“Light from a Windfall”: A. What Is Secular Revelation? (Column 518)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

A few days ago I was sent two essays by Assaf Inbari. The first, “The Generation of Collapse“, deals with processes the Israeli society has undergone in recent years, from which one might perhaps infer conclusions about the meaning of the latest elections, and even discern some light peeking through at the end of the dark tunnel we’ve stumbled into in recent years. But here I wish to discuss another of his essays, “On the Language of Revelation“, in which he tries to explain what art is and compares it to (religious) faith. He sees both as expressions of the concept of “revelation,” through which he attempts to clarify the essence of faith, the definition of art, and the relation between them.

I read it this past Shabbat, and it was truly fascinating. I highly recommend that you read it before continuing here. The piece sparked significant insights for me on several different planes: what faith is and what its language is (certainly through secular eyes—this somewhat continues the discussion in columns 513 and 515), what art is (particularly in relation to my thesis in the series 107–113 that I devoted to defining poetry and art more broadly), whether there really is a connection between them, and also the relation between a Parmenidean and a Heraclitean outlook that stands at the center of his discussion.

I will devote two columns to discussing his essay. The first will deal with chapters 1–3 and will mainly present his thesis and explain the fundamental difficulty that creates its built-in ambiguity. The second column will analyze the solution he offers to this difficulty (from chapter 4 onward). But before I begin, a few words about Inbari himself.

A bit about Assaf Inbari

Assaf Inbari is a novelist, publicist, and deep, original, knowledgeable thinker—very impressive in my eyes. I first encountered him in my “criminal” past as a subscriber to Haaretz (to fulfill in myself “know thy enemy”), where I read a fascinating article of his, “The Stone Age“, about the history of the Temple Mount (published in the Rosh Hashanah supplement of the year 5760, the day Ariel Sharon ascended the Mount and sparked the al-Aqsa Intifada). Inbari was born in Kibbutz Afikim and now lives in Kibbutz Degania Bet (not as a member). He wrote critically and controversially about his cradle, the kibbutz (Homeward), about the Labor movement (The Red Book, though I discovered at the end that it is fiction and does not claim historical accuracy)[1], and a Rashomon-style book about the tank incident in the War of Independence at Degania (The Tank). His writing is characterized by stylistic economy in various senses and by a rare authorial self-reflection; he has written quite a bit about the basis of this approach.

Inbari deals extensively with Judaism from a serious secular angle (perhaps the only one of this kind I know). Since, in my view, there is no such animal as secular Judaism—and therefore a serious treatment of such a non-existent subject is also impossible—nevertheless, almost every essay of his that I have encountered has challenged me anew. Essays dealing with these topics are usually banal and vacuous (empty sentimentality that defines “Judaism” emptily, not worth an ounce of energy. I have dealt with a few of those on this site). Inbari is almost the only one who manages to present theses of this kind in a way that demands intellectual effort to find the defects inherent in them (and they are always there, of course; one cannot escape the principles of logic). But the discussion that reveals those defects can certainly enrich even someone who holds a different position and sharpen his own conceptions. It reminds me a bit of Eliezer Malchiel’s book, Will, Freedom and Necessity, which tries to present a compatibilist thesis that, in my view, is facially untenable, and in my review I explained why it nonetheless offers a model description of that untenable thesis. The problem there does not lie in the arguments and details but in the overall logical structure. As I will try to show here, this is precisely the situation with Inbari as well.

Although I have read only a few of his essays and two of his books (highly recommended), I will end with a warm recommendation to read his deep and thought-provoking essays, despite (or, rather, because) they demand no small effort. On the margins, I must note that in essays that did not go through newspaper editing there are two odd phenomena. For some reason he uses extraneous alephs and vavs in transliterations of foreign words (something like “alternatiwvit” for “alternative”). I don’t know what’s wrong, in his eyes, with “alternative.” Perhaps this is meant to give a sense of a return to roots (a writing style of the 1950s–60s), but it is truly odd in a relatively young man. In addition, the text’s graphics are really unaesthetic and uncomfortable to read. Perhaps this is part of his “lean” approach to literature and art, which shies away from ornament and affectation in style and creation. Still, it’s distracting.

The title: What does “the language of revelation” mean?

There’s nothing better than opening with a Hasidic word-midrash on the title (Inbari is very fond of Hasidic wordplay midrashim). The title he chose for his essay is “On the Language of Revelation.” Already when I saw it—and even more when I returned to it after reading—I wondered about the meaning of the word “language” (safa) in his usage here. Does “the language of revelation” read like “the Hebrew language,” or like “on the shore (safa) of the Sea of Galilee”? From the reading, it seems to me that both meanings are possible here. Inbari’s claim is that, like those who create and those who consume art, the believer uses a language of revelation, and also stands and acts on the shore of a hidden world that emerges from its place and reveals itself to their world.

The basic definition: Faith and art as revelation

Inbari opens his essay with a description of a train ride from Marseille (Marseilles?) through Avignon to Paris (Paris?):

You boarded a train in Marseilles for Paris, and the sights along the way passed before you. When the train left the station, you saw the smoke rising from the factory chimneys of Marseilles, and then the port and the remnants of the sun on the water at dusk. As it began to get dark, the train passed a burning shack in a field. Cars had stopped by the roadside and bedding and belongings from the shack were scattered in the field. Many people were watching the burning house. When it was already dark, the train arrived in Avignon. People got on and off. At the newsstand, Frenchmen returning from Paris bought the day’s newspapers. On the platform stood Black soldiers. They wore brown uniforms, they were tall, and their faces glowed near the electric lighting. Their faces were very dark and too high up to look at. The train left Avignon station and the Black soldiers standing there. A short, white officer was with them. The train crossed a river and passed through a very well-kept forest. It passed through many satellite towns of Paris. There were streetcars in those towns and large posters for alcoholic drinks: Belle Jardinière, Dubonnet, Pernod.

Seemingly a random sequence of events, none of which has any meaning, certainly not the order in which they appear to the passenger. But immediately afterward Inbari notes that this description is taken from a book by Hemingway, and that of course illuminates all these happenings in a completely different light (as the saying goes: we’ve been granted light from a windfall)[2]. Placing this chain of events in a literary context turns it into a composition, and now every detail in it is supposed to have meaning, as does the overall order among the events (Inbari also proposes a concrete and coherent interpretation of all this there, but I won’t go into that here). For our purposes, what matters is that nothing in the events themselves has changed, except that they were placed in a literary context. Such placement turns a random sequence of events into a composition with an overarching meaning.

Inbari likens this to a faith-infused way of looking at reality (or at a text). With prosaic eyes (prose not in the literary sense, of course), reality is nothing but a collection of happenstance as befits the way of the world, and a text can be taken as a collection of sentences whose meaning lies entirely on the literal level. It transmits information to us, and that’s that. But the believer sees in such events or texts the hand of Providence, and that turns them into a composition. Now he looks for—and of course finds—meaning in each event and in the order of events. The same goes for a text: placing it as a sacred text illuminates it in a different light. It’s important to understand that this is “light from a windfall,” for there is nothing in the happenings or the text themselves that would cause the believer to see in them the hand of Providence. From the perspective of a nonbeliever, it is simply a random sequence of happenings or sentences, and that interpretation is certainly plausible and no less possible than the faith-based one. The overall meaning (the light) is charged into the events or the text only by the believer’s decision to place them within a faith context—“under the wings of the Shekhinah,” if you will. Now each event must and does receive meaning within some general composition; likewise every detail in a text like Scripture and the biblical corpus as a whole receive a completely different meaning.

With a brilliant observation, Inbari argues that both faith and art are occurrences of revelation, and their language is a language of revelation (in the sense of a spoken language). An obscure meaning is revealed through a prosaic screen, and thus the believer and the artist—or the consumer of art—stand on the shore (here safa is “shore,” of course) of a hidden world that reveals itself to them through events or text. This revelation is the fruit of a decision by the addressee or the viewer, and is not present in the things themselves. These revelations are constituted at the level of the Kantian phenomenon (what is in the knower’s cognition), not the noumenon (the world as it is in itself).

Inbari contends that attempts to define art by something present in the work itself are doomed to fail. There is nothing in the work itself that makes it art. What makes it so is its placement in an artistic context (in a book, or in a museum). The artist who illustrated this in the sharpest way is Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 placed an industrial urinal in the Grand Central Gallery in New York (and, for some reason, called this “work” “Fountain”), thereby declaring that its very placement there turns it into a work of art—even though in itself it is identical to countless other urinals produced on an industrial assembly line. One can debate to what extent this is a work of art, but there is here an important ars-poetic statement. I will return to this below.

What has this to do with nihilistic relativism?

In my above columns on poetry and art I cited Gideon Ofrat’s definition (in his book What Is Art?) of art. He surveys dozens of different definitions that have been proposed for this concept and, by way of counterexamples, concludes that none of them captures it. His final conclusion is that art is… what is placed in a museum. As I understand it, his intent is to make a postmodern claim: that there really is no such thing as art. It has no essence and therefore cannot be defined. In his view, anything placed in a museum is art by virtue of being there. Art is our arbitrary decision, a convention, and not something objective that exists in the world of things themselves.

Needless to say, there are similar relativistic claims about faith as well—claims that essentially empty it of objective meaning. According to these interpretations, faith is a subjective delusion and therefore should not be examined in terms of true or false, supported by justifications, or refuted by counterarguments; the language of faith should not be treated as a set of truth-apt assertions (see columns 513 and 515). When the believer says that he believes in God, he does not mean to assert that something of that kind exists in the world, but to report some experience occurring or residing within him. In Inbari’s terminology, he intends to describe the stance he adopts when he views the world. These subjectivist views take art and faith as narratives; atheism and lack of artistic sensitivity are, on this view, merely alternative narratives—no more and no less correct than the faith-based and artistic ones. It’s a matter of a person’s arbitrary decision where to situate himself (the formulation strongly recalls Leibowitz, of course).

From several sentences in Inbari one could gather that he too intends a similar idea. He writes that the artistic dimension is created by placement in a museum or literary context, and is not present in the things themselves. Seemingly, this is an unequivocally subjectivist claim. But if that is indeed his intent, his discussion empties of content. He is essentially giving us the circular definition that art is what we choose to see as art—or that there is no such thing as art. Exactly as “God is whoever one believes in when one says one believes in God,” i.e., there is no such thing in reality. These are subjective narratives, and the pathos and emotional force that accompany such talk is incomprehensible. In the end we’re dealing with people describing the subjectivities of their hearts—so what?! This seems too banal a claim for such a sophisticated and lengthy essay. True, among postmodern writers, length and complexity do not indicate the existence of content—perhaps the reverse. But Inbari actually champions stylistic economy, and I do not think he belongs to that odd sect. The pathos with which he writes (despite the leanness) testifies, in my view, that this is a thesis dear to his soul. It is implied in his words that whoever does not grasp these dimensions—faith and/or art—is a defective person whose vision of reality (spiritual and physical) is lacking. That cannot be merely an arbitrary decision.

To the best of my understanding, he means to say that there is something that reveals itself through the medium of art and of faith, and not that it is an arbitrary decision by the viewer. So why does he define art and faith only on the basis of the place or the context in which they are situated? Because this revelation occurs only in the contact between the work and the viewer—or between the text/event and the believer. His claim is that nothing exists in the things themselves that can prove this, and perhaps not even hint at it. But once that interaction is created, something real is revealed through it. It’s like special glasses through which alone one can discern something; but that does not mean the glasses create that something.

According to this interpretation, the non-believer or the person who is not sensitive to the artistic layers of reality does not see things correctly. He will perceive them in a completely prosaic, random manner, but that is a kind of blindness, not an arbitrary decision that posits an alternative equivalent to the artistic vision (the revelation). It’s a fine distinction, but it completely changes the meaning of the discussion—or, rather, charges the discussion with meaning that does not exist if we are dealing with mere narratives. When you place a chain of events inside a literary text, you charge them with meaningful content, and now there is something there to grasp. That is an entirely objective reality, even if it is difficult or impossible to perceive with the prosaic eyes of flesh.

This distinction is important for understanding the discussion, but in reading his essay it is quite hard to understand on which of its two sides Inbari stands. I get the impression that he twists around it without sharpening its meaning even for himself, for if you carry it through, you must assume that in art—and likewise in faith—there is an objective dimension. I suspect that as a secular person he would be unwilling to accept such a claim with respect to faith. The comparison to art forces him to contort himself also with respect to art, as we shall see below.

Implications of this distinction

To sharpen matters, I will return to Duchamp. According to Ofrat, Duchamp’s “Fountain” is a work of art in every respect. In my understanding, it is not a work of art, since indeed there is nothing in it beyond an ordinary urinal. After all, Duchamp could have used any other object to say exactly the same thing. But there is definitely a statement here about art—namely, that placement and context are what create the artistic dimension (that is, they enable us to discern it). That could have been said, of course, through any object, and not specifically a urinal. Therefore, even after placement in a museum, this “work” has no revelatory meaning. Even after I see it, I do not see anything in it itself. Through it I receive a general insight about art and its meaning. One could say it is a treatise on the philosophy of art, but not a work of art (perhaps it is ars-art). By contrast, for postmodernists, it is an actual work of art, since we who see it as art determine whether it is art or not. This consequence sharpens the distinction I presented above between two types of subjectivity regarding the artisticness of a work: the postmodernist, which claims that the meaning itself is subjective, and the revelatory, which claims that the discernment of meaning requires a subjective placement (in a museum), but the meaning itself (what is revealed) is objective. One could say that if I am right, the subjectivity here is not ontic (in reality itself) but epistemic (in how we apprehend it).

Another example was discussed in column 276. There I brought one of Alex Levac’s famous photographs, Israel Prize laureate for 2005. The photo shows Arab workers repairing Herzl’s statue at the Siren Junction in Herzliya. The situational significance is, of course, very clear. But suppose you or I had passed by there. Would you even have noticed that there is something special here? As for me—certainly not. Just workers repairing a statue. But an artist-photographer like Levac is alert to the situation and sees something I would not have noticed (see note 3 there). An artist shows alertness and sensitivity to such prosaic events and understands that there is a revelation there. The photograph, and especially placing that image in a museum or on the cover of a photography book, charges that prosaic situation with highly meaningful content that manages to pass even to me as a consumer of art. That is the revelation. This random confluence of events (the statue broke; a particular worker came for the money; another worker arrived to replace someone absent; and I happened to pass by with a camera) suddenly becomes a composition laden with meaning.

But it is not true that in this situation there is nothing in itself and that everything is a question of artistic placement and context. The situation also reflects in itself a deep statement about our life here; without its being placed in a museum, I would not have noticed it. Again we see that museum placement does not create the meaning, but is needed for us to notice it (epistemic, not ontic). In this case, the meaning was not charged into the situation by anyone—perhaps by reality itself (a bit of structuralism for the cognoscenti). It is simply there, that’s all. By contrast, in the case of visual art or literature, this is of course not the case. There the artist is the one who charges a chain of events or an object with meaning (even if he is not always aware of it), and he builds the composition so that such meaning is within it. Hemingway chose the chain of events himself. He did not merely document (as in photography) a chain of events that was there and place it in a museum. Therefore, in ordinary works of art (as opposed to photography), there is also someone who charges the meaning into the work itself. It is not merely a lucky case in which viewing such a work creates meaningful experiences for me. In this sense, a faith-infused view of reality discerns meanings that exist within reality itself and were charged into it by God. It is not true that faith creates these meanings—that is, that they are subjective. Faith merely enables us to perceive them (the epistemology is subjective, like the glasses mentioned above). Religious education places a person in a context of faith and thus brings him to look at reality with a faith-infused gaze. Contrary to what many think, religious education did not create or invent this gaze; it enables us to use it and discern the meanings that arise from it. This is the equivalent of placing a work in a museum. Religious education creates the context within which one looks at reality with a faith-infused view (see column 294).

A note on my own approach to providence

I assume that some readers are wondering how I can speak here with Olympian calm about divine involvement in reality and about a faith-infused view that discerns something real that exists there rather than invents it. I have often argued precisely the opposite: that believers who see the hand of Providence in reality are imagining it. My view is that there is no indication of it and no solid basis for it, and therefore it is not reasonable to think there is divine involvement in the world (at least in our times). Do my words here not contradict my principled stance on this issue?

To this I will first say that I am merely describing here the conception of a faith-infused view as it exists for those who have it (I did not deal with faith itself—which I too possess—but with a faith-infused view of reality, with which I disagree). My claim here is that the believer does not intend something subjective, but claims that he discerns the revelation of something that is there beyond the manifest language and reveals itself through it. My claim is that he does not choose to see divine involvement but sees such involvement. True, I do not agree with that view, but that is how he sees things. You can now understand that my words here are entirely consistent with my principled stance. If the statement of the person with a faith-infused view were subjective, there would be no point in arguing with him. My arguments claim that there is nothing of the sort there (it is a faith-based projection or construction) and therefore that faith-infused view is mistaken. This debate takes place only because the person who does believe such a view intends something objective, not to describe a subjective experience (with which there is no point arguing). Exactly as there would be no point in writing an essay like Inbari’s merely to describe people’s delusions. Hence I inferred above that his intent is to claim something about reality itself, not to draw a conventional-narrative picture of art.

Connection to my definitions

I think we can now understand the connection between Inbari’s definition of art and the definition I proposed in my columns on poetry and art. My conclusion there was that poetry is a text whose meaning is not lodged in the words and their literal sense, but in the meaning of the form or composition. The insights and impressions are produced in me through the words but not by means of them. One could say that the words both cover the meaning and reveal it, as Bialik wrote in his essay “On Revelation and Concealment in Language” (which Inbari also mentions and discusses at length). The words of the poem may speak of a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood, but it is not really about streetlamps, nor even about loneliness or neighborhoods. It depicts an atmosphere and tries to draw me into it. This seems to map directly onto Inbari’s claim that the meaning of a literary or artistic work is not found in the words or even in the “content,” but in the composition. The revelation is what passes to me through the words. In principle, perhaps the same meanings and messages could be conveyed through a different composition that employs entirely different elements (in that discussion I noted the difference between literature and poetry in this respect).

I began that discussion by presenting a simple text of mine that opened an online debate about the definition of poetry, and I recounted that one participant in the debate broke it into lines, paragraphed it, and vocalized it—and suddenly it became a poem. Does such a trick mean that poetic qualities are arbitrary? Are they nothing but a result of my arbitrary choice to view it as a poem? Is there nothing in the words themselves that possesses a poetic quality? If that were so, then any text that undergoes such “abuse” would turn into a poem. That is implausible.

Interestingly, at the end of his chapter 2 Inbari performs an astonishingly similar experiment, and to sharpen the point I will quote his words there in full:

On the one hand, he says that indeed we read a poem. It seems he really means the narrative-subjectivist picture of art—that the lineation truly turns any text into a poem. On that view, there are no qualities in the text itself; everything arises from presenting the text as a poem, and the entirety of its artistic meaning is created in the reader.

But as I already remarked above, his position on this does not come out clear (and I suspect that he himself is not sharply aware of this distinction). Note that immediately afterward he adds that there is no illusion or fraud here. That is, there really are aesthetic qualities there[3], and it seems that presenting the material as a poem merely enables us to notice them and does not create them themselves. In other words, one who does not see them is a kind of blind person, and not merely someone who arbitrarily chose a different stance.

From this experiment the question arises: will we discover artistic qualities in every passage we “abuse” in this way? If yes, that somewhat empties the term “art” of content and makes it subjective or arbitrary. But if not, then the question returns: what is art, exactly? It seems that presentation in an artistic context by itself is insufficient to explain this. Note that according to my interpretation above, presentation enables us to notice artistic qualities, but if they are not there, such presentation will not help. We may fantasize artistic value, but not truly discern such value—because it isn’t there. By contrast, if his intent is indeed to say that the very presentation creates artistic value, then we have returned to Ofrat’s thoroughgoing subjectivism.

Art as an institution

This brings me to his discussion in chapter 3. Inbari comes very close there to this distinction, but precisely because of that his contortions around it become quite bewildering. He opens the chapter with the contemporary separation between art and aesthetics. In the past hundred years, it has been understood that the question of a work’s artistic value is detached from the question of beauty. Objects such as jewelry, clothing, cars, and the like can certainly be beautiful without possessing artistic value. And conversely, there are quite a few works of art in which you will not find beauty (Duchamp’s Fountain, for example). This intensifies the question of art’s essence. He notes that in the second half of the twentieth century, an institutional answer was given: art is what the curator, critic, or expert decides is art.

To this I will note that on this approach, art is nothing but convention. But then there really are no experts on the matter, for there is nothing to be expert in. They do not diagnose what art is or what good art is; they are the ones who determine it. It resembles one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma: if the moral is defined as whatever God wants, then you cannot say that God is moral. Claims like “God is moral,” or “this work has such-and-such artistic value,” become definitions rather than assertions, and thus are emptied of content. It seems to me that the institutional theory empties the concept of art of its content, and this of course returns us to Gideon Ofrat’s claim described above. What does Inbari say about this?

If you are familiar with the institutional position, you may have gathered from my words so far that this is my position as well. Well, it is not. I think the institutional argument is circular and explains far too little. I do accept, however, the starting point of the institutional argument—namely, the rejection of the notion that “artisticness” or “literariness” is a property of the object or the text—but I do not see how the institutional theory helps beyond that rejection. For even if we accept the claim that art is a “social institution” like any other “social institution,” this tells us nothing at all about the unique character of this particular “social institution.” The institutional theory contents itself with the correct but trivial statement that our artistic experiences occur within the framework of a social institution and not outside it; but the question that follows—what distinguishes the functioning of human beings in this specific institution from their functioning in other social institutions—it does not answer and cannot answer, because of the abstract and non-informative nature of the notion “social institution.”

Here he tries to grasp the bull by the horns. He understands that the institutional approach is circular and empty, but the reason he offers does not really show circularity. He merely explains that the claim that we are dealing with a social institution does not present a complete picture so long as it has not explained to us what the role of this institution is. I think he means what I wrote, but in a more vague and less precise formulation. When he tries to explain it, he says that the artistic experience takes place within some institution, but it is not correct that this institution defines or constitutes it.

Seemingly, this formulation is equivalent to my claim that presentation in an artistic context allows one to discern artistic value but does not constitute it. Inbari’s problem is that, throughout his discussion, he refuses to say explicitly that there is something objective here—that is, in the work or in the world itself—and not only in social institutions and their purposes. I think this is why he circles around this difficulty without truly emerging from it. I suspect the reason is that if he were to admit this explicitly, the parallel question would follow: what is the corresponding objective dimension that exists in the institution or the experience of faith? Is it not necessary to posit the existence of God for that? How can a person who defines himself as secular in the assertoric sense (i.e., one who does not hold “God exists” as a truth-apt claim) be party to it? At most we are dealing with subjective delusions, and it is very hard to accept his pathos about them. I would not make a big deal—certainly not grant an aura of sanctity—about subjective experiences I undergo. That is at most a matter for psychologists. We return here, through the back door, to those embarrassing circles of those seeking a secular Jewish identity—and I have explained more than once why they are doomed to come up empty-handed. A secular Jewish identity (on the axiological plane, not the cultural) is a kind of oxymoron. Inbari’s sophisticated wording does not succeed in getting him out of this foolish circle.

What I wrote about faith is true of art as well. If you do not posit the existence of an objective dimension, beyond the social-institutional, in the artistic phenomenon, then you have emptied it of content. You’ve turned it into a branch of psychology. Art becomes nothing but a meaningless product of the way we are built. In such a picture, the pathos with which people speak about art (including Inbari himself) becomes somewhat ridiculous. It is like seeing a mentally ill patient convinced he is Napoleon as if he were a different sort of Napoleon—a fitting (secular) substitute for Napoleon himself—and describing his exploits with the same fervor as a devoted historian of the real Napoleon.

Conclusion and link to the next column: Revelation

Well then, according to Inbari, to complete the picture we must go back and seek the purpose of the social institution of art. His conclusion is expressed in the claim that is the essay’s main theme:

Why do we need art? What does it give us? For what purpose was this “social institution” established? What need does it come to answer? If it exists, then it is necessary; what is its necessity? This is, in various formulations, the question one cannot avoid—the very question from which the institutional theory escaped, and with which I wish to grapple here. The question “What is art?” is identical to the question “What is its purpose?” And my answer is: art is a human activity whose purpose is to occasion revelations. It is this purpose—not any formal or material property of an object or a text—that determines whether some object or text will be perceived as “artistic” or “literary.”

If Inbari is truly offering here a confrontation that has not yet been made, we must examine precisely what his novelty is. To that end, we must try to understand the meaning of that (secular) revelation. What exactly is revealed there? It is certainly not a subjective delusion—merely the result of the context into which a person chooses to insert himself—for otherwise we return to the very same problematic point.

The chapter ends with a promise to clarify the meaning of that revelation:

To understand this definition, we must clarify what “revelation” is. The careless way we use this word in everyday speech confuses it with words like “knowledge,” “insight,” or “illumination,” and in the current fashionable discourse of “New Age” spirituality, these words tend more than ever to lose their distinct meanings and to be taken as synonyms with one identical sense. Our investigation into the essence of art—which, in my view, is bound up with the concept of revelation—therefore requires clarifying the yawning difference between this concept and the concept of “knowledge” and the concept of “illumination.”

Each of these three concepts—“revelation,” “knowledge,” and “illumination”—is embodied in its own human discipline (in its own “social institution”). The difference among them—and among the human disciplines that embody them—lies in the opposition between two world-pictures as old as human culture: conceiving reality as “Being,” versus conceiving reality as “Becoming.”

This is the essay’s crossroads. He understands that a secular revelation is not the discovery of a fact—a truth-apt claim—expressed as knowledge or insight. But it cannot be wholly subjective either, for then, as I explained, it empties of content. So what remains? What exactly is the revelation of which he speaks? On the shore of which sea does the artistic viewer stand, and what is revealed to him by the language of revelation? The last sentence speaks of Being versus Becoming, and this is the pivot through which Inbari tries to circumvent the built-in problem in his position: can there be a secular revelation that is not merely a subjective experience? To that end, starting from chapter 4 of his essay, he embarks on an interesting discussion of Heraclitean and Parmenidean outlooks, and because of its importance and delicacy I decided to devote another column to it.

[1] I will note that, in my view, this is not a worthy genre, and it is no wonder that it stirred criticism and complaints from the families of the leaders criticized there. Such a book gives a sense of historical authenticity and causes the reader to form a stance about real people who lived and acted here, on the basis of fictional facts (and from the reading it is not at all clear that they are fictional). This issue arose regarding the play about Hannah Szenes and other mockumentary works of this sort. There is a difference between a mockumentary with no historical basis (you invent characters and give your work—a book, film, or play—a quasi-historical cast) and doing that to real figures. This claim applies to some extent to his book Homeward as well. His book The Tank confronts the problem head-on, since it presents the chain of events in question from three different points of view.

[2] This is not a pun. You can see here that this is precisely the meaning of Bialik’s ars-poetic poem.

[3] Incidentally, he should have said “artistic.” In the very next sentences, at the start of chapter 3, he himself notes the difference between aesthetics and art.