On Art, Technique and Critique:

This week’s perasha recounts the repeated (or continued) call to erect the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary built to house the ark and the sacred utensils, after the debacle of the golden calf episode. In previous weeks I have attempted to demonstrate that despite the grandeur and holiness of the endeavor, there within the edifice itself one can read a monument to the failure “built in” to the walls, so to speak. Holiness meant to be readily available and unmediated is now hidden behind walls, behind text, in every way distanced from totalizing accessability. This week, I would like to continue this approach by recognizing the same implicit distancing within the process itself of any artistic enterprise, the same dialectic of presencing and lack which typifies the aspect of technique in art.

This week, we are once again introduced to Betzalel son of Uri son of Hur, the master craftsman who is to design the actual construction of the Mishkan. The Talmud in Berachot 55: tells us that he had such great insight into construction that he understood the way the universe was created from its raw materials, the supernal letters (the logoi, if you wish). Many of the Hasidic commentators, for example, the Bet Yaakov, develop this idea into a sort of spiritual triumph, whereby this kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to draw Gd’s light into human activity, is attainable, and even the “vessels”, which are a lower, more material type of product, can be imbued with theurgic presence. The Ben Ish Hai in his Aderet Eliyahu presents this Gemara in this manner as well. However, as we will see, sheer technical ability, dazzling as it may appear, is not in itself always adequate to create meaning or “art”.

Things have a past and a present, but only Gd is pure presence….    A.J. Heschel, God in Search of Man pp 142

I’m proud to share with you all what is likely the “trippiest” piece I’ve ever written. In weeks past, we have discussed the inherent failure of artistic endeavor as perceived by contemporary theorists and earlier Hassidic masters. Every building, beautiful or sacred as it may be, is on the one hand subject to critique as a result of its being a “finished product”, and on the other hand, no matter how beautiful the edifice, it is also from some perspective also a barrier, a set of boundaries, a marked off perimeter. We have seen that in the Hassidic masters this problematic arises with regard to the  texts surrounding the Mishkan, the Temple, and identifies the barriers as being erected due to sin, specifically that of the golden calf. Thus, we have seen how what is at first glance considered to be the holiest and highest potential religious creation is reduced to a continuous reminder of our mistakes and failures. However, where we in contemporary culture enjoy contemplating pessimistic works of critique, is there no way to overcome the innate tragedy of human activity, what we may deem, the “Edifice complex”? The answer leads to some very surprising and “trippy” ideas about dwelling, reality, and time.

While novel ideas regarding contemporary theory are generally presented in the academic essay form, in the Hassidic tradition these issues are discussed as part of exegesis on the Torah text, usually involving creative readings of the Midrash and Talmud. Thus, as a general principle with regards to understanding this literature,  in order to reach the novel theological perspective in their writings, we must first confront a textual problem. This week’s Torah reading, which is centrally situated between the various repetitions of the various commands to construct the Mishkan, is built upon a strange order of passages . In summary, the portion of Ki Tissa contains a restatement of the command to construct all the sundry elements of the Mishkan, directed this time to the “architect”, Bezalel, and his team. After this, there is a command to keep the Sabbath, not specifically linked to the surrounding passages, and then the pivotal chapter containing the sin of the golden calf is narrated. Why is so central and lofty a concept as the Sabbath linked to the narrative of the golden calf?

No image of torture? I want to proceed as Raphael did and never paint another image of torture. There are enough sublime things so that one does not have to look for the sublime where it dwells in sisterly association with cruelty; and my ambition also could never find satisfaction if I became a sublime assistant at torture…. Nietzsche

Purim is an unusual holiday in the Jewish calendar in that as opposed to the solemnity of most holidays, it is one which phenomenologically appears as one of unbridled levity. Children and adults dress in costumes, one is meant to drink until “Blessed be Mordechai” is confused with “Cursed be the evil Haman”, a large meal is held which frequently was accompanied by itinerant comic and satirical theater performances. The message is that events in the world are not as they appear at first glance, even when it appears that all is lost, salvation is just around the corner, or lurking beneath the surface.

The story is told in the Book of Esther- an evil minister of the Persian king, Haman, attempts to get back at another courtier, Mordechai, who Haman feels has ‘dissed’ him. Instead of taking on Mordechai directly, he spends a lot of his own money bribing the king to wipe out Mordechai’s entire people, the people later to be known as the Jews. This decree is accepted by the Persian king, until it is revealed that his beloved Queen is also an MOT (member of the tribe, in Jewish campus slang), and instead the king hangs Haman and his clan, and give Mordechai a good government position. Hence the levity surrounding the holiday, and my presentation of it is in that spirit.

The Rabbis, however, while institutionalizing the rowdy nature of Purim, also recognized the darker aspects of the story. While in this particular instance the outcome was a favorable one, the mere possibility of a situation of mass murder of innocents is a terrifying one.

The world has seen some ugly battles fought recently over religion-related buildings. From the destruction of the Buddhist monastery at Bamiyan to the conflict over the so-called ground zero mosque, going back to Kristalnacht, the attempt at dehumanization of adherents to a religion frequently begins with a strike against the buildings associated with that faith. On the other hand, some of the most important architectural achievements of humanity across the globe, from Wat Phra Khao to Notre Dame, are a result of spiritual ardor manifested in stone. It would appear that religious structures can provide solace or evoke resistance. What does the Jewish tradition teach us about the role of buildings in spiritual life?

We will see that from the very start, from the Torah text itself, a conflicted reading of the importance or challenge of religious buildings per se is presented. The Torah text provides very lengthy and detailed descriptions for the building of the Mishkan, the portable temple carried by the freed Israelites in their journey through the desert. These details, with instructions regarding the building of the temple walls, roof, altars, ark, and other items related to the sacrificial service, are spread out over five perashiyot (Torah sections, as divided for weekly communal reading). We will see that this organization of the text itself teaches rather surprising and profound lessons about the values of sacred space and its rituals.

“And these are the laws you shall place before them” (Shemot 21:1).

What legitimates a “law”? To this day the question of the steering and ordering of society by law is one which leads to violent protest and international conflagurations. One of the major anti-war issues today involves the legitimacy of unprovoked attacks by one sovereign domain over another. Is it legal by American law, does that trump international law? What does “legal” even mean? This question of ‘legality’ is closely tied to that of the legitimacy of the society itself. How far can you push in creating laws, or bending them, before society itself breaks?

This is an issue deep at the heart of interdenominational religious politics. The question of change in halacha, ‘law’ or minhag ‘custom’, such as the matter of women’s roles, for example generates rather extreme gut reactions in many people. I do not think the issue is necessarily that of this specific ruling or another per se; what is at stake is the question of legitimacy. How much change can a system tolerate before it is an alternative system altogether? On the other hand, from the perspective of the members of that society, up until what point will the individual tolerate “problematic” rulings before deciding to throw off the yoke of that legislature? When is it time to revolt and start a new society?

Any ordering of society requires the ground of legitimacy; legitimacy of the greater processes which in return leads to the internalized willingness by the citizens to surrender some degree of civil autonomy. The twentieth century has been bloodied by failed experiments in this area; the title of Habermas’ work on this subject, “Legitimation Crisis” (which we will cite from later) is an apt description of the situation of governance in many lands and in its relation to many parts of our lives. It is to this matter which we will turn this week, and we have an interesting test model, a society in formation, the people of Israel now out from under the exploitative yoke of Egypt, deterritorialized and reteritorializing under a new law, a new attempt at societal rebirth and regeneration.

I. Yitro’s Visit As Response:

This week’s reading is a momentous one, it contains the narrative of the revelation at Mt Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments, as described in the longer essay below. What is striking is that this week’s reading doesn’t begin with that crucial section, it actually begins with a family visit of Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro, and in fact, this central reading is not known in traditional circles as “Sinai” or “Giving of the Torah” but as Perashat Yitro, by the name of an outsider, described as a foreign Priest!

Even if the division of the weekly readings is viewed as accidental, still, why is this the section immediately preceding the central section of the Torah, in fact, some of the medieval commentators argue that the meeting with Yitro actually happened after Sinai. Thus placing Yitro’s visit ahead of the revelation of Sinai is meant to be intentional.

The Tiferet Shelomo sees this meeting with Yitro as a prologue to Sinai, in a Buddhist like teaching.  The Tiferet Shelomo explains that we must be like Yitro in the way we approach Torah.  Every day, we must approach our Torah study and observance as though this moment is the first time we are hearing Torah; we must eternal present ourself to study as though we were complete outsiders with no preconceptions, in a state of  humility and with an open mind.

It seems appropriate that sitting down and finally getting this particular shiur down on paper seemed like an impossible mission. Several times I fired up the computer and stared at the untitled document in front of me, jumped to the couch, came back, checked email, ate, and then tried again. For this shiur is about the near impossibility of writing, particularly original writing, specifically poetry.

I will attempt a presentation of the void that must be crossed, or split if you will, in order to create a new utterance, a phrase as of yet unheard, a new thought. I suspect that to many of the Hasidic thinkers I will cite, there is no difference between poetry and what they were endeavoring to say in their readings, other than a formal one. Hence, only because I am construing from my own experience, I can’t help but hope that in some sense there is human truth, perhaps ‘universal’ autobiography in these readings, as close that Hasidic masters came to revealing their own truth in creative struggle, a truth of one’s own that they sensed is also true for everyone, a description of how these masters grappled with their own need for, and fear of, their own creativity.

The old frog leaps

Into the silent pool

Splash!

-Basho

Everyone from childhood is familiar with the story line of the Ten Plagues. We are familiar with them from childhood because they are almost amusing. God smites the fierce Egyptian people not with Godzilla and King Kong, but with bugs, hail, and frogs. Frogs! At any rate, it is hard to envision just what kind of ‘plague’ throwing frogs around might be. Other than some minor damage to agriculture, they aren’t particularly pesky little fellas. So our goal is to discover what other meanings may be inherent in this plague of frogs.

Before thinking about the relationship between animals and plagues, perhaps it might be valuable to the relationship between animals and us, or the concept of animality, in general. The initial impulse would be to try find the Freudian frog, situate frog symbolism in some sort of psychoanalytic way. The frog would follow the the horse in the manner of Freud’s Little Hans case; the reaction of the child to the mistreatment and death of the horse would be understood as ‘really’ referring to underlying drives. Or the wolf, in the Wolfman case, which wasn’t about wolves at all but about castration. Thus we would have to find some neurotic process which could be adequately symbolized by a frog. In the classical psychoanalytic viewpoint, then, interpreting the frog would be interpreting some signified process or drive in man, but would have very little to do with the actual frog or ‘frogness’.

Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative reading in these cases. They argue that there is a more immediate relation to animality that is more than just a signifier for an unconscious drive. Here is their dissension from Freud:

‘The horses blinders are the father’s eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his moustache, its kicks are the parents’ ‘lovemaking’. Not one word about Hans’s relation to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a child to see the spectacle ‘a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse falls, a horse is whipped” Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural participations’

Deleuze and Guattari postulate that the relationship to animals is that of an ‘assemblage’, that is, a structuralist construct whereby aspects of animal behaviour are abstracted and incorporated into the individuals being. Their language is wonderful and thus hard to summarize, a summary would sound something like: the individual’s abstract machine (abstract here being a verb, that is, the person unconstructs the actual thing observed and takes from it certain structures and relations) reconstructing for themselves a Body Without Organs, these new behaviours would become lines of flight, deterritorializations. This appropriation they call the ‘becoming-animal’. When an actor barks like a dog, he is not metamorphosizing into a dog, or trying to, rather, he is taking on to himself an abstracted characteristic of dogs. This process is identical to other becomings, such as the ‘becoming-woman’. Images and stereotypes of what woman means are what are assumed by the individual who ‘becomes-woman’. Becoming woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it… The child does not become the adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just at the child is the becoming-young of every age…

This analysis leads in several interesting directions, for example, they point out that these becomings tend to be of minorities, there is less becoming-man than there is becoming-woman, or becoming-Black or becoming-Jew. These becomings, since they are by nature acts of reterritorialization, tend to relate to ‘minoritarian’ processes. Thus:

In the case of some terms, people might have doubts as to whether they’re names or descriptions; like “God”—does it describe God as the unique divine being or is it a name of God? (Saul A Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 27)

Our text seems to be preoccupied with names. Moshe (Moses) went to Pharoah as instructed, and instead of freeing the slave people, Pharoah makes their life even more miserable. Moshe complains to God about the suffering of the people and the failure of his mission, but God wants to talk about names. The text relates (Shemot 2:6):

And God spoke to Moshe, saying: I am ADNY. I have revealed myself to Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov as El Shaddai, but with the name ADNY I had not revealed myself to them.

Moshe wants to know how the people will be freed, and God answers with a seemingly irrelevant discourse on names. Why does it matter with which name revelation was conducted in the past? In attempting to find meaning in this emphasis upon ancient names, we will find ourselves confronting very contemporary issues regarding faith and science.

Even as we focus upon the centrality of names in the current verse, we can’t help noticing the preoccupation with names in the early part of the book of Shemot (Exodus). This book begins with an enumeration of the names of the tribes, then Moshe names his children, then Moshe is concerned in his first dialogue with God that the Israelites will ask of him what God’s name is, and here again, in this speech announcing the deliverance from Egypt, God begins by announcing a new previously undisclosed name. It is fitting, I suppose, that this book, called Exodus in Greek, is traditionally known as Sefer Shemot, the Book of Names, in Hebrew. What’s all this business about names?

This week’s essay is very timely, as it deals with the role of women in society (in this case, revolutionary society), offering a set of traditional readings whose authors would likely be horrified at the recent events in Bet Shemesh, and perhaps provide for us a Torah viewpoint on the subject of “biopolitics”, the way health and access to healthcare has become a central issue of modern society, and some hints about bio-control and gender.

The opening sections of the Book of Shemot (Exodus) sketch the rapid transformation of the mighty tribes of Jacob into the despised slave chattel of Egypt. Within a few short sentences, we are told how the new administration of Egypt decides to transform a group of successful outsiders into a subservient drone class. This societal transformation was so successful that it continued for hundreds of years without resistance, until a Moshe arises and ignites emancipatory fervor. However, there is one episode, apparently towards the end of the enslavement epoch (though the text itself does not provide a date), which details an apparently small pocket of resistance led by two women, described as Israelite midwives named Shifra and Pu’ah.

Given the importance of the Moshe narrative immediately following, less attention has been given to these few verses. Given current developments in history, and with the growing centrality of issues related to autonomy of the body, the time has come to award these passages a more careful reading. I was initially drawn to these verses by a curious Midrash and its interpretation by the Tiferet Shelomo. However, upon further examination of this problematic passage and some of the classic Hasidic expositions upon it, I found myself overwhelmed with an entire set of positions regarding martyrdom, death, bio-ethics, government control of medical resources, definitions of truth, the overall ethical position of the Other and the power of the sovereign and society.