by Peter Gimpel

Concerning Art and Religion, No. 9, by Junko Chodos. To see more, click on the picture above.

Are there “sacred values” capable of dissolving the borders between art and religion?

That question pulsed at the heart of the recent Art and Religion Symposium organized by the Foundation for Centripetal Art and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.

Rafael Chodos, the foundation’s director, opened the symposium with a riddle:

A group of people gather in a certain place, where they all focus on the same thing. Some of them are moved. All of them feel that their experience is important. They are all quiet and many of them seem to be looking inward. After the gathering has dispersed, one or two of them come back to that place alone and weep. Where did this gathering take place? In a theatre, a concert hall, an art gallery or museum, or in a place of worship?

According to Rafael, all we can tell from the above scenario is that

the gathering took place in or created a space of shared imagination. The ones who go back alone, like Hannah, who prayed in solitude, or like the art lover who stands before a particular painting and weeps, remind us that there are unique questions to be considered about the relationship between the individual and the group and the group’s most sacred values.

What are these “sacred values”? The subject is deep.

The first to venture into these mysterious waters and part them was UCLA Hillel Director Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who proposed to contrast the Second Commandment’s prohibition, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex. 20:4) with the lively involvement of Jews with visual arts, as attested by Biblical descriptions of the Mishkan (the Holy Tabernacle that travelled with the Jews in the Sinai), as well as by the Dura Synagogue paintings and our unabashed tradition of illuminated ketubot and megillot.

Rabbi Seidler-Feller is an engaging speaker and, perhaps wisely, avoided losing us in talmudic expositions. However, he may have left the largely secular audience with a mistaken impression that Jewish visual arts were by definition a violation of the Second Commandment or that they were the product of an “alternative Judaism.”

Actually, Torah permits artistic expression by means of painting, weaving, and even carving (not in the round but in bas relief) for the beautification of the Mitzvot and within parameters well defined by Halachah. As Rabbi Seidler-Feller pointed out, citing Tehillim (Psalms) 29:2 (“Give to Hashem the glory due to His name; worship Hashem in the beauty of holiness”), Jews believe in the beauty of holiness, rather than the holiness of beauty.

The Dura paintings, however, present a separate problem because of their extensive use of symbols borrowed from pagan tradition. We must wonder, for example, with E.R. Goodenough in his monumental work, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, that in the Dura Synagogue,

the god Ares . . . could supervise the Exodus from Egypt, Victories bring their crowns on the acroteria of the Temple, and the three Nymphs guard the infant Moses while Aphrodite-Anahita takes him out of the little ark.

Concerning Art and Religion, No. 5, by Junko Chodos. To view more of her artwork, click on the picture above.

This question has been the subject of much scholarly discussion of a complex historical, archeological, and hermeneutical nature and thus tends to distract from the immediate matter at hand: why should artistic creation be subject to any halachic limitations at all? Here Rabbi Seidler-Feller offered a beautiful answer from Rabbi A.J. Heschel: “God’s image is you!” In other words, our duty is to perfect ourselves, and no other image is worthy of the labor required to realize that goal!

Jack Miles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, is a Jesuit by training and an Episcopalian by persuasion, but responds to a question like any Jew – with more questions. Thus, in answer to Rafael’s opening riddle, Dr. Miles posed a series of deceptively facile queries: Can you be religious and not know it? Can people be spiritual without religion? Can people find religious fulfillment through art? Can they find esthetic fulfillment in religion? And by what features are we to distinguish between non-fiction (chronicle) and fiction (parable) in the Bible?

The one question he did venture to answer was, “why would anyone – including the Priests of the Mishkan and Holy Temple – offer sacrifices on an altar?” And his answer was clearly offered in the context of Rafael’s quest for the meaning of art: “burning a sheep or a heifer on the Mizbeyach, or pouring out a libation of good wine makes no sense unless you imagine that it is going up to G-d.”

Japanese-born artist Junko Chodos, an imposing advocate for humanity whose series of paintings, Concerning Art and Religion, were displayed in the adjoining Dortort Gallery as part of the symposium, was the last to speak. A survivor of the devastation of Japan by deadly waves of American bomber planes, Junko has devoted her life and her art to transforming and transcending what others most commonly strive to forget. Her work inspires wonder, terror, tenderness, repentance, a poignant awareness of the magnitude of human suffering, and above all, a haunting sense of impending Truth.

Her paintings — some of them many times larger than Junko — confront the viewer with questions often beginning with “why on earth did she paint that?” They are not objects to be viewed, but doorways to one’s own soul and to the soul of the universe. For that reason, they frighten and make one weep and long to give and receive solace. Clearly, they were the inspiration for Rafael’s opening question: What is this art? And what is this encounter with the spirit it inspires?

Mass Killing, No. 4, by Junko Chodos.

Reading from her essay, “Image and Revelation,” Junko told how her desperate clinging to sanity during childhood years of horror and fear merged with her evolving poetics of art-as-revelation, of art as an intimately laborious dialogue between artist, viewer, and “visitant” – a term she uses for a castaway relic that somehow captures and holds her attention because of its inner vitality. This encounter with the at-first-glance inanimate but secretly alive detritus of a self-destructive humanity is often enriched by an equally convulsive encounter with oracular visions that Junko “sees” as if displayed on “celestial curtains.” Thus, Junko’s works contain something beyond the visual or surface truth to which contemporary art so often pays exclusive homage. It is the concealed but alluring state of this deeper truth that draws the viewer into the encounter – not as passive spectator, but as a vitally engaged participant in the central process of creation itself. Because of this process of drawing-in-towards-the-center, Junko characterizes her art as “centripetal.”

Thus, for Junko, art is religious insofar as it strips the incidental and superficial trappings of doctrine, ideology, agenda, and common association from artist, viewer, and “visitant” alike, unifying all three components into a vibrantly dynamic whole.

Whether or not others would agree with Junko’s formulation of the artistic experience, it is clear that she is calling for a revitalization of art as a force of spiritual rebirth and growth – an art that not only creates images, but restores the soul; not only expresses what is in the heart, but changes the heart itself.

It is precisely here that we, as Jews, need to beware of confusing art with religion. For, as we are reminded by Anthony Burgess’s bitter novella, Clockwork Orange, or by ghastly newsreels of Nazi leaders attending a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one can be moved and even inspired by great art – only to revert, minutes later, to a state of inhuman degradation.

For a Jew, at any rate, there need be no overlap or ambiguity between art and religion: the observance of the Mitzvot and the daily regime of prayer and Torah study strengthen our faith and self-mastery, guide our steps in the path of righteousness, sensitize us to the needs of others, clarify our thinking, and refine our character and judgment.

None of this requires or depends on experiencing moments of profound ecstasy or inspired insight – as desirable as such moments might be – for otherwise the vast majority of us would perhaps be excluded from religious observance!

And yet, great art does compel us to compare that which is mediocre or wanting within ourselves with the pinnacles of creative achievement. Such confrontation can be a shaming moment that brings us to repent of our failings and resolve to “do Teshuvah” – to change for the better. Perhaps that is the very point that Rafael had in mind when he postulated a mysterious “space of shared imagination,” to which, when all other participants have gone home, “one or two come back alone and weep.”

Rilke wrote one of his most beautiful sonnets on that moment of shattering insight, and it might not be inappropriate to conclude this review with an English rendering I did many years ago (published under the title “Torso” in my selected poems, Twilight with Halfmoon Rising):

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We were not liege to know the astounding head
in which his apple eyes grew ripe and round;
but in his torso soft lights still abound,
holding gleams of his aspect – dimmed, not dead.

Else could the ship’s prow of his chest not blind,
and in the faint curve of his gentle loins
a smile not linger where it softly joins
the memory of procreant mankind.

Else would this stand mere stone, deformed and halt
beneath the ruin of an ethereal shoulder,
and not glisten so, like a wild beast’s pelt,

nor burst from every surface with its rays
like a star. No part but lays bare the beholder,
you cannot hide: you have to change your ways.