Jonathan Sacks on Jewish Art
April 5th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Zak Safra of parsha thoughts posts a transcript from a lecture by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Torah from Heaven. The transcript may not be accurate, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Jonathan Sacks:
So you have, in other words, two kinds of culture. You have the culture of sight. You have a culture of sound. You have a culture in which the central intellectual act is seeing - the Greek theoria means ’seeing’. Theory is something you see. Or the Latin - idea. You know how you go - round the corner from you is a video shop? The word ‘video’ - the ‘v’ is a soft consonant which gets dropped. It comes from the same word as ‘idea’. And idea is something you see. Greek culture is a sight-oriented culture. Judaism is the paradigm of a ear-oriented culture in which the primary act is not seeing but listening.
Now what does a visual culture produce? [Interjection from audience: “Statues and … ” - inaudible] Statues. Paintings. Architecture. Sculpture - and spectator sports. The most dignified of which (I daren’t say anything about football because my team always lose whenever I do.) - but theatre. Theatre. Drama. In other words, those are the visual arts and of all of those, in every department, Greek culture reached a pinnacle that has rarely if ever been surpassed. They were the greatness of Greek culture.
In Judaism, where’s the art? Where’s the architecture? Where are the paintings? Where’s the drama, the theatre? There isn’t any. And this is fascinating because this shows us that Judaism is a culture not of the eye but of the ear. And it is not just, as you might think, because the third commandment prohibits the making of graven images. It is not just that. It goes much further. It goes into the very texture of biblical narrative.
Let me ask you a question. What did Abraham look like? Anyone know? Tall? Short? Fat? Red hair? What did Moshe Rabbenu look like? We haven’t got a clue!
You know that, as Eric Auerbach pointed out in a very famous essay he wrote called “Odysseus’s Scar” which is in his book called “Mimesis”. Homer is full of vivid descriptions of the surfaces of things. You see, when you read Homer.
But when you read Tenach, you don’t see anything very much. The text is what he calls “fraught with background”. Anything interesting is left out of the text and you have to supply it from your own imagination. The Jewish text, the biblical text, is fraught with background. Or let me give you a different point. In other words, the prohibition against graven images even applies to visual descriptions in Tenach. You never get a description of somebody unless it is strictly necessary for the narrative. When do you need to know that somebody is beautiful? When somebody might threaten to take his wife and kill him - or to explain how come they fell in love at first sight. So we discover that Sarah was beautiful; that Rivka was gemilut chassidim; that Rachel was beautiful. But beyond that, ‘beautiful’? What does that tell you? We still don’t know what colour was her hair.
In the “Sunday Times” this week, apparently Cleopatra was short, fat and ugly but she was seductive anyway. One way and another, Jewish culture is so non-visual that we don’t know what anyone looks like. Walter J. Ong - who is not a person you may have read but who has written some wonderful books: one called “Orality and Literacy”; another even better called “The Presence of the Word” - points out that sight deals in surfaces whereas sound deals, at the literal and metaphorical sense, with interiors.
Marcus Freed asks, “Chief Rabbi, your statement that there is no Jewish art, sculpture or drama,” Sacks interjects, “No, no. Sorry! - you have remedied that,” and Freed continues:
Apart from it being bad for business - I really just wanted to ask if it was exactly that straightforward, the distinction between Jewish culture and Greek culture, based on three main examples.
One: the extreme focus on visuality that is given in the Gemara Baba Metzia that talks about Rabbi Yochanan and asks the question about “What is male beauty?” - and it goes through different ideas of beautiful men culminating in Rabbi Yochanan’s story. Although it concludes that beautiful men have beards is, I think, the Gemara’s answer!
Then there is the whole area of festivals with the culmination of Purim spiels. And there is the mitzvah of menorah: the medhadrin min hamehadrin answer is the visual answer of eight lights rather than one. Or the aesthetics of the etrog. Or the aesthetics of the lulav, and so on.
Then, finally, the Gemara in Minocho where Eliyahu HaNavi [Elijah the Prophet] answers the question about who in the market place will gain a place in the olam haba [world to come] and it says that it is the ‘badchanim’, the jesters, who will gain redemption because they make people happy.
So, that is my question.
Sacks answers:
Listen! Of course, you are doing great stuff here. You’re doing the Jewish thing! Marcus, amongst his many talents, is a playwright and dramatist and actor-manager and all the rest of it. He also acts in lovely dramas which bring out ethical issues for the new Money and Morals curriculum. That’s it. Judaism is drama. But it is not drama on the stage. But now we are in a culture where we have to use that instrumentality and I am in favour of using all cultural instrumentalities. What I think Judaism misses most right now is a first-rate religious film director. A first-rate religious poet. You read Yehuda Amichai. You read Amos Oz’s latest book “The Same Sea”, which he gave me a couple of weeks ago. These great minds. How come we are not using them - as you are using them Marcus - to enhance our Jewish values? That is why I have entered into a dialogue with Amos Oz which will become a public dialogue in Israel in May and I would have loved to have had a dialogue with Yehuda Amichai, but he died first.
So, therefore, yes. But your ultimate point is so correct. It is the Gemara in Sanhedrin you were quoting that the ben olam haba is the person who cheers other people up. It is the comedian. It is the humorist. I cannot tell you how moving it was when last Wednesday I was addressing the 45 Group. That is Ben Helfgott’s group: Holocaust survivors. They wanted me to speak about my book “Celebrating Life” because it cheered them up.
Somebody got up and told me this story of how he had been in a concentration camp and how he had said to his friend throughout their years of surviving that it was humour that had kept them alive. I will one day give you a lecture on Jewish humour. But in the meanwhile that is only done by people with not a great sense of humour: Bergson and Freud being two very obvious examples! But humour, I think, has a spirituality all of its own. So, Marcus, I say: Use your many many wonderful talents to bring a Jewish presence to the arts. I will even give you “Certified under Chief Rabbinate supervision” [laughter] - not that it will do very much for you!
And I will finally end with your remark about beards! I don’t know if any of you remember the Gulf War? We were in Israel during the whole of the Gulf War and as the days were coming close, we got gas masks. Everyone had to have a cheder atum, a sealed room, and then put on one’s gas mask. We didn’t know until the 39th and final scud had landed whether any of them would contain chemical or biological weapons. The trouble was that a big announcement was put out on the radio, “If you have a beard, the gas mask doesn’t work!” So, what happens? The first siren sounds. The first scud missile lands. Everyone else, the kids and Elaine, are in the sealed room with their gas masks on - and I’m shaving off my beard! [Laughter]I have to tell you that it was the most wonderful thing - because it was terribly stressful: our kids were young at the time and it was a stressful experience. But as soon as we took off our gas masks, they all shrieked, “Mummy! Who’s that strange man here?!” And Elaine said, “Oh, how romantic! That’s the fellow I got engaged to!”
Anyway, the next morning I went out in the streets of Jerusalem to see what I assumed would be a unique sight, never seen in 4,000 years: Jerusalem without beards! Because, after all, the radio told everyone that if you had a beard you should shave it off! Do you think that they were all without beards? A nachtige tag! I was the only shlemiel in the whole of Yerushalayim who listened to instructions.