The servant of the Lord alone is free: 6. Conclusion: On Constraints and Variety – A Look at Freedom and Liberty in Art (Column 131)

With God's help

In the previous column I discussed Amos Oz's article, which criticizes the fossilization of halakhic Judaism in recent generations. I pointed out there that without a framework it is impossible to grapple with the questions that the framework raises. Amos Oz speaks about liberty, but in fact advocates freedom. We also saw that secular Jewish identity is a value-vacuum. At most, it is a collection of factual characteristics, and they have no value significance whatsoever. In this column I conclude this series, which was written under pressure in order to manage to clarify this issue in time for Passover. Here I will touch on the question of the relationship between variety and richness of possibilities and the existence of constraints, and from there I will arrive at a discussion of freedom and liberty in art.

A reminder: the parable of the room

Amos Oz illustrated his claim with the parable of the room and the furniture. He describes the development of Jewish law as a Big Bang that took place at Mount Sinai, where the Jewish space was created, which in his analogy is a room. Over the years and generations, many different pieces of furniture accumulated in this room, and Jewish law does not allow touching any of them. All of them obligate us, and we are forbidden to dispute them and/or choose to remove some of them. Each generation brings more and more furniture into the room, and no generation removes anything. In the end, a stifling congestion is created that does not allow us to maneuver within it, and this is the halakhic and intellectual ossification of rabbinic Judaism (as distinct from sovereign Judaism; for Amos Oz, that is modern Hebrew literature).

I explained that, as we saw regarding Ari Elon's distinction, the same fallacy appears here too. Constraints express a reduction of freedom, but they do not contradict liberty; on the contrary, they constitute it. In the vacuum in which Amos Oz operates there is no liberty and no grappling. There are only arbitrary and meaningless actions. Everyone does whatever he likes, and there is no importance to the way a person chooses, just as in Switzerland (see the example of elections in Switzerland in Column 127). If a person legislates his own values and chooses the furniture in the room, he is not acting within a framework of constraints. Therefore his path is no longer one way of arranging the same room, but a different way altogether. And in the analogy, Amos Oz's proposal is not variety within Judaism but a non-Jewish alternative (empty, in the Jewish sense). I would now like to broaden the discussion of the parable of the room, and through it illustrate a surprising phenomenon that will lead us to further surprising conclusions regarding our Jewish lives and in general.

Another look at the parable of the room: entropy calculations

Think of a room laid out like a chessboard, 8X8 tiles. Now place in the room one chair the size of a single tile. How many ways are there to arrange the chair in the room? 64, of course. You can place the chair on any of the tiles. Fine, now put another chair into the room. Is the number of ways to arrange the room now larger or smaller? The surprising answer is that it is of course larger. If the two chairs are identical, the number of ways to arrange them in the room is 64X63/2, that is, something like 2000. That is a number about 30 times larger than in the previous case. If we add another chair to the room, the number of possibilities grows by about another factor of 20, and so on. The peak is reached when there are 32 chairs in the room; the number of ways to arrange them is about two billion billions. From that point onward the number of possibilities of course goes down (because now we are arranging holes rather than chairs. 33 chairs is equivalent to 31 holes, and so on). It is worth noting here that if the chairs in the room are not identical, the number of possibilities is much, much larger.[1]

By contrast, how many ways are there to arrange 0 chairs in the room? Indeed: exactly one. In all arrangements we have an empty room. You can place your no-chair on any square you like, or alternatively arrange 58 no-chairs in the room. In all cases and all arrangements you will get the same state: an empty room. This is something like the number of solutions to a puzzle without constraints (reaching the number 100 with no restrictions on the numbers or arithmetic operations that may be used). Ostensibly there are many possibilities, but they are not really different from one another.

This calculation is similar to entropy calculations, which count microscopic arrangement possibilities that correspond to the same macroscopic state (see the beginning of the third notebook, where I dealt with the definition of complexity). It prompts second thoughts about Amos Oz's example. To our astonishment, it turns out that increasing the number of chairs actually increases the number of ways to arrange them rather than decreasing it. Amos Oz assumes that shrinking the space and filling the room with furniture reduces the range of possibilities open to us, but the reality is the opposite.

Application to the question of religious commitment

Let us now return from the parable to our topic. Suppose for the sake of discussion that Jewish law contains ten rules. A person who is committed to Jewish law can make about a thousand (1K) different decisions with respect to them: to observe or not observe the first, the second, the third, and so on. A person who is not committed to Jewish law has no rules in his world. He can of course decide whatever he wants, but all the possibilities are essentially identical. He can observe or not observe each of the no-rules in his world. The result is the same result.

We have arrived here at a rather surprising conclusion. There are many ways to be religious. No two Jews committed to Jewish law look the same. With all the conservatism and ossification, the number of religious groups and ideologies is very large (though most of them are ossified and conservative within themselves). There are Hasidim and Mitnagdim, Haredi-nationalist Zionists and liberal and modern Zionists, anti-Zionists, both Haredi and liberal, Conservatives, Sephardim of various kinds, Reconstructionists, and more and more. Even heretics who believe in God and the Torah and nevertheless decide to rebel against them are one of the possibilities in this variety. The decisions that are made are whether to observe the rules or not, how to arrange them in one way or another, what the hierarchy among them is, and in what way it is worthwhile and proper to observe them. There is hardly a Jew whose room is arranged like his fellow's room. This is a complex and interesting world, full of ferment, prophets and rebels, preachers and opponents, revolutionaries and conservatives, factionalism and contentiousness, arguments and counterarguments, faith and heresy, and everything Amos Oz described with his marvelous descriptive talent (see the previous column).

But notice what happens on the other side of the equation, the secular side. There there is only one group! There are, of course, many kinds of secular people. They differ from one another in character traits, dress, moral rules, worldviews, ideologies, occupations and hobbies, and much more. But secularity, by definition, is the absence of religious commitment. It is a negative concept. The contents that people add for themselves are not part of secularity but an addition built on top of it. A person is a complex creature. He is not only secular but also communist or capitalist, liberal or chauvinist, etc., etc. But all of these are not part of secularity; they are add-ons. In the world of the 'bare' secular person there are no rules, and as noted, the number of ways to conduct oneself in a world of no rules is exactly 1. The secular person cannot even rebel or be a heretic. He simply does not accept the system, and that is all. This is a dull world in which not even an interesting heretic can be found. And again, on top of 'bare' secularity one can of course assemble all sorts of ideologies and outlooks. That is what creates the variety of people and groups on this side of the divide. But this is not secular variety; it is human variety (most of it, incidentally, can also exist in a religious world. There too there are communists and capitalists, proponents of human rights and opponents of them, etc., etc.). Therefore there may indeed be many kinds of secular people, but there is only one secularity. A staggeringly dull world.

So where was Amos Oz mistaken?

I have already explained that Amos Oz confuses freedom and liberty. Now we can see this from yet another angle. He thinks that the furniture in the room reduces the variety of possible forms of conduct, but he is mistaken. It is true that they reduce the empty space, that is, they lower the degree of freedom, but the addition of furniture actually increases the number of ways to arrange it. The variety in the Jewish world that Amos Oz described does not contradict his furniture model; it follows from it. Precisely because more and more furniture accumulates in the room, the number of ways to arrange it grows, and the factionalism, rebellions, and arguments can and should occur. The conclusion is that the arguments and polemics, the anarchy and the refusal to accept authority and discipline, stem precisely from the fact that we relate to all the furniture. Those for whom there is no furniture in the room all look the same.

And what about those who do play the game, but allow themselves to bring in and remove furniture as they see fit? That is the situation in Switzerland. In such a situation the different arrangements and the differences between them have no meaning whatsoever. As I explained in the previous columns, in the absence of agreed-upon and binding rules there is no variety and no meaning to the differences. One cannot summon the Holy One, blessed be He, to court when one does not believe in Him. In fact, one can, but it is a bland and meaningless move. The significance of such a step draws on the inertia of the religious concepts that survived in the world of secular literature. In a committed religious world, such a rebellion is perceived as a bold and revolutionary step. One can agree with it or argue with it and see in it heresy at the core, but in a secular world one can only roll one's eyes and continue on indifferently. In the previous column I explained that this is in fact the meaning of the engagement of modern Hebrew (and secular) literature with the Holocaust and with other theological questions. On the theological plane, this is very intensive and varied activity inside a vacuum. What people call, in everyday language: full throttle in neutral. All the ferment and creativity that Amos Oz describes lose their meaning (in the Jewish and theological context Amos Oz was discussing, not necessarily the artistic one) because they take place in a religious vacuum. This brings us to examine the meaning of the distinction between freedom and liberty in the context of artistic creation.

On genres and the rules of genre

Throughout history there has been a division of the different fields of art into genres. For example, literature was customarily divided into three types (three genres): fiction, poetry, and drama. Each of these is itself divided into various subgenres. The same is true of other artistic fields, such as the visual arts (painting and sculpture), cinema and performance art, photography, and more. Scholars of genre-based creation (see briefly here and here) note that at the basis of genre stands a system of rules, sometimes explicitly formulated and sometimes not, that enables communication between the creator and the viewer. Creators work according to the rules of the genre, but within those rules they add their own touch to the work. That is what builds the difference between different creators and different works within the genre. Over time changes also take place in the rules of the genre, but this is a metamorphosis that does not really destroy the old system; rather, it gives birth from within it to a new framework of somewhat different rules.

On the ORT website, remarks are brought from Hillel Barzel (A Lesson in Research Methods, The Study of Genre, 1989), who tries to define the concept of genre. Among other things, it says there:

Thus, a story written in medieval Florence is not like a story written by Kafka at the beginning of the twentieth century: the basic norm remains, but the tools, the words, the means, the atmosphere, and the statement are entirely different. Examining the history of literature reveals to us an unceasing development in the norms of the genres. On the one hand, the original rules of each and every genre remain as they were in the distant past, yet on the other hand every creator brings himself into the work in his own original way.

Our role as skilled readers is to examine a work, understand the genre according to which it was written, become acquainted with the accepted norms for writing in that genre, and examine the points at which the genre is breached; that is, to what extent the creator breaks the norms, changes them, adds to them, and in essence what the degree of the creator's originality is.

These remarks concern literature, but as noted there were genre rules in all areas of artistic creation. There were rules that determined how one writes a tragedy (three acts, the first with ten sentences, the second with the smoking gun, etc., etc.). So too there were rules that determined how one paints works from different genres, or how one sculpts.

Why do we really need genre rules?

As a convinced anarchist, I always wondered why genre rules are needed at all. Why can a playwright not write a tragedy in four acts, and why can the smoking gun not appear in the third act? Why place shackles on the hands of creators? What is wrong with a funny tragedy (cf. Benigni's wonderful Life Is Beautiful)? And indeed, it is only natural that in the postmodern age the rules of genre are shattered brutally. The refined metamorphosis through which the rules of genre passed in the past now becomes a violent revolution. They are smashed completely, without a substitute, and thus works are created that depart from all the rules. We have no way to sort, classify, or even understand them.

This is precisely the explanation for why those rules are necessary. A work can exist only within a framework that makes its understanding and interpretation possible. Only such a framework allows us to appreciate the creator's creativity. He chose to make the middle act in a way different from what is customary, and thereby expressed impressive creativity in relation to his predecessors and in relation to the rules. But if he does something altogether different, the viewers will not be able to interpret the work or relate to it. It will be chaos devoid of artistic value. The rules of genre do indeed limit creation, but they are the condition for its existence and for the meaningfulness of creativity. Just as the constraints that limit the number of solutions to a puzzle are precisely what allow the solver to reveal his intellectual or mathematical creativity, so the rules of genre allow the creator to reveal his artistic creativity. Without them, the work is meaningless. It lives in a vacuum. This does not mean that whenever one creates within the rules of a genre there is creativity, just as action within constraints and limitations does not always express liberty. The rules and the limitations make liberty and creativity possible, but clearly there will also be people who are enslaved by them. It is precisely there that autonomy and liberty, and creativity as well, are tested.

On freedom and artistic liberty

Today it is customary to speak about the value of artists' freedom of creation. There is fierce opposition to the limitations that people try to impose on creation, and even to the accepted rules of genre, which also place shackles on the hands of creators. But this is an unfortunate mistake. Artistic value lies in creative liberty, not in freedom (and in the ethical context as well we saw in Column 127 that freedom is an asset, not a value). Creation within a free framework (that is, without a framework) is meaningless, like voting in Switzerland. Only creation that reveals liberty within the constraints of the rules of genre can have meaning. In such a situation, the viewer has a way to interpret, understand, appreciate, and judge it. This is done in relation to other works in the genre, and in accordance with the rules of the genre.

The postmodern works that shattered the rules of genre and were created out of creative freedom are nothing but nonsense. This is a facade of creativity, but in fact it is rampant anarchy devoid of meaning and artistic value. Creativity is based on liberty, not on freedom. Running in an open field is not creative and has no meaning whatsoever. In such a situation it does not really matter where or how you run. By contrast, escaping from a guarded prison requires creativity. If you do it correctly—you will succeed, and if not—you will fail. Because there are prices and a framework that does not depend on us, the way we conduct ourselves within it has meaning. Innovative and interesting thought, too, can be created only within a binding system of beliefs, but in a vacuum nothing interesting or creative will be created. As we said, there are many kinds of religious people, and the religious world is vibrant and fascinating. But the secular world (in its essential sense—not the world of secular people, but the world of secularity) is astonishingly dull. There is only one kind of secularity, and one can die there of boredom.

Implicit rules

More than once people have claimed to me that I do not understand modern art (or postmodern art), and therefore I think those works have no meaning. That may very well be so, but if there really are those who do understand these strange things, then necessarily there are rules of genre there too, even if they are implicit. If these works have meaning, then they presumably have not completely shattered the rules as they think and claim. They have simply created new rules (which are clear only to themselves, if at all), and now the works are interpreted within them and according to them.

As we have seen, art is destined to take place within a system of genre rules. There is no escaping this. The feeling that there is free creation without rules is an illusion stemming from ignorance and/or lack of awareness. Wherever there is meaning, some kind of genre rules stand in the background. Sometimes I feel that in those bizarre regions they adhere to their rules with even greater fanaticism than their modernist colleagues (you must run wild in order to be meaningful; otherwise it is not art). You have to scribble and mumble all kinds of meaningless and senseless words in order to be considered an artist, a thinker, and a profound art critic. From a broader perspective one can say that even this is a kind of genre rule (though in my opinion it creates inferior art).

The parallel between ethics and religion, on the one hand, and aesthetics and art, on the other

The conclusion is that there is a full parallel between the ethical and religious contexts discussed in the previous columns and the artistic contexts with which I am dealing here. Here too, in the artistic and aesthetic context, the confusion appears that we encountered in the previous columns between freedom and liberty. There it is called secularity, whereas here it is called postmodernism. Artistic creativity parallels ethical and religious liberty. The postmodern ethos parallels ethical or religious freedom. Here as there, freedom emasculates creativity and liberty and autonomy, and empties them of meaning. Here as there, it is the constraints that constitute the possibility of being creative in the artistic context, just as of conducting oneself autonomously as a free person in the ethical and religious context. Not only do the constraints not contradict creativity and liberty, they are what give them meaning and make them possible. In ethical or aesthetic Switzerland, our decisions have no significance. They are expressions of arbitrary impulses. Only in a place where there is a prescribed framework that the artist does not legislate for himself does his creation have meaning.

Incidentally, in the artistic context too it is usually correct to say that the tighter and stronger the constraints are, the more room there is for creativity, and the work and the artistic act acquire greater meaning. A religious creator who is bound by the rules of Jewish law, and if he is not postmodern then also by the rules of genre, is not like a free creator who is not limited by any rules (or at least feels that way). For example, where there are strict rules of modesty, a small shift in the actress's head covering acquires far greater meaning than complete nudity in a world where that is accepted and normal. In a world without rules one cannot break rules, and without breaking rules there is no art. When there are no rules, the viewer too does not know whether the creator broke any rule, and therefore whether he is creative or not. He watches chaos before his eyes, and has no tools to deal with it.

If indeed the rules of genre are what mediate between the creator and the viewer and the interpreter, and without them the work has no meaning, the conclusion is that even when breaking them it is very important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. One can bend them, change them carefully and gently, but it is not advisable to smash them. If nudity on the stage and explicit sexual relations on the screen in a film are permitted, what will remain for us to break? How can we protest powerfully against something? After all, one cannot do something provocative in a place where everything is permitted. Such smashing of the rules causes the loss of the work's artistic value, neutralizes our ability to judge it, and in effect empties the toolbox of artistic creation of its principal tools. One cannot protest, create provocations, or break all the rules. How can one create art without those tools?

Freedom destroys art exactly as it destroys liberty and ethical and religious meaning. We saw that a secular person cannot grapple with theological problems, and likewise an artistic creator cannot create meaningful art in a world without rules of genre. The confusion between freedom and liberty is destructive in this field as well. Just as there is no secular Jewish identity, so too there is no postmodern art.

Our exodus from Egypt was built in stages: first we went from slavery to freedom, and afterward from freedom to Sinai subjugation. From that point on all possibilities are open. Now we can choose whether to be free people or slaves of slaves. Whether the rules of genre will dictate our path and wrench the reins from our hands, or whether we ourselves will choose our path—whether to comply or to rebel, how to rank the rules, and how to implement them in practice in our own reality. On all these questions there are different approaches, and all of them are based on the principled commitment to the giving of the Torah at Sinai. "The servant of God alone is free."

That is it; the race is over for now. A kosher and happy Passover to all.

[1] For 32 chairs one gets a fantastic number, something with 55 zeros after the decimal point. An illuminating example of the rapid explosion of an exponential process: if you fold a sheet of paper in half 40 times, its thickness will reach roughly the distance from the earth to the moon.