On the Connection between Universality and Artistic Value: Following Asaf Inbari's Article on Religious-Zionist Art (Column 213)

With God's help

 

In the latest Sabbath supplement (Parashat Aharei-Mot), there appeared an essay by Asaf Inbari on the contribution of Religious Zionism to literature, art, and contemporary culture. As is his way, Inbari raises interesting points here too and presents arguments that merit discussion and thought. Here I will focus mainly on one point, and try to address it from a somewhat broader perspective.

A note on political influence

Just to get a marginal point off the table, let me begin by saying that Inbari argues that the political influence of Religious Zionism is incomparably greater than its cultural-artistic influence, and he laments this. I too regret the lack of cultural influence, but it seems to me that if he sees political influence, that is only his own projection. In my view, there is no group in the country with less influence on the political plane than the Religious-Zionist public. Its influence is almost nonexistent. Moreover, my impression is that its cultural influence, though fairly small, is incomparably greater than its political influence.

I think the impression of decisive political influence is created by Haaretz-style demonization, which vastly exaggerates the political influence of the religious public (coercion, settlement, and the rest of the usual bogeymen). Nada. These are fantasies with no basis. Religious influences on Israeli society and politics are created mainly by the Haredim, with Religious Zionism usually tagging along behind them (unfortunately). Settlement influence existed once and is gone now (beyond what already exists and is maintained by right-wing rule). Even in this sphere, in my opinion, nothing different would happen without the Mizrachi types in the government. Just notice who is on the platforms at right-wing rallies and who is in the audience (on the platform there is not one kippah, and in the audience there is not one uncovered head). It seems to me that today the main influence lies in concern for the Mizrachi crowd's own small, sectoral patch, and the results of the last elections prove this a hundred times over. We have returned to the old National Religious Party (even if not in slogans, on the ground that is exactly what it is). Incidentally, they also prove that even within the religious public there is no real pretension to influence beyond the sector.

Inbari's claims in a nutshell

Inbari makes two main claims:

1. The contribution of Religious Zionism to art and culture is very much needed.

This is mainly because of the thinning undergone by secular art, which is becoming increasingly detached from its Jewish and national roots. Once there were secular creators (Bialik, for example) who were rooted in the past and created in the present. This continued with Grossman and Amos Oz, writers with strong biblical and Hebrew roots, but today there are almost no young people like that. The Haredi world does not engage in artistic creation, and therefore he argues that this is a natural role for Religious Zionism. Agnon, Kurzweil, and others are each classified by him, somewhat tendentiously, as not Religious-Zionist (Kurzweil, for example, is a 'liberal kippah-wearer').

2. In practice, this contribution barely exists.

Inbari argues that most Religious-Zionist creation is devoted to reading Torah sources—that is, it deals with the past rather than the present and is tainted by sectoralism. Another contribution is the production of books, films, and poetry, which likewise have a 'sectoral' character. There is no significant contribution to general culture.

The responses

I am very careful not to be dragged into the whining and hurt feelings that these remarks almost invite. To be sure, there are quite a few errors in what he writes (such as the superficial analysis he offers of Rabbi Sherlo's remarks, a tendentious and biased analysis of various phenomena, and several more specific points), but first of all one has to admit honestly that there is a good deal of justice in what he says. It seems to me that there are still no creators of truly outstanding stature in the Religious-Zionist public. At least not creators who are recognized as such, and therefore, at least on the practical plane, it is true that the influence is not great.

This essay has sparked a discussion that is only just beginning, but even now it has already borne several interesting fruits, and I expect more will follow. A considerable portion of the responses I have seen takes an apologetic line—that is, it offers explanations for the situation (and also levels accusations, not without basis, against secular people who exclude religious creativity). Another response I read to Inbari's remarks, that of Nadav Halperin, actually agrees and attributes the matter to the difficulty of producing, within a religious world, writing that is free of constraints and not 'mobilized.' He therefore pins his hopes on ex-religious writing (which can also be produced by religious writers). Another fine response, by Amnon Dukov, points among other things to Inbari's secular begging-the-question assumption, which treats the renewal and revitalization of Torah as an engagement with the past. A religious person sees such engagement as entirely concerned with the present. Both also point out that there is exclusion, intentional and otherwise, of religious creativity, and that it is hard to cultivate significant creativity without supportive infrastructure (budget, publicity, encouragement, study and guidance, and so on). Beyond that, there is of course the dedication of effort and energy to Torah study, for which there is no equivalent in any other group, and this naturally comes at the expense of creative and artistic activity. There is also, of course, a difference in educational emphases in schools and educational institutions, stemming from various reasons that do not exist in the secular sector (yes, that too is a sector), such as the built-in fears of openness and freedom without restraints. Beyond that, one must take into account the relatively short time that the Religious-Zionist public has been involved in these media at all (ripening and maturation take time), so it is still too early to expect more impressive results, and so on.

All these are valid claims, but in my opinion there is something deeper and more fundamental here, something that has more to do with art and artistic judgment than with understanding the religious world and its relations with the secular world. I think that first and foremost Inbari is not precise in his conception of artistic creation and of its judgment and evaluation.

On the criterion of universality

Inbari assumes, almost casually, that art of value must be universal. Therefore, in his view, even if literature is created that has local, sectoral value, it cannot be considered significant art (such as the books of Rabbi Haim Sabato, for example, which Inbari claims are overrated in the religious world). At the same time, he laments the over-universal character of secular literature and culture, which is becoming detached from its Jewish roots. That is, he acknowledges that literature created in the universal sphere usually lacks depth and meaning. It seems that the literature for which he longs must satisfy two demands: that it spring from deep Jewish-particular sources, and at the same time possess universal significance. Is there a contradiction between the two? I argue that there is not.

This requires me to distinguish between two meanings of the term 'universal' that are at play in this discussion: 1. Literature should deal with phenomena that have universal significance—matters that say something to every person in every culture. 2. Literature should be accessible and understandable to every person from every culture. There is a difference between these two meanings. For example, Agnon is not fully understandable to someone who is unaware of the Jewish-Torah context in and out of which his writing emerges. But once one succeeds in penetrating the wall of context (language, terminology, modes of reference and thought, textual associations), any person can find in him things that speak to his own world. Thus Agnon does not fully meet the demand of universality 2, but he certainly meets demand 1.

It is important to understand that the distinction between these two meanings parallels the two demands Inbari makes of literature with meaning and depth: its springing from particular sources sometimes makes it inaccessible (that is, not universal in sense 2), and consequently it becomes impossible to discern its universal qualities even if it does possess them (that is, even if it is universal in sense 1).

It is no accident that the examples Inbari gives of contemporary Torah creativity are Rabbi Lichtenstein, Rabbi Brands, and Rabbi Benny Lau. All of these create in a language and conceptual world that are accessible to any person, and not only to someone steeped in the terminology and classical Jewish-Torah modes of thought. In my terms, they satisfy universality in sense 2, and therefore he succeeds in seeing in them universality in sense 1 as well (though with reservations, from his point of view). But if there are works that do not satisfy demand 2, then even if they contain immense universal significance in sense 1, Inbari and those like him will sometimes fail to see it. That does not mean that the universal literary and artistic value is not there, only that it is not necessarily accessible to every reader.

One must understand that the barrier is not only one of terminology and language. It involves connotations and sources of inspiration, wordplay, affinities and context, and of course human and conceptual nuances as well. It involves ways of thinking and values, the meaning assigned to various actions and thoughts in a given society, and much more. All of these grow increasingly distant from the general secular reader, and therefore a work written in a religious context naturally appears to him less and less universal. But he does not always notice that this is a lack of universality in sense 2, not necessarily in sense 1.

It seems to me that even Agnon, whose literary value is beyond dispute, has lost much of his radiance in recent years, and not for nothing. In the past, his language and contexts were accessible to quite a few people, not necessarily religious. Rabbi Sabato, whom Inbari claims—contrary to what people think—has succeeded mainly in the religious world, operates in a different world. Today many young people will not be able to enjoy his works because of their linguistic and other inaccessibility. This does not necessarily testify to essential differences between him and Agnon (without arguing the substantive issue here). Even Agnon today probably would not succeed as he did in his own time.[1]

Who is out of touch here?

I am reminded now of an article by Tom Segev written after the funeral of Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach. He relates that he saw the funeral of an anonymous person whose name he had never heard, and neither had his friends (and we are speaking of intelligent, educated people who are thoroughly familiar with Israel and Israeli society), and to his astonishment he discovered that behind the bier of this 'anonymous' man walked some three hundred thousand people (about 5% of the country's population), broken and weeping. The fact is that the Haredim do not know the secular celebrities, and the secular do not know the Haredi celebrities. But he writes that it is not clear who is really out of touch here—the secular or the Haredim. This is a clear example of inaccessibility that prevents recognition of a person's qualities or of the universal meanings that exist in a text.

Moreover, in my view the religious know secularity better than the secular know religiosity. For several reasons there is an asymmetry between the two sides, since secular language and culture are more familiar to the religious than religious language and culture are to the secular. This is also because the public sphere is dominated by secular discourse and numerically there is a secular majority, but also because every religious person has a secular ground floor with an additional religious floor built on top of it, whereas the secular person remains on the ground floor (this is the thesis of 'the empty wagon,' which, despite all the protests and sobbing of political correctness, cannot change that logical fact).

This reminds me of an incident from the period of Ehud Barak's election campaign, when I was teaching at the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham. One fine day we were informed that this fellow wanted to come speak with the students and staff of the yeshiva. For those who remember, his motto in that election campaign was anti-right-wing and, even more so, extremely anti-religious. Huge billboards explained to the public that the religious and the right-wing were leeches, and that Ehud Barak would not give in to them. I tried to persuade people not to agree to his visit to the yeshiva, but my view was rejected on the grounds that it was important that he hear us firsthand. The man came to the yeshiva, fed us the same shallow slogans that we could read every day, all day, under every leafy tree, but all the while we waited patiently for the turn of the head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Blumentzweig, to say his piece. Ehud Barak cannot really hear his views in the media, and so it was reasonable that his words would be the main point of this discussion. Rabbi Blumentzweig spoke with great moderation, as was his way, and after five minutes one of Barak's aides got up and cut him off, claiming that the campaign had to continue and that, 'regrettably,' they had to leave.

In the wake of this I was truly seething, and for the sake of the hearts of some readers and of my friends from the Yeruham yeshiva, I will not detail here what I wrote and what I did then. In any case, after the uproar I explained to the students of the yeshiva why I had been so angry. I saw Ehud Barak (who in my eyes is a pathetic person devoid of any depth or human quality) sitting next to Rabbi Blumentzweig (a man whose sound judgment and depth I value very highly) and speaking as though the whole world were filled with his glory and his intellect (for which, as noted, my admiration is very limited), while Rabbi Blumentzweig, who in my eyes is a man of true stature, sat quietly at his side, and even when he spoke, he did so in a modest, measured, understated way that did not allow anyone who was not among his students and acquaintances to understand his significance. And in the end he was not even able to say what he had to say.

What angered me most was that this is really a model for what also happens in the public sphere. There too there may be people of immense depth and breadth, except that this is not accessible to the broader public. People on the street do not understand their analytical and other abilities, nor their human height and depth. These are expressed in innovative Torah interpretations, in modesty, in analyzing reality through Torah tools, in character and a simple way of life, and the like. Sometimes this even appears to many secular people, and to quite a few religious ones as well, as an archaic, primitive, and shallow world. Any idiot who speaks in foreign academic jargon is considered an intellectual and a creator of real stature, while people whose little finger is thicker than his loins receive no appreciation at all, mainly because their teaching is not accessible. And then, of course, they tell me that only secular people possess depth and meaning. That's laughable…

Implications for the claims of exclusion

One must understand that if there were a plot here, it might actually be easier to deal with it. But in my view, in most cases what we are dealing with is innocent conduct, and that makes coping with it much harder. From what I have described so far, it emerges that the exclusion mentioned above is rooted mainly in inaccessibility, which causes people not to notice the existence of high-quality material. An Orthodox film is not universal and is therefore perceived as unsuccessful and unworthy of funding. Literature or poetry built on nuances that are not understood by someone unfamiliar with the folds of religious culture and language naturally appear to him devoid of value. Incidentally, in the political and academic context too, exclusion and discrimination are often not intentional. There are groups in whose eyes a person with conservative worldviews is simply an unintelligent person, and therefore naturally and in good faith they do not promote him and do not recognize his qualities. They genuinely think he is unworthy. My claim is that this is blindness more than exclusion, but that actually makes the situation worse.

A note on walls in the global village

Despite the feeling that we live in a global village, it turns out that even in our global village there is still a wall (a natural one, and as noted usually an unintentional one) between the different publics, and it is very hard to breach it. Many accuse the religious of not opening themselves to general culture, but for some reason secular people who understand nothing at all of the religious and Torah world are perfectly fine. After all, they are not a sector (just as Hungarians or Poles are not an ethnic community—only Moroccans or Iraqis are), and therefore their creation is universal by definition. Everyone else has to adapt themselves to them in order to be considered creators of significance. It does not occur to Inbari that perhaps, in order to encounter the universal dimensions in religious literature, secular people too must draw closer to it, and not merely demand that the religious come to them and speak their language.

As an example of this wall, I will mention something that happened to me personally. When I finished writing my book Two Wagons, I sent the manuscript to several major publishers, and explained that this was a philosophical book and not a text dealing with Judaism. Most of them did not bother to answer, but I did receive a response from one publisher saying that they had recently published a similar book and so at the moment it was not right for them. I was quite surprised. I thought my book was unique, and I assumed I would know of a similar book that had come out at the same time, so I asked the editor who had made the decision (and claimed to have read the manuscript) what he meant. He replied that they had intended Levi Yitzhak Yerushalmi's book The Knitted Kippah. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I assume they never bothered even to open the manuscript of some Orthodox fellow writing Torah material.

But that is not the end of the story. When the book came out (through the Beit El Library) and sold surprisingly well in the religious public, and was read on an even more surprising scale (again, almost only in the religious public), I am repeatedly surprised to discover that almost no secular person has ever heard of it. It was a bestseller by the standards of the religious public, yet secular people had never heard of it. As stated, the book is not a religious or Jewish book, but a text dealing with general philosophical questions of truth, skepticism, and certainty, which trouble quite a few people (mainly young people) from all groups. And yet none of them had heard of it. Needless to say, the wall of Haaretz was impossible to breach at all (I sent three copies to three different people connected with the editorial board, and I knew them personally. At that time I was well known to the editorial board from my responses to their books supplement. Apparently that was part of the problem).[2] I do not mean to lament here, but only to illustrate that same wall, intentional or not, which prevents creation produced in the religious public from reaching the broader public and influencing it.

Revealing the universal from the particular

In the postmodern age we are not inclined to accept claims about objective artistic value. But the whole discussion here assumes that such value exists. Inbari determines which works have value and which do not, without presenting criteria. On what basis does he determine that works created in the Religious-Zionist world are not such works? Perhaps his criteria are biased and dependent on culture and context? Seemingly, one could argue against him that his claim assumes that artistic value is whatever is based on his own standards, and therefore, by definition, a work of high artistic value cannot arise in a cultural world different from his own. But I, as one who is skeptical of postmodernism and assumes that some works are better and some worse and not everything depends on context and culture, actually accept his assumption. Even so, it is important here to put a finger on a fundamental distinction that, in my view, greatly confuses our postmodern cousins.

My claim is that the artistic value of a work cannot be measured independently of perspective and context, and yet works do have artistic value that does not depend on them. How can this be? To explain, let us take as an example a good joke, such as the one that asks how many synagogues a Jew living on a deserted island needs. The answer is (forgive the cliché) two: one to pray in, and the other not to pray in. This battered joke, before it became so battered, was a very successful and pointed joke (which is why it gets battered so often). But it is clear that someone who is not immersed in religious Jewish culture will not really understand it in depth. You can explain the point to him, and he will probably even understand, but he will not laugh. That is, he will not really grasp the depth of its meaning. The connotation that accompanies this joke is part of it and part of its meaning. Does that mean that this joke has no objective humorous value? I think not. It certainly has such value, and it exists in relation to every person, even though it will not be accessible to most people (those who are not immersed in religious Jewish culture). What I mean is that if a person manages to step into Jewish cultural shoes, he will understand the joke, and then he too will recognize its value and full meaning. In other words, my claim is that this value and meaning are objective and universal, and the problem is only accessibility. Therefore any person who crosses the barrier of accessibility will also be able to appreciate the meaning and humorous value of this joke.

If I return to the analogy, my claim is that the religious Jewish context is only the medium through which the humorous value is conveyed, and without it one cannot recognize that value. But once one understands and internalizes this medium (overcoming non-universality 2), one discovers the universal value (in sense 1) that it contains.

The same, I argue, is true of works of art or literature: recognition of the medium within which the creation takes place is required, with all its nuances. But once we have overcome this difficulty, we can discover the universal artistic value of the work. Of course, this is not black and white. The more we know the medium, the more folds hidden in the work we will uncover, and the more we will be able to appreciate it. Therefore a work of very high artistic value may be appreciated by knowledgeable people on different levels because of their different degrees of familiarity with the medium within which it takes place and is created.

An analogy for this is logic. A logical inference derives a conclusion from several premises. The validity of the inference does not depend on the truth of the premises or of the conclusion, but only on the connection between them. Moreover, the same inferential structure can appear through several different media. Thus, for example, the inference 'All frogs have wings, the chair next to me is a frog, therefore it has wings' derives a false conclusion from false premises, but the inference is valid. The logic of the argument does not depend on the premises or on the conclusion, but only on the relation between them. The propositions that make up the argument (the premises and the conclusion) are only the medium through which the argument reaches us. A person from another culture who does not know what chairs, wings, or frogs are can learn the nature of that very same logical inference through a completely different argument, for example: 'All clouds are made of copper, the grass next to me is a cloud, therefore it is made of copper.' This is an argument with the same logical structure, and therefore it contains the same logical content. But that logical content itself is conveyed here through a wholly different medium.

This reminds me of a story I saw in Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery. Herrigel was a German professor of philosophy in the early twentieth century who stayed with a friend who was a Japanese professor of law at the University of Tokyo. He asked him to introduce him to a Zen master so that he could study with him. When Herrigel came to the master, the latter asked whether he wanted to learn flower arranging, target shooting with bow and arrow, or swordsmanship. Herrigel replied that he wanted none of these. His goal was to study Zen. The master explained that he understood this perfectly well, but that is how one studies Zen. One person does it through flower arranging, another through fencing, or through archery, but in all these contexts one learns the very same thing. Swordsmanship or flower arranging are only different kinds of medium through which that same abstract message itself (= Zen) is transmitted. It is entirely possible that one person will grasp the message better through flower arranging, while his friend grasps it mainly through archery. They learn the same thing, which has the same meaning and the same value, but they do so through a different medium and a different cultural and conceptual world. Had the first person learned it through archery, he might not have descended to the full meaning of the Zen he learned, because that context does not speak to him. See also my remark here on Bach's genius and Column 143 in general, as well as my lecture on Jewish law (about which too I make a similar claim).

And back to our subject: my claim is that a work created and taking place in an entirely different environment may not be understood by a reader who stands outside that context, and then he will be unable to discover its artistic value and its full meaning, even if it has both on a very high level. To extract the universal meanings of a work, one must understand well the particular medium within which it is created and occurs.

Clearly, there are quite a few works created in foreign and strange cultures whose readers can nevertheless stand on their artistic value (such as, for example, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and many others like it). This is especially true today, when the global village allows us to understand at least a bit of the context. And still, it is clear that familiarity with the nuances can dramatically improve our understanding and appreciation of a work. Someone who knows the medium and context well will be able to find in that work additional qualities and meanings that will remain blocked to us as outsiders. Moreover, even if there is a writer who is not endowed with the ability to translate the culture within which he lives and works for foreign readers, if he creates something of great significance only for members of his own group, this still does not mean that the work is not of high artistic value. Even if it is not universal in sense 2, it can still be universal in sense 1.

Summary: the connection between Inbari's two claims

To conclude, I return to Inbari. He is right that accessibility is important if there is to be cultural influence on general society. He is wrong in his claim (at least in the subtext) that because of their particularity these works lack universal artistic value (in sense 1). It is important to make the creation accessible to broad audiences, but that is not a necessary condition for its being of high, even universal, artistic value. The conclusion is that the way to improve the situation is not necessarily by bringing religious creators closer to the secular world of concepts and context, but no less by bringing the secular reader closer to the world within which these works are created, live, and take place. Without that, however much we move closer from the other direction, it will be impossible to understand the full quality and meaning of these works. And again, I do not mean to say that the Religious-Zionist public has creators of the quality of Dostoevsky or Amos Oz. I do not know that. My main claim is on the level of principle.

What emerges from my remarks here is that there is a connection between Inbari's two claims, and it seems to me that Dukov too noted this in his own way. The fact that there is no significant religious creation (his claim 2) is connected to the fact that it is needed (his claim 1), and this is because of the thinning of the secular spirit. As we have seen, these are probably two sides of the same coin, and they parallel Inbari's two demands of meaningful Jewish creation (that it arise from within the particular context and remain connected to it, yet speak to every reader). As stated, the obvious way out is not necessarily the religious creator's drawing closer to secular language and the secular world, but no less the secular world's drawing closer to religious language and culture, which will enable it to uncover further universal dimensions from among the folds of the particular medium.

There is much more to discuss here, but my aim was to focus on this specific point. As stated, it touches more on the question of what art is and how one encounters it than on the question of relations between religious and secular people. My claim is that Inbari's article is not entirely mistaken. As noted, in my view there is much justice in it, and yet I think that in its subtext there lies not only a misunderstanding of the religious world, but no less a misunderstanding of what art is, what sort of universality it requires, and how that universality must specifically be extracted from a particular context.

[1] I have always been astonished at how the members of the Nobel Prize committee managed to understand Agnon's power and qualities. How can one translate that without missing far too many nuances and meanings?!

[2] Incidentally, in that case I tend to assume that it really was intentional and tendentious. Even my books published by Yedioth, which were aimed at a general audience and were not presented as books about Judaism, were not reviewed in Haaretz, except for God Plays Dice, which received a review that proves the reviewer did not even bother to get past the cover (which did not prevent him from speaking of his disappointments with the book).