by William Meyers, delivered at Minyan M'at


A month or so ago during Minyan announcements, Carolyn Greene stood up and talked about this journal, Kerem. It is devoted, it says on the title page, to Creative Explorations in Judaism, and it is edited by friends of hers. Carolyn was distributing copies of this issue to help them. I asked Beverly Schneider, who was sitting near me, to let me flip through the copy of Kerem she was holding, and I was immediately taken with an article that touched a special concern of mine, the relationship of Jews and photography.

The article is entitled “Ervah: Hidden Sensuality,” a photoessay by Na’ama Batya Lewin. Ms Lewin is an Orthodox woman. In the essay she explores women’s head coverings in the Orthodox community by taking portraits of herself in various Orthodox neighborhoods while wearing the head covering appropriate to that particular neighborhood. So in some cases she wears a sheitel, that is a wig, in some a hat, in some a kerchief, etc. Let me show you a few of these.

I am not interested here in discussing the quality of these pictures as art, that is whether they are good pictures or not, I am interested in them as cultural artifacts, ones that illustrate a new movement in photography. There is nothing unusual about photographers taking self-portraits; the current exhibit at ICP includes self-portraits by William Henry Fox Talbot taken in the mid-nineteenth century, the very beginning of photography. And there is nothing unusual about a photographer dressing up to take self-portraits. Over the past few decades Cindy Sherman has made an enormous reputation for herself as an avant-garde artist by taking pictures of herself outfitted in various disguises. But Sherman, who like Lewin is Jewish, says the theme of her work is the exploration of the self. It is a narcissistic, and increasingly depressing, exploration that I believe can be differentiated from the work in this issue of Kerem.

Now there is a long roster of truly distinguished Jewish women photographers, and although it is still somewhat unusual for an Orthodox woman to be a professional art photographer at all, the fact that Lewin is one is only sociology. What is significant here is that Na’ama Lewin is using her camera, her art, to explore aspects of Judaism. Her essay quotes Talmud and Maimonides. If she juxtaposes those texts with her photographs, she must mean for them to comment on each other. That sort of give and take is what we would expect from any Jew concerned with the tradition, but it is not something that has much been done by photographers.

Max Kozloff is a well-known writer on photography, a teacher, curator, and himself a photographer. In a recent article in Parnassus about the role of photography in the aftermath of September 11, he said, “By and large, photography operates as a secular medium,..” That is true. There was a mini vogue 100 or so years ago for shooting tableaux vivantes of Biblical scenes by Christian photographers, but they mostly have a tacky, even camp, look about them. The medium does not seem to lend itself to religious expression the way music or poetry do, maybe because music seems so apt for dealing with the ineffable, and poetry for discussing abstractions and elevated thoughts.

The other plastic arts – painting and sculpture – are more capable of handling religious themes, as even a brief visit to the Renaissance section of any creditable museum will show. The painter and sculptor are not as bound to the physical realities of their models as the photographer is, so ordinary humans can be idealized into saints, gold-leaf halos can be placed around their heads, and suggestive light qualities added to give a supernatural aura to the overall scene. In spite of which, over the last few decades, an increasing number of Jewish photographers are using their Judaism – the religious, spiritual aspects of Judaism – as an inspiration for their work.

Let me make clear what I mean. There is an exhibit up now at the Museum of the City of New York by Steve Hoffman entitled An Intimate Portrait of the Chabad-Lubavitch of Brooklyn. This is competent work but, although the subject is a religious community, the approach is ethnographic. Hoffman shows us what the people in this community look like as they go about their daily tasks, including their ritual observances. It is not unlike a National Geographic article on a tribe in Africa or the Amazon rainforest. This is not what I have in mind when I talk about the new Jewish photography.

If you go to www.toddweinstein.com you can view this photographer’s essay The 36 Unknown. While documenting the WW II death camps, Weinstein felt he had to express something beside the bestiality of the Nazis. He began to notice and photograph what might be faces or other vestiges of absent human beings in the inanimate objects he saw through his viewfinder; in rocks, in twisted metal, in items encountered on the street. He conceptualized these as being the 36 totally righteous men, the Lamed-Vavniks, that Jewish tradition maintains sustain the world. Without passing on the quality of this work as art, what is new about it is the photographer’s recourse to his religious roots in an attempt to overcome the nihilism of his original subject matter. And it is this impulse that connects this drash with today’s parsha, Tetzaveh.

Actually with three parshiot, last week’s Terumah, which dealt with the building of the Miskhan, Tetzaveh, which deals with the furnishings of the Mishkan, and next week’s Ki Thissa, which details the indiscretion of the golden calf. They are a trilogy of related material, and you may recall Michael Rebell telling us last week of the midrashim that claim the incident of the calf actually took place before instructions for the Mishkan were given, although that is not the order they appear in in the Chumash. Everett Fox says in a gloss on this part of his translation of Exodus that, “The entire section is an object lesson in what the Bible deems it proper for human beings to make, ..” He points out the repetition of the key word ‘asoh, “make.” So it is not surprising that these parshiot figure in Jewish artworks – for instance, the pomegranate from the fringe of the high priest’s robe that Deborah translated into stained glass for us – and that they also figure in discussions of Jewish aesthetics.

Neil Folberg cited the Miskan in a lecture he gave at Temple Emmanuel a few years ago about the pictures in his book And I Shall Dwell Among Them. You may recall the Minyan gave a copy of this book to Herman Sands in appreciation for his work as architect designing this space. Folberg grew up in San Francisco, studied photography with Ansel Adams, became a baal tshuvah, and made aliyah to Israel. With his yalmulke, beard, and talit koton, he is immediately identifiable as an observant Jew. He has tried to develop an aesthetic to guide his photography based on traditional Jewish sources – Torah, midrashim, the Marharal of Prague – and incorporate it with what he’s learned from his teacher Ansel Adams and other photographers he admires, as well as all he values in the other canons of art.

Folberg asked in his lecture, “How can any material object contain something that is spiritual? It would seem that matter and spirituality are diametric opposites, and can have no relationship with one another. That is, indeed, the view of certain religions – but most certainly not Judaism. Moses is commanded to build the sanctuary in the Sinai dessert with the following commandment:

“‘Make for me a Sanctuary, and I shall dwell among them…’ Exodus 25:8-9

“Moses wonders how the Divine Presence can be contained within the parameters of anything physical – and in reply he is told it can be done.

“The midrash elaborates: “At the time when G-d said to Moses, ‘Make for Me a Sanctuary . . .’ Moses wondered: ‘the glory of G-d fills the Heavens and the Earth. How, then, can He reasonably say, ‘Make for Me a Sanctuary…?’

“The Holy One, Blessed Be He, replies: ‘Moses, it’s not like you think; just takes these twenty planks of wood!…’ (Midrash Shmot Rabba, Seder Terumah 34)”

It should be clear from this quote that Folberg is seriously engaged with the sources. My guess is he considers each of his photographs, the good ones anyway, to be like one of the twenty planks of wood. That is, the picture is a potential dwelling place for the Divine. This is certainly an appropriate concept for his book of synagogues. The photographs have a luminous quality to them, a richness, and although very few people are seen in the pictures, the presence of their congregations is palpable even in those shuls which haven’t had a minyan in decades.

Neil Folberg’s next book was In a Desert Land: Photographs of Israel, Egypt and Jordan. His debt to Ansel Adams is clear in these pictures of the Sinai, the Negev, the Judean desert, and the other sites that are the backdrop of Biblical history. And there is a striving for a spiritual quality that is frequently realized. But they raise a question that will be asked a lot if this new willingness of Jewish photographs to be influenced by their religion is more than a passing phenomenon: granted the pictures in In a Desert Land have spiritual qualities, how do we know they are the Jewish spiritual qualities? That is, would a pantheist, a pagan, a frum idol worshipper, have shown these mountains and deserts and wadis any differently? You can see where this is going. With the limited means of differentiation available to the photographer, how does the Jew manifest his special intentions?

There is another problem in this movement besides the difficulty of Jewish photographers adopting appropriate idioms. What if the photographer is wrong in his understanding of Judaism? Many of you have probably seen the advertisements for Shekhina, the book and exhibit by Leonard Nimoy. There are naked ladies in tallitot and tephillin looking very soulful, but also somewhat silly. Nimoy grew up in an Orthodox environment, and claims to have been influenced in his work by the Kabbalah – a subject about which I claim no special knowledge. Nonetheless, his pictures seem to me to owe much more to a wistful, adolescent New Age spiritualism than to the insights of the Lurianic sages of Tsfat. So you can see where this is going: who gets to determine the aesthetic halacha, to say this is kosher and this is tref?

So, good, there will be plenty more for Jews to argue about.

Another reason for associating the three pashiot with artistic creation is their position in the Chumash. They are set between the portions that deal with the giving of laws, that is the establishment of acceptable norms of behavior. And the giving of these laws is set in the middle of the book that deals with the risks that must be taken to achieve freedom. The connection of these themes would seem to run like this: to be creative, to make, one needs the discipline imposed by accepting God’s commandments, and this acceptance is predicated on freeing one self of the pathologies of Mitzraim. The difficulties in reaching a successful outcome to this project, that is of freedom, discipline and creativity, become apparent with the enthusiastic, somewhat mad, dancing of the Israelites around the golden calf. Their surrender to the excitement of idolatry so soon after their encounter with Divinity at Sinai, is a comment of how hard it is to achieve the steadfastness needed to make a sanctuary, a Mishkan, but also on how necessary its making is.

Aviva Zornberg has an elaborate and difficult explication of the meanings of the three related pashiot in her book The Particulars of Rapture Reflections on Exodus. She also cites the midrashim that discuss the incident of the golden calf as happening before the instructions for the building of the Mishkan, of the intricate relationship between the various acts of creation. She suggests that, “At their heart…is a sustained concern with time and memory, a fascination with both the timeless moment of full presence and the subtle gifts of temporality and process.” Her expression “the timeless moment of full presence” sums up wonderfully what it is photographers hope they are capturing when they press the shutter release on their camera. Those photographers who think their Jewish inheritance can help them to do that have much to learn from the study of Terumah, Tetzaveh, and Ki Thissa.

As a coda to this drosh I want to tell an anecdote. I ran across Neil Folberg in a photo gallery in Chelsea one day after I had started work on an article I wrote on the same subject of Jews and photography. I told him I intended to quote him about the mishkan to illustrate the way Jewish learning could influence a photographer’s work.

He gave a deprecating shrug and said, “I don’t know that it’s that important.”

“The thing I mean about Judaism,” I said, “is, it’s a matter of whether you’re on the outside looking in, or on the inside of looking out.”

Folberg smiled. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good.”

copyright reserved by the author