understandings of difficult biblical stories. In so doing, midrashic storytelling not only makes these ancient stories relevant, but it also brings them immediately into our realm—recasting these stories on the contemporary stage of Jewish American culture. 

IV

            A wealth of literature and artwork has been created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by people aspiring to create "Contemporary or Modern Midrash,” including music, poetry, prose, and painting. I begin here with an excerpt of the biblical story of the Akedah, or The Binding of Isaac, before analyzing a midrashic re-interpretation and extension of this story:

 ¹And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

 ²And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

 ³And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

 ⁴Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.

 ⁵And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.

 ⁶And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

 ⁷And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

 ⁸And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

 ⁹And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

 ¹⁰And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

 ¹¹And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.

 ¹²And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

 ¹³And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. (Genesis 22:1–13)

This is, obviously, one of the most troubling and disturbing stories in the entire Hebrew Bible. It has consequently lent itself to literally thousands of midrashic reinterpretations, completions, and extensions. Recall the blurring of boundaries and the preference for multiple interpretations rather than a single truth that Stern spoke of in relation to midrashic texts. These same qualities are certainly true for the zeitgeist of the 1960s, the supposed “youth movement” or “counter-culture”—a movement that quickly anointed a baby-faced Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota as its high priest. In 1965 Bob Dylan was looking for a way to capture the absurdity of the American political moment—he turned toward a midrashic interpretation of The Akedah, or The Binding of Issac to make his statement in “Highway 61 Revisited” [See Figure 2at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]:

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61

Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light, he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61

(Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music)

There are numerous ironies and levels of meaning in Dylan’s midrashic reinterpretation of the ancient biblical story of The Akedah. Dylan’s deeply American, vernacular “translation” of this archetypal biblical story of faith and sacrifice is, in many ways, indicative of the contemporary Jewish imagination. As Robert Hass reminds us in his poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking (1–2).

We should first notice the intense conflation of time in Dylan’s lyrics and song: in seven short lines, Dylan midrashically links several key biblical stories: 1) Genesis 17, the story of God’s changing Abram’s name to Abraham, 2) Genesis 18, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 3) Genesis 22, story of the Akedah, or The Binding of Isaac.

In “Highway 61 Revisited,” the voice of God is still the voice of Yahweh from the Hebrew Bible, a fierce God of retribution, yet the voice of Abraham assumes the guise of a contemporary of Dylan—mid-1960s Greenwich Village hippie: “Man you must be putting me on,” Dylan’s Abe says. Yes, much like the story told in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis: 17, Dylan changes the Patriarch’s name. Even this aspect of the song is a rather humorous and ironic reversal (an extension through subtraction) of the original biblical story in Genesis: “Neither shall your name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee” (Genesis 17:5). In the Hebrew Bible story, God does not shorten Avram’s name, but rather lengthens it (by including the name of God, represented by the letter “heh,” to Avraham). Dylan’s shortening both Avram and Abraham to just an American-style “Abe” suggests an ironic reversal of the closeness to God and his watchful gaze here on Earth, and his promise that Abraham “will be the father of many nations,” that the patriarchal name Abraham represents. It is the reversal of the name Abraham, which contains God’s name within it, that Dylan alludes to throughout the apocalyptic lyrics and carnivalesque rhythms of “Highway 61 Revisited.” The song moves toward the indifference of authority figures to outright cruelty, sadism, and destruction by those in power (promoting a “next world war”) and not the birth of great nations as the God of the Hebrew Bible promises Abraham. Consequently, Dylan’s song might represent a terrifying state of hester panim, or a time when God has “turned away his face.”

Of course, in the context of warfare, it is also hard to hear the name Abe, either with the Vietnam war raging in the background, or the imagined “next world war” discussed in the powerful concluding stanza of Dylan’s song, without immediately imaging Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War—thus, “Abe” functions midrashically as yet another ironic reference embedded within Dylan’s song. Whereas Abraham Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator” represents freedom and justice—all is ironically reversed in “Highway 61 Revisited.” The name “Abe,” in the context of the 1960s underscores the lack of justice and the absence of freedom that the youth movement felt toward an increasingly militaristic American government.[iv]

            Another biblical story midrashically alluded to in Dylan’s song is the episode of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities that have come to be synonymous with evil. Through his midrashic storytelling in “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan seems to equate the consumer obsessed capitalism of America—(“I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings / And a thousand telephones that don’t ring” (16–17)—which hides behind patriotism with ultimate evil.

Soon after God changes Abram’s name to Abraham in Genesis, God reveals his plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah:

²²Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the LORD. ²³ And Abraham came near and said, “Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it? ²⁵ Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
²⁶ So the LORD said, “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
²⁷ Then Abraham answered and said, “Indeed now, I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord:

²⁸Suppose there were five less than the fifty righteous; would You destroy all of the city for lack of five?”
So He said, “If I find there forty-five, I will not destroy it.”
²⁹ And he spoke to Him yet again and said, “Suppose there should be forty found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it for the sake of forty.”
³⁰ Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Suppose thirty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”
³¹ And he said, “Indeed now, I have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: Suppose twenty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty.”
³² Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten should be found there?”
And He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.” ³³ So the LORD went His way as soon as He had finished speaking with Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place.(Genesis 18:22–33)  

The knowledge of this impending destruction and loss of life, leads Abraham to desperately bargain with God on behalf of the righteous among these cities. This tense back and forth bargaining between God and Abraham in Genesis Chapter 18 is midrashically alluded to in the opening lines of Dylan’s song, particularly lines 3–6, where Abe and God seem to bargain back and forth until Abe accepts God’s demand to “do the killing out on Highway 61.”

Like an aged prophet from the Hebrew Bible, Dylan sings his song from the depths of the counter-culture revolution sweeping America—in its numerous hidden allusions and allegorical meanings, it is a midrashic commentary on the state of America at war in Vietnam, the civil unrest at home, and the rising tide of violence, and indifference overtaking the United States.

V

In the first installment of his memoirs,Chronicles, Volume I, Dylan talks about his early method of song composition: “I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues… What I usually did was start out with something, some kind of line written in stone and then turn it into another line—make it add up to something else than it originally did” (228). One would be hard pressed to find a more exact definition of the act of midrashic storytelling—including its subversive element and its addition and completion of an original biblical story—the line, which was originally “written in stone,” that Dylan alludes to.

The Highway 61 that Dylan takes as the name of his album and this song from the collection has its own highly mythologized history. After the failure of Reconstruction and the development of the Jim Crow south, Highway 61, which follows the contours of the great Mississippi River, became a major migration route for African Americans heading north for opportunities they were barred from in the deep South. As they traveled the nearly seventeen hundred miles of Highway 61—stretching from New Orleans all the way to Duluth, Minnesota—right next door to where Dylan grew up in a Jewish home in Hibbing, Minnesota, these African American migrants brought with them their musical traditions. One such traveler was the bluesman Robert Johnson, who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil on Highway 61 at a crossroads near Clarksdale, Mississippi in exchange for his musical talents. Those who were privileged to hear Johnson play surmised that this story was the only way to explain such supernatural talent.

Many music critics interpret Dylan’s use of Highway 61 as a return to his roots—the musical roots of the Blues—and, suggest that Dylan’s songs showcased how Rock and Roll (and electric guitars) could actually incorporate the best of the Blues as well as the Folk music Dylan began his career singing and creating. While I would largely agree with this assessment, I would also suggest that “Highway 61 Revisited” conveys an even deeper significance and return for Dylan, a concomitant return to his Jewish roots along with his musical ancestry. The fact that Dylan uses the biblical story of the Akedah as a starting point—the “lines written in stone” that he will midrashically re-imagine and reinterpret in a contemporary American setting suggests a much larger, philosophical and thematic return. Dylan’s, “Highway 61 Revisited,” is both a commentary on a culture of violence that sacrifices the “best minds of his generation” (1) to warfare and slaughter, to quote another midrashic poem, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as well as a re-interpretation of the biblical story of the Akedah. 

Highway 61 mostly parallels the great Mississippi River, its watery path forever linked to the heart of America through Mark Twain’s canonical novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound, anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep… (135)

Through the many musical legends who migrated up north along the land route of Highway 61 (such as Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson), and the musicians who, years later, in search of those musical traditions traveled back down south along Highway 61 (including Bob Dylan), the highway itself, much like the Mississippi River, has just as impressive a mythical life—legends that Bob Dylan midrashically tapped into while writing “Highway 61 Revisited.” As Dylan suggests in Chronicles, Volume One:

Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from… Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors.  The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood. (240–241)

Dylan’s musical exploration of Highway 61 along with his turn back toward the language and stories of the Hebrew Bible in 1965 signaled a seismic shift in Jewish American literature and culture. Many critics thought that with the passing of the immigrant generation Jewish art had lost its main theme. With Dylan pointing the way toward the future through re-invigorating the past, Jewish American culture was about to explore exciting new developments in art, culture, and representation.

VI

Lenny Abramov, a Jewish Russian immigrant to New York City, is the unlikely hero of Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, chosen as one of the New York Times’ ten best books of 2010. The novel is set sometime in the-not-too-distant-future, when New York City, as well as the rest of the “American empire,” is coming to a close. The entire rickety structure of the U.S. government, including its long-neglected infrastructure, is about to fall apart. In one memorable scene in the novel, part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses into the East River—all of this rotting-away, in Shteyngart’s biting satire, is, of course, symptomatic of America’s many moral failings. In this frighteningly all-too-real look into the future, there is no longer a two-party system of Republicans and Democrats—now there is only a need for one party which calls itself—in deference to the supposed two-party politics of years ago—the Bi-Partisans. In Shteyngart’s vision of the coming American century, all citizens wear around their necks an electronic device called an äppärät, which resembles a sort of high-tech cross between the choshen mishpat and an advanced iPhone that constantly streams data and, most-importantly, ratings for every person one encounters (does this remind anyone of Twitter, or Facebook?).

Lenny works for a company called Post-Human Services, owned by a man named Joshie Goldman. Post-Human Services offers its rich clients eternal life, but this “product” is only available to those extremely wealthy individuals who can afford the exorbitant fees that Post-Human Services charges—or as Shteyngart puts it—High Net Worth Individuals or HNWI’s. This concept of eternal life is accomplished through painstaking blood work, healthy eating habits, and an extremely high-tech drug regimen. This painful routine of constant monitoring of clients’ blood levels for fat and triglycerides, and so forth—is, of course, Shetyngart’s satire of our current culture’s complete obsession with youth and beauty, a preoccupation that many elevate to the level of a new religion.

When the novel opens, Lenny, our hero has been living abroad in Italy for a few years selling eternal life to HNWI’s, and in the scene I examine below, he has just returned to New York to his office at Post-Human Services, which is situated at an old, and now-defunct, midtown New York synagogue, built in the Moorish architecture style. Shteyngart is probably modeling this fictional midtown synagogue on the famous Central Synagogue in New York. Shteyngart writes:

The Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung Corporation is housed in a former Moorish-style synagogue near Fifth Avenue, a tired-looking building dripping with arabesques, kooky buttresses, and other crap that brings to mind a lesser Gaudi. Joshie bought it at auction for a mere eighty thousand dollars when the congregation folded after being bamboozled by some kind of Jewish pyramid scheme years ago. (56–57)         

Shteyngart’s satirical joke of the venerable midtown synagogue being sold at auction hits painfully close to home. The effect is enhanced by the fact that this travesty was caused by “a Jewish pyramid scheme”—an obvious reference to the Bernard Madoff scandal, which deeply affected numerous Jewish charitable organizations that had invested with Madoff (The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, among others). Shteyngart’s midrashic reversal continues throughout this scene:

The ark where the Torahs are customarily stashed had been taken out, and in its place hung five gigantic Solari schedule boards Joshie had rescued from various Italian train stations. Instead of the arrivi and partenze times of trains pulling in and out of Florence or Milan, the flip board displayed the names of Post-Human Services employees with the results of our latest physicals, our methylation and homocysteine levels, our testosterone and estrogen, our fasting insulin and triglycerides, and, most important, our “mood + stress indicators,” which were always supposed to read, “positive/playful/ready to contribute,” but which, with enough input from competitive co-workers, could be changed to “one competitive betch today” or “not a team playa this month.” On this particular day, the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-tika-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from “overcoming loss of loved one” to “letting personal life interfere with job” to “doesn’t play well with others.” Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues, including my fellow Russian, the brilliantly manic-depressive Vasily Greenbaum, were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELLED. (56–58)

Shteyngart has midrashically replaced the ark of the Torah, which holds the scroll of the law, with a Solari flip information board that does nothing but contain data. The difference of the endless interpretations spilling out from the Torah’s thousands of stories, which have been interpreted and re-imagined by Jewish writers and thinkers for thousands of years, versus the notion of all of this being replaced by a simple Solari flip-data board, representative of our future, as well as a wry commentary on our current culture—life within the information age—is hard to miss. This satirical scene might also be a sad addendum to recent Jewish history: in a post-Holocaust world, it is difficult to see a European train schedule board in a synagogue and not have it convey numerous associations to the Holocaust-era cattle-cars and trains, which carried Jews from the farthest reaches of occupied Europe to the Nazi killing centers. [See Figure 3 andFigure 4at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

Additionally, Shteyngart obviously does not choose the number five at random; rather, each of the Solari boards can be understood to replace one of the “Five Books of Moses,” the Hebrew Bible. This displacement of prayer services and the numerous activities of a synagogue, which promises eternal life in olam haBa, the world to come, with the headquarters of a corporation premised on delivering eternal life in olam haZeh, the present world, showcases Shteyngart’s familiarity with midrashic ironic reversal. In fact, these many ironies, of using midrashic exegesis to decry American culture’s displacing of literacy with raw data, becomes the major theme of Shteyngart’s novel. Despite these many midrashic interpretations, Shteyngart’s main focus remains on the present, information and ratings-obsessed cultural moment; in decrying our current culture’s reliance on data over the endless multiplicity and imagination of books, Torah exegesis, and midrashic reinterpretations, he ironically employs an extended midrashic story to make this observation.

We can see this theme further developed during a key moment in the novel when Eunice, Lenny Abramov’s love-interest in the novel, does something radical in this futuristic post-literate New York City: she attempts to read a book, or rather, she asks Lenny to read a book to her. In Shteyngart’s dystopic vision of the American future, a time and place where the Ark of the Covenant has easily been replaced by a Solari information board, people do not read books anymore. Books are considered extremely “uncool” and they will lower your rating on your äppärät—clearly something to be avoided in a data-obsessed culture where a person’s success is entirely dependent on one’s rating. Despite the many perils of literacy in this futuristic New York, in a brave moment in the novel, Eunice attempts to understand Lenny’s old, yellowed, dog-eared copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—a book about love and mortality. She asks him to read to her from the novel. However, after a few moments, Eunice appears to give up: “Eunice’s gaze had weakened, and the light had gone out from her eyes, those twin black orbs usually charged with an irrepressible mandate of anger and desire” (277). Eunice’s wandering attention leads to the following conversation:

 “Are you following all this?” I said. “Maybe we should stop.”

“I’m listening,” she half-whispered.

“But are you understanding?” I said.

“I’ve never really learned how to read texts,” she said. “Just to scan them for info.”

I let out a small, stupid laugh.

She started to cry…

“Even I’m having trouble following this. It’s not just you. Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for Dante to appear? Many, many years.” (277)

The knowledge and wisdom contained in the Torah (synonymous with Judaism’s textual history), has been entirely displaced in Gary Shteyngart’s futuristic view of a “post-literate” America bereft of values and all the knowledge that our print culture contained. Instead of midrashic interpretations of the Five Books of Moses, much like a retro Twitter account, the five Solari flip boards endlessly stream data concerning the health and mood of the Post-Human Services employees. Through the Solari information boards, streaming endless statistics and blood-work data, Shteyngart creates a modern midrash that also works allegorically, as the Solari boards imported from Italian train stations cannot help but bring to mind the roll-call of the European death trains. Even as the Solari boards broadcast the health and vitality of the workers at Post-Human Services, in an ironic midrashic reversal, Shteyngart has them memorializing the “post-human” quality of all that endless life. Shteyngart’s ironic displacement suggests to his readers that without the Torah and the stories and ethics and the “understanding” that goes with it—the hermeneutics and interpretation of the Torah—all is reduced to a mindless scanning of texts for data, for useless information. Indeed, it is a sterile vision of our age and the future it foretells. Through his ironic reversal of the Torah ark, Shteyngart midrashically underscores the perils of ignoring our spiritual and cultural heritage contained in the Torah and our thousands of years of textual exegesis on that foundational, living document.

After he is convinced to give up books in favor of a shiny new äppärät, Shteyngart’s hero Lenny reports to his readers: “I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors” (78).

In contrast to a post-literate future, Shteyngart himself does not just draw attention to an amnesiac America, which is turning its back on classical texts and literacy, but he also draws upon many of his own literary forbears as well to make his case—extending their reach and relevancy. The entire novel of Super Sad True Love Story might be thought of as a recasting of the Russian master Anton Chekhov’s novella, Three Years. Shteyngart liberally quotes from Chekhov throughout Super Sad True Love Story, drawing attention to the many parallels as well as the disjunctions between Lenny Abromov’s predicament and the tragic story of Chekhov’s hero Laptev. Despite the obvious importance of Chekhov’s novella undergirding Shteyngart’s deeply literary novel (this is part of the midrashic irony he employs), I believe there is yet another Russian writer lurking beneath the surface of Shteyngart’s novel—the Jewish short story writer, who was initially hailed by the Soviet-system as an important writer and respected comrade, only to be murdered by Stalin as a Jew and a parasite on the state: Isaac Babel. Babel might have had as profound an influence on the twentieth century and contemporary Jewish imagination (from Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick to Shteyngart, Nathan Englander, and Dara Horn) as any other Jewish writer. After reading of the displacement of the aron kodesh, the ark of the Torah, in Shteyngart’s novel, Babel’s short story, “My First Goose,” comes to mind. Nearly a century before Shteyngart replaces the Torah ark with Solari information boards, Isaac Babel, in his well-known short story, “My First Goose,” replaces the promised land of Israel with the false promise of a communist paradise on earth.

VII

“My First Goose” was published in Red Cavalry, a collection of Babel’s stories drawn from his years fighting on the front lines with a Cossack unit (The First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army) during the Polish-Soviet Warof 1920. The purpose of this war was to spread communism and the doctrines of the Revolution to Poland, and then, to the rest of the world. Babel was raised in a traditional Jewish home in Odessa, and according to Cynthia Ozick he “was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and demanding commentaries” (15). In one of his stories, Babel describes himself (the Jewish intellectual) as follows: “you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart” (146). Despite these poetic leanings, as a young man Babel was assigned to a murderous Cossack unit fighting to spread the gospel of communism. “My First Goose” tells the story of the pivotal first hours of Babel’s service with this Cossack unit (or Lyutov—his fictional, but deeply autobiographical, first-person narrator of “My First Goose,” as well as many of the Red Cavalry stories). Things do not go well for the Jewish intellectual Lyutov. As an insular fighting group, the Cossacks have rejected him as an educated “cream-puff.” To the amusement of the unit, one handsome young Cossack has thrown Lyutov’s suitcase out into the street; he then impresses his comrades by farting in the intellectual’s face. Yet, other men incessantly make fun of the new recruit:

I went down on my hands and knees and gathered up the manuscripts and the old, tattered clothes that had fallen out of my suitcase. I took them and carried them to the other end of the yard. A large pot of boiling pork stood on some bricks in front of the hut. Smoke rose from it as distant smoke rises from the village hut of one’s childhood, mixing hunger with intense loneliness inside me. I covered my broken little suitcase with hay, turning it into a pillow, and lay down on the ground to read Lenin’s speech at the Second Congress of the Comintern, which Pravda had printed. The sun fell on me through the jagged hills, the Cossacks kept stepping over my legs, the young fellow incessantly made fun of me, the beloved sentences struggled toward me over thorny fields, but could not reach me. (232)

The situation is desperate for Lyutov. If he is not accepted by the men of his unit, he realizes he will not survive very long in the midst of war in a very unforgiving environment. Lyutov decides to act. He gets up from his intellectual pursuit of Lenin’s latest speech and approaches the mistress of the house (undoubtedly a Jewish woman as are so many of the poor peasants we meet in Babel’s Red Cavalry stories):

I put away the newspaper and went to the mistress of the house, who was spinning yarn on the porch.

“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub.”

The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes to me and lowered them again.

“Comrade,” she said, after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself.”

“Goddammit!” I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. “I’m in no mood to start debating with you.”

And, turning around, I saw someone’s saber lying nearby. A haughty goose was waddling through the yard, placidly grooming its feathers. I caught the goose and forced it to the ground, its head cracking beneath my boot, cracking and bleeding. Its white neck lay stretched out in the dung, and the wings folded down over the slaughtered bird.

“Goddammit!” I said, poking at the goose with the saber. “Roast it for me mistress!”

The old woman, her blindness and her spectacles flashing, picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron, and hauled it to the kitchen.

“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “This makes me want to hang myself.” As she pulled the door shut behind her. (232)

This act of violence, so out of character for the mild-mannered Lyutov (Babel’s Jewish-intellectual alter-ego), impresses the Cossacks, and he is subsequently accepted by the tough, violent men of the unit. By the end of the story, he is seen reading Lenin’s speech to group of fighting men gathered round him, their legs entwined together under the stars, yet the guilt of this first act of violence (there will soon be many more to come) troubles Lyutov’s fitful dreams:

…then we went to sleep in the hayloft. Six of us slept there warming each other, our legs tangled, under the holes in the roof which let in the stars.

I dreamed and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.” (233)

            It is this seminal midrashic moment in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry that I believe Gary Shteyngart is building upon and extending in Super Sad True Love Story. In Babel’s story, Lyutov is rejected by the regiment of Cossacks to which he has just been assigned to. One of the older men has, in fact, thrown his suitcase into the street and, at the beginning of the paragraph, the narrator, on his hands and knees, is in the process of retrieving its contents. Once he has collected the many manuscripts together, he places them beneath his head as a pillow of sorts. Only his rest is troubled and he quickly abandons the notion of sleep in favor of the violent act that ingratiates him to his comrades. Notice the obvious reworking of the midrash that Rashi writes extending the original biblical story of Genesis 28:11. While fleeing his brother Esau, Jacob leaves Beer-sheba and travels toward Haran. In Genesis 28:11 the Torah says that before preparing to sleep, Jacob “took of the stones of the place and put them under his head.” Later in the same chapter of Genesis 28, in section 18, the language of the Hebrew Bible refers to Jacob taking one “stone,” singular. Rashi, (see Babylonian Talmud, Hullin 91b as well), tells a midrash to help explain this seeming grammatical error or inconsistency:

“And he put it under his head—He made them into a sort of cape round his head, for he was afraid of wild beasts. The (stones) began to quarrel with each other, one saying, ‘Upon me shall the righteous man place his head,” and the other (stone) said, ‘Let him lay (it) upon me.’ Immediately the Holy One Blessed Be He made them into one stone (sing, in verse 18) that he had put under his head.’” (Rashi 28:11, The Pentateuch with Rashi’s Commentary, p. 275)

            Rashi’s midrash is clearly glossed in the decisive moment in Babel’s “My First Goose.” Lyutov takes his manuscripts and creates a sort of pillow using the communist manuscripts just as Jacob had done with the stones during his moment of crisis fleeing his brother Esau. In the original biblical story, after his dream, Jacob then uses the stones to make an altar for an animal sacrifice to God who, in his dream, has promised Jacob the land of Israel. Lyutov’s sacrifice of the goose in his short story does not lead to the dream of Jacob’s ladder as it does later in Genesis Chapter 28 and God’s promise of a homeland. Instead, in Babel’s story this sacrifice leads to the joining of Lyutov with his fellow violent comrades in this vicious Cossack unit, off fighting a war for the dubious mission of spreading the gospel of communism to neighboring Poland. Thus, Babel’s “My First Goose” functions as a midrashic extension of the seminal story in Genesis. Rather than gaining the promised land of universal brotherhood, the communist dream that both Babel and his first-person narrator Lyutov are so enamored with at the outset of Red Cavalry, in actuality, what transpired was the murder of Isaac Babel before one of Stalin’s firing squads. Thus, Babel’s personal history adds another tragic layer of meaning and commentary to “My First Goose.”[v] [See Figure 5 andFigure 6at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

In Babel’s retelling of this midrash, the stones that would become part of Jacob’s altar to God and the basis for the future temple on that same site are replaced by the many communist manuscripts contained in his little suitcase, which are gathered into a pillow. Lyutov’s sleep does not lead to a dream of redemption by God and the promise of a great nation and homeland as in the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder. Instead, it foretells a midrashic replacement of God’s temple and promise with the hope for the new religion of communism and Lenin’s Comintern speech reprinted in Pravda.  As we have already seen, this displacement of the Torah with other political or social ideas is glossed throughout Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, particularly in the scene with the Solari flip boards replacing the Torah ark.

So, to recapitulate the narrative timeline we have been sketching: the redactors of the Talmud tell a midrashic story to explain a grammatical inconsistency in Genesis 28; many centuries later Rashi re-interprets and retells this talmudic midrash in his commentary on the Hebrew Bible; in the early twentieth century Isaac Babel recasts this midrash to explain the predicament of being a Jewish intellectual in a Cossack unit fighting for the spread of Communism; and early in the twenty-first century Gary Shteyngart builds upon each of these midrashim to reinterpret the story anew in his satire, Super Sad True Love Story, using the displacement of the wisdom and multiple interpretations of the Torah with simple Solari information boards to prophesize his vision of America’s future bereft of midrashic storytelling. In following this timeline we can begin to glimpse the many ways that midrash is central to understanding the contemporary Jewish imagination.

VIII

To understand more fully the contemporary Jewish imagination and the ways midrash spurs creativity, I turn my attention here to the work of renowned contemporary artist Tobi Kahn, who, from the very beginning of his career three decades ago, has been using biblical texts and stories to connect viewers to the stories of their own lives and experiences.

While Gary Shteyngart has created a modern midrash in which the ark of the covenant contains Solari train schedule boards to replace the ancient stories of the Bible, graphic artist, Tobi Kahn has not created a metaphorical ark as his midrash, but rather an actual aron kodesh, Orah (1987). Orah was originally commissioned as a moveable ark to hold a Torah scroll for prayer services in a New York-area hospice. In place of the customary lions holding the rounded form of the Decalogue, Kahn has created a beautiful, and somewhat abstract, landscape painting with two mountains in the distance and a flowing river moving from the right foreground of the painting into the distant mountains in the center of the painting at the “vanishing point” of the image corresponding with the lowering arc of the second mountain to the right. In this evocative painting, Kahn tells a story about olam haZeh (this present world) and olam haBa (the world to come).

In an interview with art critic and historian Emily Bilski, Kahn notes: “Although Judaism has emphasized words, language, and commentary, I have found the visual elements of the tradition equally illuminating. For me, the life of the spirit is integrally bound up with the beauty of the world, with the rituals and symbols that are a Jewish medium to transcendence. Like language, what we see can be a benediction” (6). [See Figure 7 at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

As Bilski explains, Kahn builds up the surfaces of his paintings by

adding over ten layers of gesso, each layer sanded before the next one is applied, to ensure an extremely smooth surface, with no trace of the texture of the material. On this prepared surface, Kahn executes a black-and white drawing; he then starts building up the surface with a mixture of modeling paste and acrylic polymer. This is followed by eight to ten layers of opaque pigment, over which Kahn applies a final fifteen layers of transparent washes of acrylic paint that resembles glazes. Thus he achieves the richly luminous surfaces that have been a hallmark of his expressive paintings. By building up multiple layers of modeling paste and pigment, he creates tactile surfaces resonating with a rare depth of color. (16)

As Bilski explains, just like most midrashic art, there is paradox and contradiction (irony) in much of Tobi Kahn’s artwork: “a simultaneous embrace of the human experience and celebration of the physical world, along with a desire to transcend that world and achieve a higher spiritual state” (17). This paradox is poignantly seen in Kahn’s portable ark for a Torah scroll, Orah, acrylic on wood (1987). This work of ritual art tells a midrashic story of Kahn’s own family history. Kahn’s father was born in Frankfurt Am Mainz, Germany, a member of the Breuer’s Kehillah. For generations of Kahns (Kohanim, members of the priestly tribe), Germany was home—until during Kristallnacht in 1933, an uncle of Kahn’s was among the very first group of Jews murdered by the Nazis. The remaining members of the family soon managed to flee Germany for America, and Kahn was born and raised as a member of the Breuer’s Kehillah, which was re-established by Rav Joseph Breuer in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Kahn’s father is, in fact, a “haver” one of Rav Breuer’s inner circle of adherents and leading members of the Kehillah, the Breuer community. Although the Kahn family found respite and safety in Washington Heights in what became euphemistically known as “Frankfurt on the Hudson,” given the Kahn family history, the necessity for an easily transportable ark—one that can easily be moved in times of crisis and exile—becomes apparent.

            Orah contains other midrashic and historic elements as well. The architectural form of the ark is simple and hearkens back to Shaker furniture, which influenced the American arts and crafts movement and the furniture of Gustav Stickley. Kahn’s borrowing from this somewhat obscure Christian religious sect for his variation on the traditional form of a Torah ark deeply resonates with Andy Statman’s continual borrowing and improvisation with indigenous American musical forms: Blues, Jazz, and Bluegrass. As already mentioned, the central image in most arks from at least the middle ages, are the twin forms of the Ten Commandments—the Decalogue. In Kahn’s American reimagining of this central conceit, however, the two rounded tablets are replaced by the form of two mountains with a river running through them. Although there are clearly two mountains discerned in Orah, Emily Bilski sees in this landscape painting a modern reinterpretation on the midrash on Proverbs, 68.9, which tells the story of how there were actually three mountains present at the giving of the Torah: Mount Tabor, Mount Carmel, and Mount Sinai, each competing to be the site for the giving of the Torah (Ritual Art, p. 26). Bilski sees the suggestion of yet a third mountain ciphered within Orah in the hollow, rounded door knob on the front of the ark. While I agree with Bilski’s brilliant commentary on the midrashic elements hidden within Kahn’s sculptural form and the painting contained within Orah, I believe there may be yet another hidden meaning contained in Orah.

This painting calls to mind the famous landscape artists of the Hudson River School of landscape painting: Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, even Sanford Gifford in the luminous, shimmering surface of Kahn’s paintings, including Orah, a Hebrew name, which means “light.” As a boy, Tobi Kahn spent each of his summers in Tannersville, NY, a vacation spot in the Northern Catskill Mountains, as his family would follow Rav Breuer up to some of the highest peaks in New York State. I see the river running through the center of Orah as a visual representation of the Hudson River, which not only meanders beside the Catskill Mountains, Kahn’s summer home, but also flowed past Kahn’s boyhood residence in Washington Heights overlooking the Hudson River one hundred and twenty miles south of Tannersville. Thus Kahn’s abstract reimagining of a Hudson River School landscape such as Cole’s Sunrise From the Catskill Mountains is not only an homage to his childhood homes, but it is also a means for Kahn to tell a personal story of family redemption in this art work. Through Orah, Kahn also suggests the union of ancient Jewish culture with indigenous and contemporary American art forms. In creating his landscape midrash as a house for a Torah scroll, Kahn is also suggesting the many imaginative ways that contemporary America has served as a home for the Torah—its stories, wisdom, and lessons—and the myriad, new interpretations being spun from the ancient Hebrew scroll contained within Orah by so many contemporary writers and artists. Thus, Kahn is typologically and midrashically transposing three Northern Catskill high-peaks for the ancient Judean hills from the Hebrew Bible, and in so doing, through the shimmering surface of Orah he allows us to glimpse the reflection of an endlessly inventive contemporary midrashic imagination.  

Kahn’s interpretive improvisation with indigenous American art forms and religious movements from Shaker furniture to Hudson River School landscape painting to his reimagining of the ancient ritual object of an aron kodesh, parallels the powerful midrashic imagination evidenced by Andy Statman, Bob Dylan, and Gary Shteyngart. Although it might not be immediately apparent, upon studying Orah, Kahn’s transgressive and subversive imagination is stunning. When one considers Orah as a functioning piece of ritual art, a working aron kodesh, a house to hold a Torah scroll, the holiest object in Judaism, its full import and beauty is recognizable. Kahn is not making his statement of blurring borders and boundaries between old-world ideas of sacred and secular, between what constitutes “acceptable religious iconography,” at the margins of Jewish culture, but instead he is forcing viewers to take up his aesthetic and spiritual challenge right at the center of Jewish life and ritual. Kahn confronts these questions and ideas through the literal house of Judaism’s most sacred object. All of Kahn’s ritual art objects are made within the halakhic specifications and are fully functioning ritual objects. Kahn’s midrashic imagination purposefully blurs the boundaries between text and commentary and suggests a seemingly ceaseless number of interpretations for his Torah ark. In so doing he creates a contemporary midrash on the ways that New York City itself, and by extension America, has been a welcoming home for Torah and the millions of Jewish people who have made their modern lives on the shores of the Hudson river. Stern suggests all great midrashic works should “tease out the nuances of Scripture rather than use (artistic) interpretation to close them off” (3). This is precisely what Kahn’s art does: it invites viewers to re-imagine ritual and reinterpret biblical stories through aesthetic beauty. Whether he slyly references ancient midrashic stories about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, as Bilski suggests, or whether he evocatively alludes to Shaker simplicity or the complex story of exile and survival that is his own personal and familial history, Kahn’s Jewish imagination works midrashically—in so doing he returns all viewers of his art to the fundamental principles of Judaism and the complex negotiations required of cosmopolitan Orthodox citizens of the contemporary American scene. Rather than seem heretical and problematic, as might have been the view of an earlier Jewish audience, say a mid-nineteenth-century Hirschian worldview, in the twenty-first American century, Kahn’s objects of the spirit truly inspire all who view them.

IX

The last midrashic work I would like to take a look at is a series of photographs taken of “décollage” images by Ahron Weiner, a contemporary New York artist. His show, titled Bible AdInfinitum, opened in June of 2011 at Superfine, a Brooklyn gallery in Dumbo. I was able to attend this opening with my Jewish Studies students from the University of Texas at El Paso when we were all in New York for my summer class, New York Through the Literary Imagination. Weiner’s midrashic aim for Bible AdInfinitum is to combine advertising “décollage” and digital photography to uncover new interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. The French word “décollage” translates into English literally as “take-off” or “to become unglued.” Essentially, what Weiner does is walk the streets of Manhattan looking for old advertising posters placed around the city at major construction sites. After many months, or years, (just ask any New Yorker about the speed of contractors and construction in Manhattan…), there could be twenty or thirty advertising posters pasted one on top of the other plastered onto the protective scaffolding around a construction site. In an act of “archeological semiology,” Weiner removes a large section of these pasted-together advertising posters and, back at his Long Island studio, begins the task of stripping away at the palimpsest to reveal iconic images and story fragments redolent of tales from the Hebrew Bible.

Unlike Tobi Kahn’s painstakingly slow building up of an image through numerous layers, Ahron Weiner employs a reverse method of décollage, of tearing at a surface to reveal the hidden meaning within. Instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images (as is done in collage), it is created by cutting, tearing away, or otherwise removing pieces of an original image. It is this “un-mooring” of the original image from its advertising intent that frees it to be manipulated back into a biblical context.

In an interview, I asked Weiner to elaborate on his choice of décollage as his compositional method. He responded: “I think the ancient Kabbalistic tradition of permutation—rearranging words and letters to uncover deeper meanings­—foreshadows what I’m doing. The semiotic archaeological aspect of this series quite literally echoes the work of archaeologists working on tels across the Middle East, seeking physical evidence of biblical sites and stories” (interview). Weiner’s attempt to find hidden meanings in advertising images, particularly allusions and reinterpretations of ancient biblical stories, partakes in the midrashic imagination that has animated so much of Jewish art over the centuries. The element of ironic reversal, which, as we have already seen in this essay, is a defining characteristic of the current midrashic imagination, is apparent in Weiner’s image The Creation of Man—a work that retells a Hebrew Bible story (Genesis 1:26) through obvious allusion to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, one of the most revered and copied images in Christian iconography and Western art. Yet Weiner sees this image as relevant to the Hebrew Bible as well: “My compositional appropriation of Michelangelo’s iconic Sistine Chapel fresco in my “Creation of Man” is relevant, important, and ironic. In addition to being an homage to an artist I revere, it suggests all that Christianity appropriated from Judaism” (interview). [See Figure 8at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

Weiner goes on to suggest that through Bible AdInfinitum, he is “appropriating advertising—a medium that appropriates from everything else—to retell these biblical stories. Whereas the Bible is eternal, holy, and written by God, advertising is temporal, unholy, and most certainly written by man” (interview). Despite this “unholy” quality infusing advertising, Weiner still believes that he can use this medium to retell these ancient biblical stories. When I visited the opening of Bible AdInfintum in Brooklyn in June of 2011, I witnessed an eclectic mix of advertising executives, art gallery owners, inquisitive Williamsburg hipsters, former and current Yeshiva students, and my students and I from West Texas. All of us together stood around discussing these ancient biblical stories as if they were current news—whether it was the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) or the Creation of Man (Genesis 1:26)—stories uncovered through Weiner’s décollage technique.

Weiner has been an advertising executive for several decades, and, he says about drawing biblical tales out of the most unlikely of places: “I didn’t set out to create an advertising-based abstract biblical narrative. I’ve been working with AdInfinitum since 2002—it took me eight years before I realized that I could use it to tell the biblical narrative. This series is a synthesis of my three major influences: Jewish history, art history, and advertising. It’s that mother’s milk, sub-rosa, informing my artistic expression” (interview).

Although graphic artists—Kahn and Weiner—use somewhat oppositional methods of composition, they share a similar fascination with the ancient stories of the Hebrew Bible: they both give new life to ancient biblical stories and recast Jewish history on the contemporary American stage thus making it relevant and meaningful to new audiences.

X

            In Midrash and Literature, David Stern asks us to consider the many ways we, as citizens of the modern world, inscribe meaning in our lives. Stern asks: “how are we to secularize our understanding of [midrash] this inherently religious literature, as we must, without profaning it?” (2). The numerous artists and writers that I analyze here, Andy Statman, Bob Dylan, Isaac Babel, Gary Shteyngart, Tobi Kahn, and Ahron Weiner challenge us to find new and innovative ways of incorporating biblical stories into our contemporary American lives.

Before I conclude, I would be remiss if I did not mention that in a future essay I will be looking at the particular ways that Jewish women writers, interpreters, and artists—people such as Dara Horn, who reanimates lost Jewish worlds and languages, Basya Schechter, the lead singer for Pharoah’s Daughter, and biblical scholars Nechama Lebowitz and Aviva Zornberg—after thousands of years of being silenced and shut out of midrashic storytelling and biblical exegesis, are reinvigorating this ancient form of analysis. The incredible variety of midrashic reinterpretations currently ongoing by female scholars and artists requires and deserves its own analysis—one that looks at the many ways that for centuries women’s voices were silenced. Today women midrashists, having largely overcome this centuries-long neglect, are among the most innovative practitioners of this ancient exegetical compositional method.

XI

As Dylan says, it’s funny how circles always seem to hook up with themselves. Or as Walt Whitman reminds us in his meditation on the timelessness of change, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” when it comes to people connecting to each other through great art, “it avails not, time nor place—distance avails not” (20). As I sit in the Charles Street Synagogue, surrounded by my students from West Texas, together we listen to Andy Statman play his clarinet in the heart of Greenwich Village, like the Hassidic masters of old, listeners and fellow travelers, each of us can begin to discern a path to redemption through niggun, through song. Although Bob Dylan was speaking about Aaron Neville when he said, “There’s so much spirituality in his singing that it could even bring sanity back in a world of madness” (Chronicles, p. 178), had he ever stumbled into the Charles Street Synagogue on a Thursday night, he would have to agree that the same description would just as easily apply to Andy Statman as well.

Whether contemplating one’s life journey in a makeshift synagogue through Tobi Kahn’s painstaking layering of abstract forms into shimmering surfaces which reveal the journey of contemporary Jewish history, or whether one considers the travails of Jewish history and the plight of African American’s migrating north up Highway 61 while listening to Bob Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, or perhaps while viewing Ahron’s Weiner’s slow, meticulous scraping away at contemporary advertising culture to reveal a small biblical kernel within its unholy wrapping, when one notices the smoke rising from Isaac Babel’s lonely childhood hut and when one heed’s Gary Shteyngart’s prophetic warning of a post-literate world (think of the implications for the people of the book!)—we are, each of us, participants in the midrashic imagination. Midrash is what unites each of these distinct Jewish artists—the vibrant, renewable, midrashic imagination, which is rediscovered anew for each generation. We today in the twenty-first century are seeing the completion of a circle—the long arc of Jewish imagination that knows no linguistic limitations and admits no geographic boundaries. Nearly half a century ago at the height of the youth movement in the 1960s, Bob Dylan stridently warned his listeners: “Don’t look back.” For the artists and writers that I examine here, as well as so many other contemporary Jewish artists from Jerusalem to New Orleans, one need not turn around to see what might be gaining ground. With the steadying force of the timeless midrashic imagination behind them, contemporary Jewish artists confidently face the future knowing that following the long arc of tradition, like a circle hooking up with itself, will, eventually, bring them right back home again. 

List of Works Cited

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic, 1981. Print.

Babel, Isaac. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Ed. Nathalie Babel. Trans. Peter Constantine.

Intro. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.

Ben Isaiah, Rabbi Abraham, and Rabbi Benjamin Sharfman. The Pentateuch and Rashi’s

Commentary: A Linear Translation into English. New York: S.S. & R., 1949. Print.

Bilski, Emily. Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn. New York: Hudson Hills,

2004. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. 1975. New York: Continuum, 1999. Print.

Chekhov, Anton. The Complete Short Novels. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Print.

———. “Highway 61 Revisited,” Highway 61 Revisited. Warner Bros. Inc., 1965. CD.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl: And Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959. Print.

Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitis,” The Apple Trees at Olema. New York: Ecco Press,

2010. Print.

Kahn, Tobi. Orah. 1987. Acrylic on Wood. Private collection.

Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

Stern, David. Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies.

            Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry,” The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a

Play.Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Suggs, Jack M. et al., eds. The Oxford Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: Norton,

1999. Text.

Visotzky, Burton, L. Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society, 2005. Text.

Weiner, Ahron. Personal interview. 15 June 2011.

———. Creation of Man. 2011. Paper. Collection of the artist.

Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. New York:

Norton, 2002.

The pattern is much the same everywhere – because the cause and effect is the same everywhere. It's probably true that the new communication technologies are catalyzing the process, but that process existed in ancient and medieval times too, so only the externals have changed, not the substance.

The process I'm referring to is the backlash on the part of the poor against the predatory rich. In medieval times, peasants' revolts were commonplace – not surprising, given the miserable lot of the serfs. But it is worth noting that then, as now and as ever, it was the participation and usually the leadership of the middle-class that was essential to give the peasant mob a fighting chance against the rich – then the nobility – who controlled all the resources.

The growth of the middle-class in the modern period was supposed to have made the idea of peasant revolts passé – and for a time it really seemed that way. Nowhere was this truer than in the United States, where the essence of the American dream was that the class and status you were born into did not determine your fate, lot and life-story. Even in class-bound Britain and Europe, the rise of universal and largely free education drove a move away from aristocracy and towards meritocracy. The odds were still stacked in favor of the haves, but the chances of a have-not joining them were vastly improved.

This was not the case in the un- and less-developed world, and nowhere was this clearer than in the Arab countries. Thus, when the "Arab Spring" erupted almost a year ago, the reaction in much of the developed world was one of patronizing support for the demonstrators – who, for their part, followed the classic pattern of middle-class leadership of an urban mob, with the rural (and mostly conservative) population largely sidelined.

However, during the course of 2011, the pattern has extended not merely across the Arab world, but also into the developed world, from Europe's Mediterranean south across the continent – Britain providing an especially horrific example of mob violence. In Israel, of course, we have had a powerful dose of protest. Belatedly, the expression of open, widespread and so far largely peaceful protest, has spread to the US, where it began fittingly enough in Wall Street, but is now rapidly going nationwide.

The rationale for reviewing this now is not because it is finished. On the contrary, it is a safe bet that we will see much more of this pattern of protest in the coming year – and that it will be more intense, more bitter and encompass more countries. But now is the time for Jews, at least, to relate to the forces driving the protest/ backlash/ revolt that is taking place across the world and which, everywhere, is the result of a culture of greed and excess in which a tiny elite appropriated the bulk of a country's or a society's wealth, impoverishing the majority or, in more fortunate cases, leaving it a steadily shrinking share.

Why now? Because the main theme of our Holy Day season as a whole, is to ask what's it all about – at the individual and societal level. The passage from Isaiah read on Yom Kippur morning is rightly viewed as a seminal text for social justice, and the quotation in the title of this essay is one key component of that manifesto. But the second half of that verse – "and bring the desperate poor into thy house" – is interpreted in the Talmud not as a moral exhortation but as sound advice: if you don’t share your bread with the hungry, don’t be surprised if the desperate poor come knocking – not necessarily very politely – on your door.

There are people, even in America, who understand this simple equation. Jeffery Hollender was here this week, talking about the social, moral and ethical issues that underlie the economic and financial crisis (Google him and read some of his stuff – it's worth it and it's not written in academese). But the moneyed class, which is now centered on the financial elite, and which has effectively bought control of the government and its agencies, is blind and deaf not merely to moral suasion, but to the common sense version of Isaiah's prophecy.

They, like all their predecessors and their contemporaries around the world, are doomed and they will be swept away in the rising tide of protest and revolt. But it is still possible for 'Main Street' America to wrest back control of the country and society from the Wall Street elite and its self-serving but ultimately destructive creed. Fortunately, Israel's society – as well as its economy and financial system – are in better shape or, more correctly, are less far gone in terms of the extent of the moral rot characterizing them. That's a good starting point for what is sure to be a tough year.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

—Albert Einstein

“Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometric theories of structures or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture—literally a vision in the minds of those who built them.”

—Historian Eugene Ferguson

Introduction

Art education is rarely prioritized in Jewish Day School curricula. A double curriculum of secular and religious studies often leaves little time for subjects whose importance is “still questioned.” Even in the best of secular schools, art education often survives, but only on a year-to-year basis with the constant threat of being slashed. If not for the monitoring by the education watchdogs and the relentless hard work of art advocates, there would be many artless schools in America and even more artless Jewish Day Schools.

The fact that art is offered in some schools and not others is nothing new. Many administrators or school boards have considered an art program “glorified busywork” and do not really understand the nature of art and its value to society. While no one group can be blamed for this misunderstanding, arguably most everyone who is against art programs rarely cares enough to give the matter of art education serious thought. As a result, the average Jewish Day School graduate, like most secular school graduates, is probably a victim of a passive attitude toward art education that often translates into no art classes being offered. There is a sad irony in this situation because the arts have always played a major role in Judaism. In this essay, therefore, I will argue that it is essential to have an art program in a Jewish Day School, and present ideas for what I think a rich art curriculum should consist of, taking into account limits on time that result from a “double curriculum.”

Before I talk about art education in a Jewish Day School setting, it is important to define what art is. It is commonly held that the definition of art has changed many times since the cave paintings were first created 40,000 years ago. It started with “art is magic,” then moved to “art is beauty and emotion,” then to “art is the artist’s view of the world,” and on and on and on. Each culture has defined art in its own way, depending on the time, the place, and the people who made it. But what is art today, in the twenty-first century, postmodern era? The present accepted definition is, “art is when a person takes any material or substance and uses it to make a statement.” Today, one can take paint, stone, clay, food, newspaper, scraps of metal, wire, cloth, vinyl, egg crates, rubber, or film and use them to make a statement. Anyone who has visited a museum of modern art anywhere in the Western world can attest to the variety of materials being used in unique ways. Like the paintings of the past, postmodern art of the twenty-first century challenges the viewer to think about and analyze what the artist is trying to say. But it may be more demanding than paintings of the past because the viewer may not readily understand the language of an artist who, for instance, uses a few tree branches to make a point.

What distinguishes art from science is that art and creativity are timeless. Science is like a ladder—each year humanity builds upon what it knows and what it has achieved to move forward and upward. When humanity makes progress in science, it usually replaces old techniques and old insights with new ones. Art is only somewhat similar, in that while artists employ techniques that build upon those of their predecessors, viewers do not cease appreciating and finding beauty in what came before. Cave paintings are just as fantastic to behold as a Michelangelo statue, or a Picasso painting, or an Andy Warhol silkscreen of a soup can, or a Frank Gehry piece of architecture. Someone might prefer one style over another, but each is still relevant today and can be appreciated. So with this in mind, why is it important to teach art in school?

Why Is an Art Education Important for Every Child?

Many people do not accept art as an important element in their lives or in the general education of their children. Therefore, there are numerous schools that lack art education, even in the richest and most progressive states.  I am fortunate to teach at a school whose headmaster and administrators value art education, but within many Jewish Day Schools across the country art education is often missing from their curricula. This is always an unfortunate state of affairs, and with budget cutbacks and financial restraints, the problem will only get worse. Therefore it is important to outline a few reasons why every child should have the opportunity of an art education throughout his or her years in school.

I use the term art education to mean a curriculum that combines the teaching of art appreciation and theory with the instruction of hands-on projects—seeing and doing. There are several reasons children benefit from this type of art education. Most broadly, art education can help nurture creativity and critical thinking, which are necessary to excel in a range of disciplines. If people stopped creating or thinking critically, progress in many fields—medicine, engineering, science, or literature would cease. At the same time, art education can encourage healthy risk-taking so that children become comfortable with stepping out of their “comfort zone,” and gain confidence in trying new projects. This ability to come to terms with risk-taking, and sometimes experiencing and recovering from failure, is an important skill-set to learn. Parents who therefore dream of their children becoming doctors or engineers or lawyers should consider that the skills taught in art education can be useful, and critical to, a variety of professional careers.

Aside from benefiting their future professional lives, art education both deepens and broadens children’s understanding of the world around them. Students who take art classes are not only able to appreciate art in museums, they are able comprehend and value the different cultures they come in contact with on a daily basis. Students equipped with this skill are more able to navigate through an increasingly multicultural world and interact intelligently with people of different backgrounds and faiths.

Finally, art education can help improve children’s academic performance. Making art is a uniquely human activity and the making and appreciating art marks an important stage in human intellectual development. In addition, research shows a correlation between studying art and academic achievement. For instance, art education correlated with higher SAT scores, and some studies show that students perform 30 percent better in business when they have taken art classes.[1]

Why Is an Art Education Especially Important in the Jewish Day School Setting?

To make connections.

We marvel at modern-day communication tools; the iPhone, the Internet, Skype, wi-fi, and the digital camera have all facilitated communication and the sharing of ideas. We can be in touch with people living anywhere in the world in a matter of a few seconds. But of course we cannot call or email people who lived years ago. Art is different, as it can put us in touch with civilizations and people that lived thousands of years ago. Art is the voice of what occurred.

Jewish Day School students are especially vested in history, so they can use art to better appreciate their Jewish cultural heritage and see how their forefathers and foremothers lived, as well as get a sense of the other civilizations of the ancient world. The art tells the story. Whether it is an ancient menorah, a ceramic jar, an Assyrian animal carving, an Egyptian tomb painting, a Babylonian ziggurat, or a Greek mosaic, art puts the viewer in direct contact with the past.

To nourish the soul.

How might a student feel when at the Kotel for the first time, or when he or she learns about the horrors of the Holocaust? The history and stories of the Jewish people can certainly open profound as well as unsettling emotions and feelings. In an art class, students can express their feelings and emotions and make a statement through the visual arts.  It is a place where they can incubate their thoughts without the pressure of a test. They can get lost in thought as they make a clay bowl; as they feel the wet clay slip through their fingers, they can find themselves. But it is where they can also explore their values and create a visual image that is reflective of their beliefs and concerns. For example, they can design a poster to express the injustice of the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.  Nourishing the soul of a Jewish child has to include the arts as a way of integrating the life cycles, the emotions, the battlefields of Jewish history, and the spiritual meaning of our traditions. It is especially important and is a way of staying connected to Israel as well as the outside world.

To learn respect.

The world is filled with human rights violations, prejudice, discrimination, gender inequality, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, and war.  Art curricula can enlighten students both about their own culture, as well as the cultures of the world around them. The advantages of a Jewish education are enormous. But there is a downside to it. Day School students often grow up in an environment that is just like theirs, and they often miss the opportunity to mingle freely with kids from other backgrounds and lifestyles. An art program is a great way to learn about other cultures. This is increasingly important because Jewish people play on the world stage, and so it is essential that they be comfortable with other cultures for business, in politics, and for pleasure. For example, doing a Chinese landscape painting and along the way understanding the origin of this style of painting can help a Jewish Day School student learn about the symbolic meaning of the style and the culture within which it developed. Instead of laughing, which kids normally do when they see something that is bizarre or strange to them, if they have knowledge of what they are looking at, they can begin to respect different cultures. In the end, they will respect themselves as well for being culturally literate. Museum visits with observations and explanations are therefore very important. Worksheets, writing and sketching in the museum are wonderful ways to get children to ask about what they see.

To develop an interest in the aesthetic dimension of life.

Somehow a sense of aesthetics sometimes gets lost in the observant Jewish family tradition. Why? Does a sukkah have to be pre-fab and made of plastic? Does everyone’s wedding invitation have to look similar? Can a menorah be made from copper plumbing parts or fire bricks?  Judaica that is creative not only brings a smile to everyone’s face, but also can make them think more about the mitzvah. Holidays and semahot become more exciting and inspire more reflection when the Judaica is unique. Why does creativity tend to get lost in the tradition? This issue is something that I never quite understood, but is certainly a valid argument for a substantial art program in the Day School setting. There are endless possibilities for new and different ideas while keeping with tradition.

To take risks.

To become a creative person, one has to take risks, come up with new ideas, and have the tenacity to follow through with the creative process. In Jewish Day Schools, taking risks, or trying something different, is often avoided. More broadly, thinking and problem solving is becoming easier to avoid in the age of computer technology. It’s just easier to Google your way from start to finish. What is getting lost, therefore, is the teaching of problem solving and imparting the confidence in students to take risks. It is an especially important skill to have the courage to create something, change it, revise it, critique it and work with it. It doesn’t happen instantly. You have to work it through. That is the nature of the creative process. And you might get a great idea that just doesn’t pan out and that is okay too! It is just as important to learn from mistakes.

A Proposed Art Curriculum in the Jewish Day School

Ideally, if Day School art educators work together, a seamless art curriculum could be developed that would run from grades K–12 and that follows state standard guidelines.

Knowledge and skills would be built on prior experience, but would be revisited allowing for mastery. This is called a spiraling approach. Kids need to be re-exposed to the information and the experience for education and confidence building to work best.  The following are proposed standards, which are based, in part, on some baseline standards set by New York State:

Standard 1: Students should participate in the arts and make works of art that explore different kinds of subject matter, topics, themes, and metaphors. Students will understand and use sensory elements, organizational design principles, and expressive images to communicate their own ideas in works of art.

Standard 2: Students should know and use a variety of visual art materials, techniques, and processes and become aware of the many options and careers in the arts.

Standard 3: Students should respond critically to works of art connecting the individual work to aspects of human thought. They will learn to reflect on, interpret, and evaluate works of art using the language of art criticism.

Standard 4: Students should develop an understanding of the personal and cultural forces that shape artistic communications and how the arts shape the diverse cultures of past and present society. They will explore art and artifacts from world cultures and discover the roles that art plays in the lives of a given time and place. They will use art to understand the social, cultural, and environmental dimensions of human society.

With these standards as a guide and with the limited amount of time for art classes, I would propose the following:

K–2^nd grade: An introduction to the different art materials and techniques, such as painting, sculpting, and printmaking. The emphasis should be on experimentation and exploration. Children should begin to feel confident with the materials. There should be a focus on Jewish themes, such as the holidays. Examples: a clay hannukiyah or a tzedaka box.

3^rd–5^th grade: An introduction to the elements of art, which are line, shape, form, color, value, texture, and space. Basic observational drawing skills and modeling skills should be introduced, as well as an introduction to the work of various artists.  Jewish themes should be used whenever possible. Examples: scenes of Israel painted in acrylic paint on canvas, three-dimensional soft sculpture.

6^th–8^th grade: Design principles should be introduced, such as balance, movement, rhythm, contrast, emphasis, pattern, unity, proportion, and variety. This is the language and grammar of art. Students in middle school should be given the opportunity to delve deeper into the art and culture of other lands as well as learn about the art of the Western world. An overview of the art movements as well as a close study of one of the artists should be explored. Examples: Chinese hand scrolls, hard-edge paintings, Picasso cubist portraits, pop-art paintings, the mosaic and South American rain sticks.

9^th–12^th grade: One unit of art is needed for a high school diploma and the choice is one of the four arts, which include dance, music, drama, or the visual arts. Students who choose fine arts should create a collection of artworks in a variety of media, based on assignments that encourage them to explore various ideas and viewpoints. Teachers should use rubrics for evaluation. College portfolios should be prepared for those students seeking admission to university art schools. Examples of projects: graphic design, lithography, computer graphics, poster design, and experimental sculpture.

Conclusion: To the Source

The center of our Jewish spirituality was the Holy Temple and from the beautiful biblical descriptions we know that there was an emphasis on aesthetics.  As it’s mentioned in the Torah, “Let them make a Holy Shrine that I may dwell amidst them” (Exodus 25:8). The descriptions in this part of the text tell us that the Israelites procured such materials as gold and silver along with fine artisanship, such as weaving, dyeing, and the setting of jewels. The Torah prescribes in detail all the fine materials to be used to build the Temple including the specific measurements and amounts. One could only imagine how beautiful it all was—a true work of art.

In the time of the Temple, Judaism’s expression of faith was fundamentally connected to the arts. And so it should be today as well. There is a concept in Judaism of “hidddur mitzvah”—beautifying the mitzvah. It is praiseworthy to not just fulfill the commandment, but to embellish the mitzvah with additional beauty, so as to express our love and respect for it. It is our responsibility as a community to continue that aesthetic journey with our children so that they may express their faith and so that they can appreciate and participate in the arts throughout their lives. After all, out of the Jewish Day School might come a great architect, industrial designer, fine artist, art teacher, graphic designer, interior designer, curator, art conservationist, art historian, commercial artist, fashion designer, frequent museum visitor, or art collector. Hopefully all of our children armed with a good art education in their Day School years will become lifelong participants in the creative process as well as the future caretakers of all of humanity’s artistic treasures. 

A Ladder upon the Earth, Whose Top Reaches the Heavens[1]

In this article I will attempt to analyze the halakhic approach of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and to compare and contrast it with two other models of halakhic thought—those of Rabbi Abraham Issac haCohen Kook and Rabbi Isaac Hutner. The central question at the core of these different halakhic approaches is the relationship between halakha and reality; that is, the relationship between the legal source material of preceding generations and the human concerns that arise from the specific question that a posek (halakhic arbiter) is asked. A central prism through which these various approaches may be best understood is their alternative theories of mahloket (talmudic dispute)—a central characteristic of the oral tradition. Over the course of this study, we will explore the way each approach understands the balance between halakha and reality, as well as its relationship to the nature of mahloket.

Rabbi Soloveitchik—Divine Law

In the eulogy for his uncle, Rav Velvele of Brisk (Rabbi Isaac Zev Soloveitchik), ‘Ma Dodekh Mi Dod,’ Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik describes the role reality should play on halakhic pesak through a parable. He compares the real-life circumstances, the difficulties and needs of the individual who asks a halakhic question, to a rocket that launches a satellite into its orbit.   

The halakhic process can be compared to a satellite that enters a particular orbit. The satellite’s entry into orbit depends on its thrust at takeoff. However, once in orbit, it begins to travel with amazing precision according to the specific parameters of its particular orbital path. At this point, its original thrust cannot affect it in the least.[2]

Indeed the rocket propels the satellite into its trajectory; however, once it enters its orbit it continues to travel by the laws of physics. The same is true for the process of pesikah (halakhic decision-making):

The case is the psychological prompt that pushes pure thought into its path. However, once on its path, it [pure thought] pays no deference to the particular case, but operates by its own unique ideal-normative categories.[3]

Even though the posek is dependent upon a question from reality, the process of pesikah itself, the search for an answer to the halakhic question, must be separated from the reality in which the question was asked. The premise of halakhic decision-making is that halakha is based on a set of absolute a priori principles, and as such has no direct or necessary connection with reality. The posek’s role is uncovering the halakhic truth by way of a predetermined course controlled by the principles of the halakhic process.

Professor Avi Sagi summarizes this outlook:

Apparently the closed nature of the system is determined from the fact that it operates as a legal system drawn from predetermined postulates and that it derives its conclusions in consonance with a system of objective rules. Halakha is therefore similar to a deductive system whose fundamental assumptions are the content given from Sinai and its principles are the a priori legal system that also was given at Sinai. The system develops from its own internal axioms on the basis of its own rules, and not on other external factors. Rav Soloveitchik is in fact aware that halakhic ruling is done in relation to the questions that reality itself raises. However, in his opinion, reality is not a component within the halakhic decision itself, rather, it is the motive driving the sages of the halakha to activate the system.[4]

This attitude toward halakhic decision-making greatly influences the place of, and the need for, creativity when making a pesak. It seems to me that Rav Soloveitchik does not deny the fact that pesikat halakha is a process in which the posek compares and connects different sources. For him it is a process through which he creates and adapts halakha to reality and to the new halakhic question that has been asked. Even so, the room for creativity is limited by the predetermined rules that he strives to uphold. In the end, creativity then becomes just a servant to the quest to reveal the halakhic truth. Reality is only an instrument through which the posek is launched into his logical, mathematic-like calculations.

Rabbi Soloveitchik’s fundamental aim is to disconnect halakha from reality and to limit external influences on the halakhic decision-making process.

Why does Rabbi Soliveichik oppose the influence of external realities on pesikah, as described so eloquently in the parable of the rocket? Rav Soloveitchik’s position was expressed on the background of the Haskalah and the historical approach of Zecharia Frankel, which later became the foundation of the Conservative movement. The historical school held that halakha needs to be analyzed through sociological and historical factors to uncover the close connection between these factors and the posek, and the pesikah itself. Emphasizing the influence of the historical reality on pesikah permits one to claim that a certain pesak that was appropriate to an earlier era, is no longer relevant.[5] Since these movements were understood as a threat to Orthodoxy, it seems that Rav Soloveitchik attempted to create a structure of pure halakha, transcending social, cultural, or historical context in order to protect against a complete abrogation of halakha. He therefore strove to disassociate any connection between the halakha and the reality of the questioner.

It seems to me that it is difficult to reconcile Rav Soloveitchik’s attempt to disassociate reality from the halakhic process with the tradition’s attitudes toward halakhic dispute. There are many examples in the tradition of two authorities who faced similar realities and yet came to different and even opposite conclusions. How are we to understand the essence of talmudic dispute and the question of “halakhic truth” that arises from this phenomenon?

The talmudic tradition asserts that in cases of dispute “both these and those are the words of the living God.”[6] This statement can be explained in two ways.[7] The first understands that indeed there are two truths. Both sides of the dispute are actually one hundred percent right. Alternatively, some suggest that there is only one absolutely true halakha that the posek tries with all his might to arrive at and uncover, but there is no guarantee that he will indeed succeed. One side of the dispute is mistaken but nevertheless is afforded the designation of “words of the living God” because of its positive motivation and aspiration to arrive at the truth.

Reconciling either of these understandings of halakhic truth with Rav Soloveitchik’s approach of disassociating reality from halakhic process proves difficult. Let us assume for the moment that Rav Soloveitchik does not accept the literal understanding of “these and those” but opts for the more figurative explanation. This is an approach that claims that the legitimacy of each side lies in its aspiration for truth, not necessarily having reached the absolute truth. Both sides are “the words of the living God,” because both sides are striving for divine truth. The process of searching and striving itself is the divine truth. If we return to the parable of the rocket, there is no guarantee that the posek indeed will manage to enter the proper orbit. It may be that the satellite will never make it into the proper orbit, or maybe at some point it will leave the orbit, and then the gravitational force will overtake the centrifugal force, and the satellite will fall.

The difficulty with this approach is that we are then forced to concede that at least one of the opinions is wrong. One of the posekim did not manage to launch the rocket into the right orbit. This explanation depletes Rav Soloveitchik’s approach of its great strength. He tried to create a paradigm of a priori halakhic truth, and thereby to disassociate halakhic truth from the chains of reality. The moment we acknowledge that posekim may be wrong, we have brought into the process of pesikah the problem of human imperfection with all its ramifications. There may indeed be a “halakhic truth,” but if we never know if we’ve reached it (for the aspiration for truth with no guarantee of its realization is equally applicable in the case of an individual posek as for the body of halakhic disputes), in the end the earthly reality and the human situation prevail over this truth and halakhic decision-making is ultimately dependent on them.

On the other hand, it may be possible to claim that Rav Soloveitchik accepts the other explanation of the nature of dispute in which indeed there are multiple truths. Thus, we can claim that there are a number of different “orbits” that the posek can enter. Each one of them is true in a certain way and provides alternative correct answers to any question that arises.

Yet, it seems that this explanation of dispute is also difficult to reconcile with Rav Soloveitchik’s approach as it provides an opening for the influence of reality on the posek. Ostensibly, reality is only the rocket that causes the take-off,  so how could it influence an entry into an alternative orbit? For every question are there a number of rockets? And even if there indeed are a number of “correct” answers for each question, have we not lost the benefit that we wanted to reap from disassociating halakha from reality? How is the posek to decide among the various options? In the end, there is no escape from the responsibility of the posek to take into account the circumstances and to decide which of the halakhic options best fits them. Indeed, there are multiple mathematic laws that allow for different solutions. Perhaps the axioms themselves don’t change but only their application; be that as it may, this does not remove the central role given to reality itself.

Despite these difficulties in reconciling the nature of rabbinic dispute with his theory of pesikah, it is clear that Rav Soloveitchik prefers that the halakha construct reality, and not vice versa. Halakha is to have the upper hand over reality since it is pure and impervious to human, earthly factors.

Rav Soloveitchik’s approach is best understood in light of his Brisker background. He was completely entrenched in the Bet Midrash, and there seems to be a correlation between his talmudic and his halakhic approaches.

Many of the latter Ashkenazic talmudic authorities spoke of an abstract halakhic world, and attempted to explain disputes in an abstract fashion through the creation of a priori definitions and distinctions that were to be applied to various positions. The most notable among them were the Rogetchover (Rav Yosef Rozin), Rav Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, and Rav Chaim of Brisk. The Rogetchover adopted the philosophic language of the Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed,[8] Rav Reines spoke using terminology borrowed from the science of Physics,[9] and Rav Chaim adopted terminology from the halakhic literature. In contrast with the first two thinkers, who used terminology foreign to the halakhic discourse, Rav Chaim used notions that were already familiar to the students of halakha, such as shenei dinim, heftza, and gavra (two laws, the object, and the person). He emphasized these concepts and attributed to them major significance, and through them he analyzed the entire halakhic system. He managed to transform the talmudic discussion into an abstract philosophical discussion without resorting to external terminology.[10] You do not need a background from other fields in order to understand his philosophical distinctions, and it seems that for this reason his method caught on in the world of yeshivot. The possibility of analyzing the talmudic discussion in an abstract philosophical manner gave students a sense of elation. Indeed, many times the Brisker method of study is absolutely compelling. Talmudic controversies can be understood as disputes over philosophical principles of a transcendental ideal realm, transforming the halakhic discourse of the Gemara into a debate over ideal principles from which the halakha is drawn.

The advantage of this method is that talmudic study becomes a fascinating philosophical discussion. But it has three significant drawbacks: The first disadvantage, which is recognized in the yeshiva world, is that sometimes its innovative insights simply do not fit the text; the text is exploited to make the abstraction attributed to it. The second problem is that despite the initial interest that such study creates, at some point all the talmudic passages begin to sound alike. There are predetermined arguments the student anticipates. Patterns of thought are repeated until almost all the halakhic discussion is given over to this type of analysis. For each question that arises there is a prepackaged answer. The third problem is the loss of the learner's awareness that the halakhic discussion almost always addresses a human, down-to-earth reality. The sages who dealt with the issues throughout the ages were intimately connected to reality. The discussions in the Talmud are often tied into the experiences, culture, and conceptions of justice of the individuals making their case. The rapid leap to abstraction loses the appreciation for the complexities and alternative explanations of the subject at hand.[11]

We see, therefore, how Rabbi Soloveitchik’s halakhic approach is created from two main focal points. One is the Brisker talmudic approach and the second is the Orthodox need to give a clear answer to antinomian tendencies in the other streams of Judaism. Of course both of these focal points do not stand in isolation from each other, but rather are interconnected to each other. Thus one could speculate that the Brisker method itself grew in part from the need for an Orthodox response to the more liberal forms of Judaism, but this is not for our discussion here.

This presentation of the Brisker background of Rabbi Soloveitchik allows us to focus on one of its substantial dangers. Presenting halakha as disconnected from reality allows for disregard of the circumstances in which a question was posed and a limiting of the options available to halakhic arbiter. In my humble opinion, pesikah is a process in which the posek, sincerely attentive to reality and the human needs arising from it, uses the full gamut of halakhic tools before him to address the question that has arisen. Creativity is at the heart of pesikah, and it allows the posek to connect the sources to reality. Reality is a significant and central factor in the ruling itself and not just a catalyst for the beginning the process.  

Rav Kook: Jewish Law as a Human Creation

In the beginning of his work Lights of the Torah, Rav Kook describes the difference between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. He says that Divine Law is the Written Torah, and that the Oral Law is a human creation.

We accept the written Torah through the most transcendent channel in our soul... It is not the spirit of the nation that wrought this great light but the spirit of God, the creator of all…

With the oral Torah we descend into more mundane life. We sense that we are receiving the divine light through another channel in the soul, a channel that is closer to earthly life…[12]

However, elsewhere, Rav Kook stresses that Oral Torah is not like any other human creation:

Oral Torah in ensconced in the very nation's character, which found its blessing through Divine revelation of the Written Torah…[13]

Unlike the parable of the satellite of Rabbi Soloveitchik, Rabbi Kook compares the oral tradition to the sail of a ship filled by the wind of the Written Torah—the law of Moses given through the illuminating crystal ball of prophecy. Its dynamism, its direction, and its originality flow from the unique and even divine nation and therein lies its singularity among all other human creations.

From the universal spirit of God, the transcendent spirit of prophecy which creates the eternal Torah of life, comes a spirit of interpretation tucked away in the depths of the soul of the people, revealed in its favorite sons; from its penetrating gaze comes the great riches of the Oral Torah and all its wealth, all its genius and the foundation of its acclimatization to life, and its strength to master life and defeat that which is ugly and degraded in it.[14]

The emphasis is not on a certain quality of the nation that is revealed in the Oral Torah, but rather its ability to create the Oral Law. This capability is an essential and unique feature of the nation

That which Israel has the capacity to create, that is oral Torah...[15]

You can liken the approach of Rav Kook to the difference between a painting by Rembrandt and a painting done by a high school student. Indeed both are human creations, but the difference is that for the artist there is inspiration, some inner aesthetic sense through which he/she is able to create works above and beyond the ability of other people. With regard to the Torah, this uniqueness is with the people Israel. Thus Rav Kook presents a model through which the oral tradition, including the process of pesak, is on the one hand a human process, but on the other this 'humanity' is vested with a special position stemming from its status as the chosen people.

We saw in Rav Soloveitchik that halakha is basically a divine fixed system of rules, and its study and even pesikah are influenced by its nature. In contrast, for Rav Kook all of the Oral Torah, including the halakha, is a human creation based on the divine Written Torah. If Rav Soloveitchik understands reality as a stimulus to search for the absolute divine truth, for Rav Kook halakha is a human creation of a nation endowed with a special genius for the creation of an oral Torah out of its historical experience.

Such an approach, that sees the essence of halakha as a creation flowing from the nation, can be found in the thought of Ahad Ha'am. In his article "Torah of the Heart,” he talks about the heart that beats through halakha over the generations. Although he had an ambivalent attitude toward tradition, he nevertheless anticipated a renaissance of Jewish law. He felt that there was narrowing of halakha in his generation, but looked forward to the day that the Jewish heart would beat again and create halakhot in an appropriate fashion. His approach can be best understood through his presentation of the talmudic determination that the statement “eye for an eye” should be understood as monetary compensation:

…If the heart in its development reached the understanding that “an eye for an eye” is an unacceptable cruelty for a cultured nation, and the heart was still at that time the absolute authority—then it is clear that the other source of authority, scripture, could not mean anything else, and there is no doubt, therefore, that “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensation.[16]

Rav Kook echoes Achad Ha’am in his attribution of halakha as an amazing human creation of the Jewish people; yet, there is a certain difference between them. Achad Ha’am writes critically of the state of halakha in his time. He laments that halakha has deteriorated, and he therefore calls for a halakhic renaissance.[17] Against this, Rav Kook writes in a gentler fashion. He does not believe that at some point in the development of the oral tradition the system broke down; rather, he accepts the Oral Torah of the generations as is and marvels at its beauty.

One could ask about Rav Kook's approach, what is the relationship between the Oral Torah of the current generation and previous generations? Is one to accept the creation of every generation as legitimate? What is the value of the current generation’s creation in light of the beauty and validity of the work previously existing for many generations, which is also a manifestation of all the special character of Israel from time immemorial? It seems that in some sense Rav Kook loses the ability to critically evaluate the sources of Oral Torah. If halakha is a masterpiece, can one suggest that it is not appropriate for a certain reality? And what happens in a generation where the national spirit turns in a negative direction that one should oppose? It seems that the critical sense is something fundamental to Oral Torah that expresses itself through the talmudic tradition of dispute. Oral Torah is not a unified harmonious creation but rather a compilation of numerous positions that disagreed and critiqued each other.

It should be noted that the theoretical differences between Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik do not affect their actual halakhic decision-making. On the one hand, from an examination of Rav Kook's response, he seems very similar to other posekim. There seems to be little direct influence on his pesak from his conception of Oral Torah. On the other hand, from testimony about Rav Soloveitchik’s rulings in the Boston community and at Yeshiva University, it appears that he was flexible and especially attentive to reality. Nevertheless, in the next generation the influence of Rav Soloveitchik’s understanding of the process of halakhic decision-making becomes recognizable. Posekim emanating from his circles tend to discuss little of the character of the circumstances and its complexity, and jump too quickly to apply a priori halakhic concepts. The idea that halakha is something transcendent and pure, affects all of the Orthodox circles in America—and a portion of the Conservative movement as well. The most striking point is that the posek generally does not deal with reality itself, but only with the reality as compared to the transcendent Law; i.e., how the transcendent law applies to the reality before him.

Rav Hutner—Halakha as a Conversation between Heaven and Earth

In contradistinction to Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook, who ignore the dimension of time in the transmission of Torah from generation to generation, Rav Yitzchak Hutner emphasizes the process of the transmission of the Torah received at Sinai from generation to generation. His approach is expressed in a number of places in his series of books on the holidays entitled Pahad Yitzchak, but the core of his understanding of halakha can be found in essays 1 and 3 of his volume on Hanukkah.

In essay 1, he presents an idea that there is something unique about the style of the Oral Torah that is indicative of its essence. He expresses this idea in his usual fashion through a spectacular homiletic in which he goes through various sources and explains them in creative ways.

Rav Hutner bases his approach on three sources. The first is a Tosafot in Tractate Gittin from which he learns that the translation of the Oral Torah into foreign languages would cause the Jewish people to lose its uniqueness:

The Midrash states: "they will be considered foreign" for the gentiles wrote (translated) the Torah. If all of the Torah had been written down for Israel, the gentiles would have written (translated) all of it. Therefore, the Merciful one said, "I will write for him most of the Torah, for what I wrote for them, is considered foreign, since foreigners copied it.[18]

In this puzzling midrash, the Sages say that God intentionally refrained from writing the Oral Torah in order to prevent non-Jews from translating it. Were they to acquire it through translation, Israel would lose its uniqueness. The rabbis of the midrash claim that God knew that non-Jews would translate the Torah and therefore commanded that the Oral Torah should not be written. For the purpose of Israel maintaining its uniqueness, the Oral Torah was not written. Rav Hutner connects this midrash to the statement of Rabbi Yohanan who says that the essence of the chosenness of Israel is the Oral Torah:

R. Yohanan said: God only made a covenant with Israel for the sake of the matters that were transmitted orally.[19]

The third source for Rav Hutner is the Vilna Gaon's commentary on the blessings of the Torah:

“Who chose us from all the nations,” “who gave us his Torah” ... “who gives the Torah.” He wrote in the abovementioned book of the GR”A (The Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna) that this blessing has three parts corresponding to the three times Israel accepted the Torah: When God said "you shall be my treasured possession" (Exodus 19:5), they accepted all the commandments, and the second time, at the revelation of Sinai, and third, when Moses made the covenant. Thus, all three occasions are referenced in this blessing: "who chose us" refers to "you shall be my treasured possession," "who gave us his Torah" refers to the revelation at Sinai when they received the Torah from God, and "who gives the Torah" with the definite article, refers to the Oral Torah which they received from Moses orally. Therefore, it is written in present tense, "who gives" because knowledge of the Oral Torah constantly renews knowledge.[20]

Despite the emphasis of the GR”A that the Oral Torah is the third link in the threefold giving of the Torah, Rav Hutner processes his words against their simple meaning and claims that the essence of the Oral Torah predates the chosenness of Israel and the giving of the Torah. The uniqueness of Israel, as expressed in God's proclamation that Israel will be “treasured to Me,” is dependent on the Oral Torah being unique to the nation, but had the Oral Torah been translated, Israel's uniqueness, and treasured status would be abrogated retroactively.

In this surprising explanation, Rav Hutner further claims that this fundamental aspect, which is part of the nature of the Oral Torah, already existed before the giving of the Torah, during the period of the Patriarchs, and before the content of the Oral Torah was revealed.

And because the covenant includes the repudiation of writing down the oral tradition, it follows that the prohibition of, "you are not permitted to write down the teachings of the Oral Torah" precedes all the specific prohibitions of the Torah, and moreover, it precedes the very event of the revelation of Torah.[21]

This is astonishing! On the one hand, this fundamental predates even the giving of the Torah, but on the other hand it is embodied specifically in the Oral Torah. This begs the question, what is this foundation and what is the significance of the fact that it was established before the giving of the Torah? It appears that Rav Hutner was not referring to any halakhic content that was given at Sinai but rather to something more essential and fundamental.

We will put aside for the moment the question of what this fundamental is, and turn to essay number three on Hanukkah. In this essay, Rav Hutner claims that ever since the Torah was given at Sinai, parts of it were forgotten from generation to generation. But God actually rejoices over this loss because in its wake, people attempt to restore the Torah which causes it to expand. How is it that forgetfulness causes an expansion of Torah? On the simplest level, the logical arguments through which we succeed in regaining the lost halakha is the Torah that is reproduced.

We learn from here a wonderful novel idea that it is possible for the Torah to grow in consequence of it being forgotten to the extent that it is possible to receive congratulations for forgetting Torah. See that the Sages state that three hundred halakhot were forgotten in the days of mourning for Moses, but were restored by Otniel ben Kenaz through his casuistry. The logical arguments and the restoration of halakhot, these are the words of Torah that expand only through the forgetting of Torah.[22]

Moreover, in radical way, the pilpul (logical argumentation) causes the creation of totally new halakhic positions. It is possible that the Sages did not “succeed” in their attempt to discover the original halakha that was since forgotten. We see that there are arguments regarding the correct halakha, and this indicates multiple reconstructions of the halakha by various Sages. This point is expressed in the ability of a rabbinic court to rely on a minority opinion that was rejected in the past and rule accordingly, a fact that indicates its legitimacy:

The even bigger novel insight that flows from this understanding is that Oral Torah’s extraordinary strength is more evident in cases of difference of opinion than in cases of unanimity. For embedded within the statement “these and those are the words of the living God” is the principle that even an opinion that was rejected by halakha is a legitimate Torah opinion.

…And if a latter vote is taken and they decide to accept the previously rejected opinion, from then on, the halakha genuinely changes.[23]

What is the content of those halakhot that were regenerated in the wake of forgetfulness, and what is the relationship between them and the original, forgotten halakhot? Rav Hutner suggests that “new Torah values” that may even be contrary to the original values are created.

The war of Torah (the creation of disputed positions) is not simply another characteristic of Torah study. Rather the war of Torah is a positive creation of new Torah values that would not otherwise be found in the words of Torah themselves.

The advantage of forgetfulness is the creation of new opinions that would not have been created otherwise. When the sages of Torah accept an opinion that was rejected in the past, it becomes the halakhic precedent. In extreme circumstances it is possible that a halakha will be accepted that expresses the very opposite of the original halakha, and nevertheless, it will become the true and accepted halakha. This process is not a negative one, but on the contrary, it receives God’s approbation who declares, “Yasher Koach (congratulations) that you broke them.” It seems that Rav Hutner understood how radical his words were, and therefore he emphasized:

The approach rejected from Halakha remains a legitimate Torah opinion, as long as it is said within the boundaries of the discourse of the Oral Torah.[24]

It is possible to understand the forgetting that Rav Hutner speaks of in a straightforward fashion—that in the past we knew what to do in a particular situation, but today we don't anymore. Yet it seems clear that Rav Hutner refers to not only the forgetting of technical halakhic details, but also to a more essential forgetting. Throughout the article, he claims that forgetfulness is an ongoing phenomenon of the Oral Torah and continues even after the writing of the Oral Torah that ostensibly prevents technical forgetfulness. Therefore we need to expand the notion of forgetfulness to include situations in which the reality has changed and we find it difficult to apply the previous halakhic precedent as it stands. A hint to this idea can be found in his quotation from Nachmanides where he says that “it is known that not all minds will be in agreement over how to address new situations.”[25] According to Nachmanides, halakhic disputes are the result of attempts by imperfect sages to apply the divine Torah to new realities.

Rav Hutner speaks about forgetfulness in its usual sense, but he is also referring to something similar to, yet beyond forgetting—that is the quandary that we experience when upon first glance we do not know how to apply the halakha in a given reality. He calls it “darkness-forgetfulness,” where the darkness is a type of confusion: when we don't know what to do; we feel as if we are standing in the dark.

It is from this perspective of forgetting that one should understand the reconstruction of lost halakha. This is a process in which the posek tries to apply anew the halakha to reality. He tries to compare the situation at hand to a myriad of sources, to innovate out of those sources and thereby resolve the difficulty. The halakhic sources reach us through a long tradition, whose origin can be traced to the acceptance of the Torah at Sinai and afterwards through the cycles of forgetfulness and restoration of these sources. The posek continues to engage in a conversation with the sources, through which he formulates his new ruling. These rulings are the essential and main benefits of forgetfulness that forces the posek to create and innovate.

What is the deeper significance of a conversation with things that were revealed at Sinai and what is the importance of entering into this conversation? To understand this point we will return to essay number one and to the “secret fundemental” that still needs to be uncovered.

I suggested as a solution to the puzzle of essay 1 that the foundation (or “secret”) of the Oral Torah is the dialogue and give and take that the posek establishes between the present situation and past sources. This process is like a tug-of-war between the posek and those sources. The Aramaic words shakla vetarya, translated as give-and-take, are the talmudic terminology for this process of matching the sources to the reality. This same phrase is also used as the term for bargaining. There is a process of bargaining between the human needs on the one hand and the authority of the sources on the other. Sometimes we submit before the authority of the source, but other times we reinterpret a source so that our conclusion will fit with the given reality. In essay 3, Rav Hutner emphasizes over and again the “battle of Torah,” and it seems that he is referring specifically to the talmudic dialogue, of which an essential part is argument and constant debate.

This grand conversation predates the giving of the Torah and it is, in essence, the ethos that our forefathers bequeathed to us for all future generations. The Patriarchs engaged in dialogue with God Himself for the welfare of His creations. An outstanding example of this is the conversation between Abraham and God before the destruction of Sodom. The interchange between Abraham and God could very well be described as bargaining; while God suggests he will utterly destroy Sodom, Abraham bargains suggesting that God should save the city if 50, then 45, then 40, etc., righteous individuals can be found. We can say that Abraham may have been the first to engage in “shakla vetarya” with the divine word. Perhaps this is an indication of the aspect of Oral Torah that predates its giving that Rav Hutner was referring to. But it is not just Abraham who looks to engage God in dialogue. It seems that God is anticipating and encouraging just this type of engagement. God asks, “Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am about to do?”[26] He continues, “for I have come to know him because he will instruct his sons and household after him to guard the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice.”[27] From a simple reading of the text it seems that God expected Abraham to argue with Him. God revealed His plan to Abraham specifically because He knew that Abraham instructs his household to do “righteousness and justice” and thus will not let Him destroy Sodom. So in addition to the ethos that Abraham creates when he stands before God in argument, God too creates this ethos and expects it from Abraham.

Like our Patriarchs, we, in every generation, stand before the formal commandment of God and adopt the ethos of dialogue in the story of Sodom, a dialogue that seeks the welfare of humanity. We stand before the divine commandment and declare that it is up to us to try to interpret it in a way that is attentive to reality and human adversity. It is incumbent upon us to engage in this give and take for the welfare of all creatures. God encourages this dialogue. Through the story of Sodom, God explains to us how to accept His Torah.[28]

This intimate conversation that is maintained between Israel and God is the unique aspect of the Oral Torah. Its uniqueness stems from its intimacy—there is much love and intimacy in true debate.[29] The acceptance of the Torah is indeed absolute, a complete commitment. Yet at the same time, it is like a student’s acceptance of his teacher’s wisdom. The student poses difficult questions, engages in a give and take that creates an intimate relationship.

In other words, when a posek tries to restore what was at Sinai, he tries to restore what should have been. Sometimes he’s not quite sure what was said at Sinai and stands bewildered by the simple application of the words that were said to the given reality. But he knows what should have been said at Sinai based on the principle of “to guard the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice.” Indeed, this principle speaks of interpersonal commandments; yet it is also applicable to commandments between humans and God.[30]

Halakha is an attempt to make a better world of human relations and the relations between God and humanity. Were we to try to create such a world from whole cloth, we would lose out on two accounts: first we would lose the intensity of the ethical activity and the religious adherence that stems from halakhic commitment; additionally, we would lose out on the intimacy of the dialogue with God. This dialogue is also a conversation with all those who previously engaged God in conversation. A chain of generations is in dialogue with the divine command as we attempt to apply it to reality—each generation with its own circumstances—in the best way possible.

This conversation is important, not for that sake of the debate itself, but for the attainment of love through dialogue and exchange. The joy in a shared creation is what brings love. The deep meaning of learning Torah is the conversation with God. Sometimes this conversation is not direct, but through the Torah of one who dealt with an issue in a previous generation. Nevertheless, through this conversation we feel an intimacy with God in all of His glory. The result of this intimacy is a halakha that fits the reality, is attentive, and desires to “guard the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice.”

Against the polar opposite approaches of Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook—a completely heavenly halakha or a halakha that is a wholly human creation—we can view the approach of Rav Hutner as the “middle road” that creates a dialogue between the approaches, between heaven and earth, in order to find the best way to maintain the divine command in the current reality.

An Orthodox colleague recently created a controversy after writing a blog post explaining why he no longer recites the blessing shelo asani isha - thanking God for not creating him as a woman. Several Orthodox rabbis criticized this position for various reasons with one even questioning the author's right to call himself "Orthodox," ostensibly for deviating from the traditional liturgy through his omission. In the grand scheme of Orthodox Jewish history this rabbi's personal choice is relatively trivial. However, in the subsequent squabbling over one rabbi's legitimacy, the Orthodox rabbinate inadvertently exposes the inherent cognitive dissonance prevalent in the contemporary Orthodox community.

Contemporary Orthodox Judaism tends to resist innovation and change as a matter of principle. Preserving the authentic tradition is the highest priority, especially when faced with potentially corrupting external influences. For just one example, when confronted with the question of mixed seating in the synagogues, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik exhorted the Rabbinical Council of America to "be ready to fight for an undiluted Halachah which is often not in the vogue."¹ The problem of course is that Jewish history is replete with exactly such instances when common Jewish practice has changed, either through adapting existing practice or introducing new innovations.

Consider one such example from the liturgy. In the section of morning blessings, the same part of the service which includes shelo asani isha - virtually all sidduim contain the blessing ha-notein la'ya'ef koach - blessing God for giving strength to the weak. R. Yosef Karo (1488-1575) opposed not only the recitation of this blessing (O.H. 46:6), but the legitimacy of its very existence stating, "since it is not mentioned in the Talmud, I do not know how this person had permission to create it" (Beit Yosef O.H. 46:6). The difference between omitting a blessing and reciting an unauthorized one is substantial; in the former one only does not fulfill a rabbinic obligation (T. Berachot 6:18) but in the latter instance one violates a biblical prohibition of taking God's name in vain (Shemot 20:6, B. Berachot 33a). And yet for contemporary Judaism, one such liturgical change is accepted if not required, while the other is deemed unorthodox.

The methods of how Orthodox Judaism selectively incorporates or rejects changes is beyond the scope of this essay. However, there is a more fundamental question which can be extremely uncomfortable for most traditional Orthodox Jews: are the boundaries and definitions for acceptable Orthodox Judaism objective or subjective? Based on the sanctimony emanating from Orthodox Judaism it would be reasonable to assume the former. But if there are objective criteria for Orthodox Judaism, then this criteria must not only be defined and defended explicitly, but more importantly applied consistently to every instance. This would mean that even well established "traditional" opinions or rabbis who violate this criteria would have to be held accountable to this standard, and perhaps be reconsidered as beyond the scope of Orthodox Judaism.

On the other hand, if the criteria for Orthodox Judaism is subjective, meaning it is a floating target meant to include or exclude as a need arises, then Orthodox Judaism is as arbitrary as the other denominations which they criticize. Despite the rhetoric of preserving Torah, if the criteria is subjective, then Orthodox Judaism is so only because its adherents say so.

To paraphrase John Adams, the question which Orthodox Jews must inevitably confront is if it is a religion of laws or of men. If the former, then the laws must be applied universally to exclude that which violates it and to accept that which falls within its range of acceptability, regardless of a an individual's stature or affiliation. But if Orthodox Judaism is primarily defined by its community, then the arbitrariness would be justified, albeit at the expense of its alleged adherence to being shomerei Torah.

This question must be addressed by anyone who ventures into the debate as to what qualifies as "Orthodox Judaism." But from my own experience I have found that the Law provides its own answer and the Men provide theirs.

1. Soloveitchik, Joseph B. "Message to a Rabbinic Convention." The Sanctity of the Synagogue The Case for Mechitzah: Separation Between Men and Women in the Synagogue Ed. Baruch Litvin Ktav 1987. p. 109