Midrash and Postmodernity
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Art After the Holocaust
Over the past decade, midrash has become something of a cultural phenomenon. No longer confined to synagogues and academies, talk about midrash is now heard in the daily conversations of secular Jews, used in multiple contexts to speak about everything from the latest scandal to what is going on in the synagogue. Some gossip is spread or something sensational happens and someone comments, “Here’s the midrash on that.” Sometimes the term itself is reduced from midrash to “drash,” and an ancient biblical practice is made hipper, more colloquial and accessible: midrash meets the modern world, suddenly liberated from biblical texts, flying alone without the inspiration of rabbis.
There is something dynamic about the idea of midrash—a manner of telling a story that evokes a desire to locate ourselves within a particular rabbinic tradition and simultaneously to witness that tradition transformed into something significant to our contemporary lives. In everyday life and popular culture, midrash has become an increasingly popular way of telling a story, driven by a tendency to piece bits of information together and fill in the gaps that exist naturally in all stories—whether they start out as biblical tales or end up as modern morality plays.
Midrashic thinking, now operating outside the boundaries of shuls and classrooms, began in the academy and evolved through three primary stages of development. The first centered in Jewish Studies departments with the study of classical rabbinic texts written after the fall of the Second Temple in an effort to extend the text of Torah to the world. The common understanding of midrash in this context is that it is a story told in response to a gap, wound, or tear in the text—what Sandor Goodhart calls a “material extension” of the particular text. Midrash, in other words, is not something that exists outside of the text; rather, it expands the original text, deepening it, filling it out, adding complexity and comprehension.
The second stage of midrashic thinking, between the 1970s and 1990s, was led by Jewish feminists, typically working in academic contexts, to reclaim sacred texts by restoring voices to otherwise muted biblical women. Examples of this include everything from mainstream novels such as Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent to more philosophical projects such as Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s The Nakedness of the Fathers.
The third manifestation of midrash, and the one I am offering as a new theory of criticism, is a theoretical approach to reading and writing texts, an interpretative mode derived from the very ways in which early rabbinic thinkers aggressively questioned sacred texts and generated layers of commentary. In its interpretive mode, midrash is used to infer the meaning of any text. This versatility of midrash is like manna for a new form of literary criticism and analysis, malleable in both the creation and comprehension of artistic expression. Both the artist and critic can deploy midrashic techniques in creating art, and understanding the multiple layers of that art—Jewish or otherwise, textual and even visual.
Post-Holocaust artists in particular use midrashic techniques to create new work from central cultural texts that have been ravaged and torn by the twentieth century’s crisis of faith. For example, the title of E. L. Doctorow’s City of God implicitly invokes Augustine’s work by the same title, yet allusions to the medieval text are almost conspicuously absent from Doctorow’s ouevre. Instead of the iconic work of a God whose ways can be known, Doctorow gives us a fragmented, multi-voiced, Holocaust-inspired novel that bears little if any resemblance to any conventional piece of fiction. What we have instead is essentially an anti-novel, one that speaks ambivalently about religion yet arises out of a post-Holocaust theological consciousness.
Likewise, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part, midrashically constructed film series, The Decalogue, appears to be a film about the Ten Commandments, but it is not. Similarly, at first glance, the midrashic paintings of Samuel Bak often resemble the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali. Yet Bak isn’t really interested in surrealism, but in something larger. What these three artists have in common is not just the ambiguous references to religion, but also the midrashic impulse to respond to the gaps of torn texts and slashed canvases that mirror the deeper, more irreparable tears that have already defaced this world.
Traditional midrash, as a genre, does what neither literature nor commentary can do alone. It reveals what is already hidden in the biblical text through the creation of new voices and narratives. Similarly, as a technique, the midrashic mode allows artists to respond to silences—cultural, religious, historical, literary—to reveal the contemporary meaning contained within them, but intentionally buried and blurred. Doctorow, responding to a post-Holocaust inscrutability of God and religion, uses fiction to explore the shortcomings of a silent God and an inadequate theology. But he confronts readers’ expectations by collapsing religious and aesthetic structures into an amalgamation of narrative voices. Yet the novel brilliantly evokes what it means to live, to breathe, to love, to hurt, to ponder, and to worship in a post-Holocaust era. Doctorow surreptitiously adopts the midrashic mode, but overtly refers to midrash, although only obliquely, such as in the book’s Midrash Jazz Quartet, whose midrashic lyrics are slyly scattered throughout the novel.
City of God invites diverse interpretations, compelling the reader to fill in narrative gaps. We are reminded that without continuous re-invention and re-interpretation, texts cease to be living testaments. In City of God, nothing is fixed or stable; everything has come undone and turned inside out—is transitory and without closure. Its characters—a female Reconstructionist rabbi, an Episcopalian minister, and a journalist—are spiritual drifters who investigate the meaning of a stolen cross that reappears on top of a synagogue. The crumbling of faith and religion collides head-on with the disintegration of language that renders communication impossible in a post-Holocaust world. The message seems to be that modern and postmodern writing is futile when it attempts to represent the un-representable. Instead, we must turn to the midrashic mode in order to fill in the most pervasive ellipses of our time: how to live in a world shattered by tragedy, and how to locate and articulate meaning, both spiritual and otherwise, in a world from which it seems God has hidden his face.
Doubt becomes the only thing that humanity can depend on. Yet doubt, which forces inquiry, is precisely what brings us closer to a more profound understanding of what God is. It is what we do in the space of doubt—the ongoing process of responding to doubt—that is important, and not the zero-sum result of our inquiries and confusions. This is not unlike the idea that the messiah, as we have heard it, will come only when he is no longer necessary. The significance of the messiah’s arrival is in our anticipation of it, of how we prepare for it, rather than in the arrival itself. It is in the space of living without a messiah—a messianic gap—that the potential for redemption is born.
It is not surprising, then, that theological uncertainty, spiritual discontent, and torn relationships guide the trajectory of the novel. Disrupted by death and divorce, marriages, for instance, become incomplete texts inhabited by deficient, unsatisfied, and tormented people. One character struggles to retrace the steps of a Holocaust survivor, aching to fill the void created by his death. But even as they use language to demystify their traumas, each character within the novel also realizes that faith and language have fallen short, and that a renewed understanding of faith and religion—one that is less fixed and more fluid—as well as of the language we use to articulate it, is necessary.
While the midrashic mode is particularly evident in contemporary fiction, it is equally identifiable, though more subtly, in visual media. Krzysztof Kieslowski, in The Decalogue, examines the distinction between the moral and the ethical in the context of the Ten Commandments, extending the notion of what it means to follow commandments in the modern world—in this case, the contemporary era of 1980s Warsaw. As the site of the ultimate embodiment of torn and mutilated ethical relationships, Poland is both the likeliest and unlikeliest of settings for a film about ethical responsibility.
Each segment of The Decalogue explores one commandment by juxtaposing each law with its larger ethical ramifications. Midrashic on many levels, The Decalogue responds to those who view the commandments as sharply delineated moral proscriptions, and collapses them into one ethical imperative: Love your neighbor. The film forces the viewer to re-think the commandments in ethical terms rather than with the historical tendency to insist on literal interpretations. For instance, devotion to “the law” can lead to greater ethical transgressions. Kieslowski is reading the Ten Commandments midrashically by questioning their meaning and significance, identifying their gaps and ambiguities, and responding to them with contemporary narratives that extend—rather than re-write—the original premise and promise of the commandments.
Much in the same way that Doctorow undermines aesthetic conventions and plays with readers’ expectations of a novel and what constitutes religion in a post-Holocaust world, Kieslowski toys with our assumptions about the Ten Commandments and what a film that explores them should look like. Kieslowski’s purpose is not to praise or condemn certain actions, but to investigate the unknown—to engage in a process of ethical and spiritual inquiry that ultimately raises more questions than provides answers. In other words, the commandments themselves are not to be worshipped; we should not become idolatrous in our keeping of them. They are not a list of stringent, undeviating standards that supercede human relationships. Kieslowski’s method of exploring the ambiguities of the commandments is not unlike the rabbinic mode of inquiry—the relentless questioning of sacred texts in a singsong, “if-then-but” manner of understanding our world and our places in it.
The eighth Decalogue, for instance, presumably investigates the Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. In the film, a young woman visits the classroom of an ethics professor and relates the story of a Polish woman who, during the Holocaust, retracts her promise to hide a certain Jewish child and provide her with a certificate of christening. The Polish woman, a Catholic, invokes the Eighth Commandment as an excuse for her moral failure: In order to save the child, she would have to bear false witness. Clearly, she has either misread the commandment or cynically misapplied it in order to justify her indifference. For the commandment clearly states that one should not bear false witness against thy neighbor. By interpreting the commandment as a warning not against harming one’s relationship with human beings, but against bearing false witness before God—even if it costs a human life—she has violated the larger ethical component of a specific moral proscription. In this, she transgresses against not only her neighbor but against God as well.
It turns out that the ethics professor is the Polish woman who refused to hide the child, and she is confronted in her own classroom by the child, now grown, to whom she had offered a death sentence by refusing to rescue her. The message seems clear, but at the precise moment we think we have interpreted the “moral” of the story—that privileging a commandment over the life of a child is a greater transgression than the violation of the commandment itself—Kieslowski, always resistant to absolutist moral and ethical judgments, spins the narrative in a new direction. And so here we learn that the ethics professor’s original justification for refusing to hide the child was, in fact, a cover. She had been told that hiding the child would have destroyed their resistance organization, and that more lives would have been lost as a result.
Torah abounds with stories that depict multiple misinterpretations of commandments and covenants, narratives in which people try to honor one rule but in doing so end up violating a more important one. And much like Torah, The Decalogue breaks boundaries and obscures them in an effort to raise theological questions. The ethics classroom in Decalogue 8 becomes the site of a modern-day Talmudic discussion as students grapple with impossible ethical situations. In a world in which religious and aesthetic imperatives have collapsed and faith is in flux, Kieslowski’s approach is a curious return to rabbinic thinking, an example of what the Talmud might look like were it re-created in a post-Holocaust consciousness.
It is in this post-Holocaust, postmodern age that the convergence of art and midrashic thinking is especially pronounced. But the midrashic mode is not simply one more facet of postmodernism. It is a return to an interpretive mode that predates postmodernism by centuries. In the work of Samuel Bak, post-Holocaust painter and survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, we see, literally, a midrashic response to the Holocaust. He often uses explicit biblical and religious imagery—Abraham and Isaac, stone tablets, Stars of David, angels with broken wings. Poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker has recently written about his dream paintings as contemporary midrash, noting his tendency to merge biblical images with images of the Holocaust—chimneys, yellow stars, torn tefillim. But his work goes far beyond surrealist depictions of biblical tales. The images that dominate Bak's artistic landscapes are fragmented and laden with exquisite gaps and heavy silences that are, ironically, evocative of repair and movement toward wholeness. Nevertheless, they evoke the potential for repair only by journeying back through the brokenness and decay that was bestowed on our world through the Holocaust.
Bak’s seemingly realistic images are permeated with multiple symbolic layers that undulate toward cohesiveness and restoration. He is uniquely adept at drawing our attention to the most pervasive silences of our time, and his work is truly midrashic in that it does not presume to fill gaps, only to respond to them, often through rendering new gaps and posing of new questions. Ponar, a charcoal drawing on paper, metaphorically depicts the killing site near Vilna through the image of a barren and desolate landscape impaled not with a trench filled with corpses, but with a vast ditch in the shape of a Star of David. A scar on the land, this deep chasm connotes the emptiness that remains from so much collective Jewish loss and the eradication of its culture. Ghetto, one of Bak’s Holocaust paintings, depicts a cracked stone landscape with a portion of what resides underneath—the ruins of a ghetto—revealed in the shape of a partial Star of David.
A literal excavation of history is depicted through the image of the stone slabs moved aside to reveal a voyage down into the abyss of the Holocaust. Most striking is that here Bak proposes a downward, rather than backward, journey, a call to look underneath the surface of what is readily apparent, what hides—but is nevertheless sharply present—in the cracks of our collective consciousness. We are reminded that the events of the Holocaust do not dwell in the distant past; they inhabit the present and underlie our understandings of art, theology, and human existence. The message of Bak’s midrashic work is not that the world can be made whole again. We know that it can’t. Yet he clearly advocates the possibility for renewal and the imperative of cultural memory. But that possibility, while hidden within a wasteland and scattered among artifacts of ruin, is nonetheless placed in our hands. Bak’s paintings allow us to resign ourselves neither to anguish nor optimism. Instead, they propel us into a space between interpretation and renewal. Bak extends the story of the Holocaust into our own era and reveals the ways in which this awful legacy colors his canvases and canvasses our lives, creating new voids to which we must respond in a visual demonstration of the midrashic mode.
By now we are all familiar with Theodor Adorno’s cautionary words that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric—that attempts to represent the Holocaust violate its memory. On moral and aesthetic grounds we can sympathize with this impulse, and many people recognize that he is, and was, indeed right. But despite such guardedness, this respect for the dead, we also know that it is necessary to remember. When it comes to representing the Holocaust, an abundance of caution can lead to indifference. If it can’t be represented in aesthetic terms, then it might end up being forgotten altogether. Midrash is the ultimate aesthetic loophole that allows artists to avoid running afoul of Adorno’s representational proscription because when midrash is applied to the Holocaust, it does more than simply seek to represent it. The midrashic mode begins with the awareness that what is being examined suffers from absences, silences, voids—tears in the very fabric of Jewish history. The Holocaust is un-representable, but it has also lodged itself in our collective consciousness and overshadowed the possibility for artistic expression. Thus, we are caught in the twilight between Adorno’s decree and the moral imperative of memory. The midrashic mode, as a method of reading and constructing texts, allows us to break away from what Adorno saw as the tension between aesthetics and the ethical that renders representational modes inadequate.
The purpose of this essay has been to introduce a new form of critical thinking, derived from ancient rabbinic sources, but increasingly present in contemporary art. It just so happens that what I have identified is also a necessary recognition by both the artist and critic that we live in a world in which silences are becoming deafening—a world in which we are surrounded and overwhelmed by an excess of terror. What, we ask, is the artist to do, and how is the critic to understand it?
It is in this context that the midrashic impulse is summoned to help give voice to our collective longing for repair. It is conjured, like a golem, from the ruins of atrocity, resurrected to rescue humanity from inhumane acts that are incomprehensible and yet require explanations. The fact that there are gaps and tears is not an excuse to leave them un-mended. Through the coalescence of art and midrash, we learn how to express ambivalence about our shattered world and to recreate a damaged theology. We re-read history, texts, and culture only from moments of violence that force us to return and interpret from the moment of disaster, and in every text we discover the potential for reinterpretation and response.
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