Schechter News | In the Media

"Hundred Stones as Big as a Handful" by Israeli artist Maya Cohen Levi, a participant in the SIJS Artists' Bet Midrash

A new Israeli program hopes to bridge the divide between artists and religion

When Barbara Adler was an art student in Israel she was disappointed that the only art which felt "Israeli" came from the few local Druse and Arab students. "They did work that reflected their background and their relationship to the land," she says. "But the Jewish students didn't." Adler had chosen Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem because she wanted to learn in a place where she could express her identity as an Israeli and a Jew. "When I brought it up, they were cynical, they said that talking about Jewish identity was so Diaspora-ish," she says.

During the 1980s when Adler was studying at Bezalel, the American Jewish community started to re-engage with its own histories and traditions, following on the heels of the new multicultural movements on university campuses. The American art scene slowly followed suit. In Israel, the public was more resistant - until recently. As the question of what is Jewish and Israeli art has become more relevant, new art programs were started at a few religious high schools and colleges, and art and Judaism seminars were launched at some colleges, universities, and synagogues.

In 2000, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem launched the country's first comprehensive center to teach Judaism and the arts beyond Judaica to MA students, artists, and the public. Scholars from leading art and academic institutions around the country helped with planning, betting on a revolution. They hope that religious texts and traditions can serve as inspiration for Jewish Israeli art. They also hope to inspire scholars to use traditional sources to validate creative expression. The center's first master's students and artists are now graduating, but can they rise to the challenge?

In 1989, more than eight decades after its founding, Israel's foremost academy of art hired its first lecturer on Jewish philosophy of aesthetics. "I arrived at a point where the Israeli art world was totally divorced from Judaism," says Bezalel Prof. Nadine Schenkar, who has tried to bridge the divide. Last year, two architecture students explained before a Bezalel judging panel that their final projects were related to Jewish thought.

"It was remarkable that the judges gave them very high marks," says Schenkar. "In the years that I've been at Bezalel, they were against everything Jewish. Everyone at the school is secular. It's true Bezalel is not a yeshiva, but the teachers are very cultured in other fields of philosophy but not Jewish philosophy. They don't know about it and you could even say they were anti-religion."

Bezalel, named for the first Jewish artisan, was founded in part with a vision of creating a national Jewish style, but the artists and educators changed with the times. David Cassuto, architect and editor of the collection of essays Judaism and Art, echoes a modernist ideology prevalent at Bezalel and some international art circles that art should be only about art. "Twenty-first-century art forgot the nationality behind the object of art. You normally don't find a Jewish attitude in the fine arts - and there is no reason to have one. It's decadent. Art should not have political or moral manifestos, it should be about form."

Beyond art ideology, Israelis have also been notoriously divided between religious and secular, a division reflected in the art world. "Even when Israeli artists started to become more interested in working with Jewish content, the art establishment was less interested," says Emily Bilski, a curator. "Some artists who worked with Jewish content were received more favorably abroad."

In the early 1980s, U.S. campuses faced a pluralistic revolution. As the multiculturalism movement became trendy, Jewish students noticed that they were becoming knowledgeable about other cultures and philosophies, but their own philosophers were completely absent. Since then, the American Jewish community has seen a renewal of interest in all things Jewish, including art. In Israel, only recently has the public agenda included a debate on whether Judaism should have a place in public education. Proponents, including Education Minister Limor Livnat, argue that the study of Jewish ethics, philosophies, legends, laws, and traditions should become more accessible and fun. Now art historians and theologians, too, are taking another look at the Israeli art world and wondering if there isn't a dearth of Jewish content and identity in film, theater, dance, music, art, architecture, and poetry. Schenkar, who says the attitude in the Israeli art world to Judaism is changing only slowly, has been urging a return to the idea that Judaism and the arts are compatible. She started leading Jewish aesthetics seminars around the country several years ago in addition to teaching at Bezalel. Last year she joined the Schechter Institute's staff.

"The way Israeli schools teach Bible and Talmud is so ridiculous. They are among the deepest books on earth and yet they are taught like children's stories," she says. "We discovered there is no divorce between Judaism and art, and teaching this can have a very positive influence on both art and Judaism."

Joining a team of theologians and academics from all the major universities, working under the guidance of curators, the Schechter Institute is offering Israel's first master's program in Judaism and the arts. Courses include aesthetics in Bible and Jewish law; Judaism and art in ancient times; aesthetics in modern Jewish thought; liturgy as theater, and the study of Judaism in music, poetry, dance, art, and film.

Barbara Adler

Back in school, 16 years after graduating from Bezalel, Adler has signed up for the MA program to supplement her own painting and teaching. The universalistic approach to art she learned in the Eighties cut out Jewish identity as well as Israeli identity, she says. "And it's not just in the art schools. Jewish values are missing from Israeli education. They are shunned, ignored, or left to extremists."

Now Adler says she is searching for Jewish inspiration for her work and has found it. "There is no lack of material and metaphors in Jewish text to inspire us. If we don't find a connection between Judaism and living in Israel, and understand the long, continuous line here from the Bible until now, I don't see how we can hold onto a future here."

Barbara Adler The 30 students in the program, and the dozens of others who take courses, reflect diverse backgrounds. Orthodox students look to understand the place of art in traditional Judaism; Conservative and Reform students look for new kinds of inspiration; and secular students look to their roots to expand their own vocabularies.

Painter Orit Arfa is studying Torah and Talmud with the hope of redefining female role models, she says. "There are sources for inspiration that show women, including the matriarchs, in a unexplored light." Most recently Arfa painted a portrait of biblical Rebekah in a way she describes as sensual. "People looking for models of righteousness, modesty, and prissiness find it. But I find in the text models for self-reliance, strength, intelligence, and questioning."

Teacher Jo Milgrom likes students to look at classical paintings on biblical themes to see the different ways artists have interpreted abstract ideas. "What does revelation look like?" she sometimes asks her students. Milgrom, who at age 60 started creating art assemblages based on biblical themes and midrash, says she wants to help Israelis "create a relationship with the treasures of Jewish civilization."

Israel Museum's chief curator Yigal Tzalmona, who is on the Schechter Institute's Center for Judaism and the Arts Steering Committee, is hopeful. "This is important work to help rejoin the Jewish body and spirit."

Alice Shalvi, who heads the center, had her revelation in a synagogue four years ago. Lost in the Yom Kippur prayers, she made a surprising observation when the prayer leader stepped up to lead the avoda, detailing the High Priest's service of the Second Temple. As a Shakespeare scholar, the service suddenly reminded her of the great dramas she had studied and taught. "There was a theatrical entrance and exit, changes of costume, and interaction with a community which served as a chorus to his solo," she says."The ceremony ends with an apex of drama, as a symbolic scapegoat is sent out into the wilderness, like a catharsis. "This is a clear and strong theatrical moment," she says.

She turned her prayer book over, flipped back to the source of the service, and read the accompanying talmudic text. There it was in black and white, all the way back to talmudic times theatrical descriptions could be found: "There has always been a connection between Judaism and creative expression," she says. But they seemed to go their separate ways.

At the historical basis of the so-called divorce between Judaism and the arts is an ancient debate over the Second Commandment, which has recently been renewed. "Thou shall not create graven images" has been understood by some to warn against the worship of idols, and by others it is interpreted more literally to mean a ban on art.

The controversy was apparent right from the beginning. "[The commandment] is in the same book of Exodus, where it also says there should be cherubs on the Tabernacle," says Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber, who teaches Talmud at Bar-Ilan University, and also holds a degree in art.

Indeed, references to graven images can be found in Jewish texts and confirmed in archaeological findings dating back to the Temple and talmudic eras. Early Jewish synagogues, tombs, ritual objects, and coins were adorned with images of animals and plants.

The debate was often influenced by the Jewish community's relationship to foreign cultures. According to the Mishna tractate Avoda Zara, the talmudic sage Rabban Gamliel used to frequent a public bathhouse featuring a statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. It quotes him defending his actions, saying: "She came into my place, not I into hers. No one had said let us make a bathhouse as a decoration for Aphrodite, but let us make an Aphrodite as adornment for a bathhouse."

In Deuteronomy and in the Shulhan Aruch, there are passages differentiating between graven images that are treated as a god by others and those created for decorative purposes. Though Hellenistic images, such as the zodiac, found their way into a number of early Jewish mosaics, the fear of appearing to worship false idols did affect Jewish artisans in the Diaspora. In most Muslim states, Jews rarely portrayed people, following instead the tradition of the Muslim artisans, who used calligraphy and geometric design as their primary decorative motif. "They didn't want to seem 'less pious' than their neighbors," says Sperber.

In Christian countries where art served to represent religious ideals, some Jewish artisans hesitated to create figures. In the Renaissance, as art became less about the sacred, rabbis around Europe started permitting the use of portrait painting, and even sat for their own portraits. Soon after, Jewish artists in Europe began illustrating Jewish documents for private purposes in the home. Artists illustrated marriage contracts and books such as the story of Esther.

Archaeological findings from the First Temple period onwards, together with later ritual objects - kiddush cups, Hanukka lamps, Torah crowns - make up a vast majority of what is considered Judaica.

Though there is an impression that Judaism continues to be hostile towards the arts in general, photographs of rabbis, paintings with religious themes, and Israeli landscape pictures are found in haredi houses. One haredi rabbi, who asked not to be identified, says that as long as the viewer is not looking at or listening to anything immodest or breaks any Jewish law, there is no problem with enjoying art. There is, perhaps, more pressure on Jewish artists. Novelist Chaim Potok revealed in an interview that he had loved to paint, but that this was discouraged in his Orthodox family.

Although many Jews who became painters did not paint Jewish themes, some, such as Marc Chagall, Ben Shan and R.B. Kitag, did. Despite an opening up in art and religious communities, many university programs and museum collections that focus on Jewish art are primarily limited to archaeological findings and Judaica. And in the fields such as drama, film, dance, and music, experts also complain of a dearth of real Jewish or Israeli identity.

To counter this trend, last year the Schechter Institute launched the Beit Midrash for established artists. The first group of hand-picked artists are now exhibiting works based on their first year of study. The Beit Midrash did not encourage the artists in any particular direction, yet many of the artists' final projects underscored the relationship between their study and the current political and security situation.

"We are a part of the Jewish people so we have to examine our behavior and challenge ourselves," says painter Maya Cohen-Levi. Moved by the study of language and words, Cohen-Levi created three final projects based on text. Two were paintings of Torah and Talmud text superimposed on paintings of text of eyewitness testimonies of Palestinians, one who said his olives had been stolen, and another who said he was used as a human shield. Her third piece was a symbolic chessboard made of "flimsy" materials and set with rocks with news headlines painted on them. She describes the work as an illustration of "the game of what we do to them and what they do to us. At any moment the board we are playing on could just fall apart."

Inspired by the story of Jacob's ladder and reminiscent of the news clips of the Ramallah lynching, video artist Kobi Harel shot semi-abstract scenes of bodies being pulled up and down, expressing the tension and relationship between the cycle of life and the cycle of death. "The individual loses his identity within the collective [and] becomes a partner in the infinite cycle of death," he says.

Prize-winning poet Asher Reich comes from a different background to many of the other artists, most of whom grew up in secular communities. Growing up in the haredi Natorei Karta sect, Reich studied in yeshiva but ran away 40 years ago. "I know Jewish text but I miss studying Talmud. I am happy to return to the texts after all these years, but in a way where we are free to make interpretations, argue, ask questions. Nobody tells you how to think." Growing up in a haredi community turned him on to the Hebrew language, a love strengthened through his current studies. "Artists are divorced or blocked from Judaism. They are poor people because the Hebrew language until today is based on the source of the Bible," he says.

A poem he wrote was designed like a page of Talmud, with translations in Hebrew, English and Arabic, instead of multiple commentaries. In it he describes the worship of idols, the fall of man, and the recreation of false idols in the name of religion. "Too many people in Islam and Judaism do not understand the sources of their religion. But they mistakenly use the sources as justification for their violence," he says.

The question of what is Jewish art has not yet been answered. Gliksberg, the curator of the show (at the Konrad Adenauer Center at Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim), says the output of the artists at this point is less important than the input.

"I hope Jewish artists in Israel start a personal dialogue with Jewish culture."

Adler concurs, hoping that in future she won't have to seek out Druse and Arab artists to find works that relate to Israel, as she did in her student days. "When I go back to teaching full-time, I will encourage my students to understand and express their own identities. What does it mean to be Jewish and live in Israel? That's part of the work that Jewish Israeli artists have to do, in addition to the technical training."