Faith in Art: Visual Culture and the Future of Judaism

Lance J. Sussman

In December 1969 I went to Israel for the rst time. Everything about that trip was transformative. Traveling with my summer friends from Camp Harlam (UAHC), ying on a Jewish airplane, and seeing the coastline of the Jewish state for the rst time all were powerful experiences for me. But perhaps the most surprising experience during those magical two weeks was my encounter with public art in Israel. By age fteen, I had already visited numerous leading art museums with my family. My childhood synagogue, Oheb Shalom in Baltimore, Maryland, itself was an important architectural statement created by Walter Gropius, a leader in the Bauhaus movement. But nothing fully prepared me for coming face to face with powerful, dramatic, public art portraying Jewish and Israeli themes with boldness and a uniquely modern beauty. After arriving at the old Ben Gurion airport with its open metal hangers, cracked sunower seedcovered sidewalks, and pungent cigarette smoke, we were whisked off toward Haifa. Because it was already night and I was exhausted, I did not really see Israel until morning. Stepping out of the old guest house, I was immediately confronted with David Poluss little-known sculpture Israel Saba, a two-gure metal statute, which could have worked perfectly as the cover for Amos Elons iconoclastic 1971 book, The Israelis: Founders and Sons. For me, Poluss work provided the perfect Zionist framework for my rst journey to Israel: a biblical grandfather walking with his arm around a farmer-soldier kibbutznik. Much more than my rst encounter with the Western Wall, Poluss sculpture, the Billy Rose Art Garden in Jerusalem, and the
LANCE J. SUSSMAN, Ph.D. (C80) is senior rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and national chair of the CCAR Press. He teaches classes in Jewish History at Princeton and Temple University. His article Transcending an Artless Tradition appeared in Reform Judaism (Winter 2010).

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white modernism of Tel Aviv connected me visually with Israel and instilled a sense of excitement in me about the possibilities of a modern Jewish culture. Although art and architecture remained a private interest for many years, my decision to study to be rabbi eventually took priority and other interests prevailed. In recent years, however, I found myself increasingly returning to images as a source of religious inspiration and Judaic knowledge. Quite unexpectedly, my vision was threatened by premature cataracts and a retina that detached twice. Surgery, eye patches, and double and triple vision all made sight much more important to me. I started to look at the world differently. I discovered a universe of discourse among the visually impaired. The Macular Degeneration group, which met at the far end of our synagogue, were no longer exotic guests, but my people. My sight improved and ultimately was fully restored; however, my thinking about the importance of the visual in life and in the dynamic of the synagogue will never recover. Having been trained as a historian at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati (Ph.D.,1987), I made a decision to start studying Jewish art historically and to produce a yearlong series of PowerPoint lectures on the history of Jewish art for my congregations Adult Education program. The lectures, which covered Jewish art from its emergence in Ancient Israel to the present. were so well received, I began to prepare additional illustrated talks on a variety of individual artists, among them Chagall, Ben Shahn, Roman Vishniak, and the designer of our synagogues primary stained glass windows, Jacob Landau. I also prepared thematic PowerPoint presentations including one on Women and Art in the Jewish Tradition and a multipart series on Art and the Holocaust: Before, During and After. Our regional rabbinic organization, DVARR (Delaware Valley Association of Reform Rabbis) was kind enough to invite me to present several of my talks at one of their annual retreats several years ago. Not only did we look at pictures together, but we also read biblical and Rabbinic texts on idolatry, hidur mitzvah, and the relationship between them. Jewish Art History and Holocaust and Art became electives in our conrmation academy, and eventually outside groups and schools began making similar requests. In my career, studying Jewish art had rapidly moved from personal interest to a central activity in my pulpit and academic work. The next step was to bring art (or, better, an awareness of art) into
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our worship space. Using a laser pointer, I started highlighting the art of our sanctuary during services to help open the eyes of my congregation to the possibility of using visuality in prayer. I focused a High Holy Day sermon (with mixed success) on art in the Jewish tradition and challenged my congregation to think about why modern Jews are both dedicated patrons of the arts as well as artists, yet major art museums remain nearly without any Judaic images for a host of reasons including a widespread assumption that Judaism is an imageless tradition; Chagall, of course, being the most important and often only exception. By contrast, where do you regularly nd art relating to the Jewish experience in a major metropolitan museum? The gift shop! Jewish art, I concluded, cannot just be about nostalgia, tourist junk, and frivolous tchotchkes! What about prayer? Cant synagogue prayer include images? Is there a way to employ the strategies of illuminated medieval Haggadot in the tlot of our congregation by providing compelling images as a regular part of the worship experiences? Visual tlot during Shabbat services, a PowerPoint congregational Passover seder, and in service visual presentations by our bnei mitzvah students were all soon nding their way into our prayer experience. I also began illustrating special sermons (delivered after Kaddish) with PowerPoint presentations. Dozens of powerful images ranging from biblical archaeology to stirring natural scenes to faux colored dreamscapes by Chagall accompanied all the major rubrics of prayer at Keneseth Israel. Attendance jumped upward. Now, we are installing large retractable screens in our synagogue and built-in high power projectors. Rabbi, I have been told repeatedly, I never looked up at services before and I like seeing pictures of the Wall when we pray for the peace of Jerusalem and starry night scenes when we read Maariv Aravim. I have come to the conclusion that visual culture and visual tlot can and should play a major role in the Reform Judaism of the future. We live in a visual age. From major league stadiums to LED billboards on superhighways, images, and increasingly electronic images, are dening our culture. Reform Judaism began by bringing the pipe organ into regular synagogue worship. It reinvented itself by learning how to make the six-string guitar the Davidic harp of our age. Our future, I believe, is inextricably tied up with the use of images and, most importantly, computer-generated
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images, because of the endless capacity that technology has to recover the art of the past and generate new art for the present and the future. Just as the medieval church was able to teach its nonreading adherents through the medium of stained glass, we can teach our post-reading members through contemporary visual culture and technology. In order to most fully use the visual arts to perpetuate and deepen Judaism in our time, we need to move beyond Judaisms traditional ambivalence toward art. Art itself is not idolatrous. The second commandment, as is evidenced by the explosion of art in the Orthodox community today, can be understood very narrowly in terms of restrictions. Sensuousness and nudity present a second set of challenges as do the use of non-Jewish religious images in a synagogue setting. Can Buddhist images be used the way Buddhist sounds are in the synagogue? Can Chagalls use of a Jewish Jesus ever be displayed or discussed within our congregations? My research into the history of Jewish art has convinced me that except for digital technology, none of this is really new. During the Italian Renaissance, the Jews of Rome ocked to see Michelangelos Moses in a church on Shabbat afternoon. By contrast, the Jews of Florence did not seek inspiration from the same sculptors heroic depiction of King David as a young man. We, too, will have to make choices but rst we need to cultivate and rene an interest in Jewish art in service to the living experience of Judaism in our own time. I believe synagogues need visual art committees, that the national movement needs to take art seriously as a primary path in the denition of a new and revolutionary Reform spirituality, and that HUC-JIR needs to teach Jewish art and explore how art has and can impact Jewish life as is being done at the ATID Yeshiva in Jerusalem and at least in the Graduate Program of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The agenda is almost endless and to begin we need to learn how to ask questions about how art can be used to preserve and nurture Jewish life for the present and the distant future. What are some of those questions? Here is a brief sampling: What should we exhibit in our synagogues, display on our walls, and hang in our sanctuaries? What kind of labels and explanations should we prepare? How many images of dancing Chasidim do we need in Reform synagogues? Should we feature emerging
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artists who use Jewish ideas and inspiration in their work? Do we engage the local art community and commission new ceremonial art, installations, sculpture, and paintings? Should childrens art be displayed in our sanctuaries? How can we teach Torah through art? Do we request docented tours of our great museums to learn to see them through Jewish eyes? How effectively can Jewish art move beyond nostalgia into a means of engagement? Can we redirect Jewish patronage of the arts in general toward the creation of a deeper art-based culture in the Jewish community? How do we learn to have more faith in art and allow art to help us deepen our faith and our connections to Judaism and the Jewish people? Visual art, like a pipe organ or a guitar, may not have the capacity to dene what we believe. However, it does have the power to help us better understand and relate to what it is we hope to accomplish as a community. The long debates about the existence of Jewish art and the question of art or ne art are over. It is time our movement heeded Martin Bubers challenge to the Zionist Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and elevated the place of visual art in our work. From the Bezalel of Exodus to the establishment of the Bezalel School in Jerusalem, Judaism has generated a visual culture. The time has come for us to reenvision our foundational texts as well as textualize the images that dene our lives as Jews. We need to move beyond tourist art and gift shop art. We need to extend art education from our preschools and summer camp arts and crafts shacks to our adult education programs and worship committees. We need to see our prayers and illustrate our sermons. We need to create meaningful images for our members who live their lives in an age of images. We need to reinvent our synagogues by applying museum understanding of visual culture and new museological methods to them without turning our synagogues into museums that simply put the past under glass. Similarly, we need to harness the teaching and cultural power of our museums, Jewish and communal, in service to the needs of our faith. Ultimately, we need to nd ways to understand ourselves as being created in the image of the imageless Creator. Like Moses, let us nd skilled artists who are lled with the spirit of God and let us again rediscover how to root reform worship in the beauty of holiness.

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