The Kandinsky exhibit now showing at the Guggenheim displays the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality, the material and the non-material, and the artist and his subject. Kandinsky played all his life with the natural world and its representation in art, and more personal or abstract creations that existed apart from nature. The exhibit lays out three sequential stages of his art: "Impressions," based on real-life subjects; "Improvisations," spontaneous images taken from the subjective world of the inner artist, and "Compositions," premeditated forms developed by the artist through repeated studies.
We can map this three-fold schema onto Jewish cultural activity. The Jew becomes the artist, receiving and creating something. The question becomes the relation of the "artist," i.e. the teacher, or student, or community, to nature, i.e. Jewish culture and tradition.
Impressions consist of Jews making their Judaism based upon the nature of Judaism--its behaviors and beliefs, its ways of being. Rashi does that for a text; every traditionalist Jew does that. Ironically, impressions go both ways: nature maps itself onto its observers, affecting their lives visibly and invisibly; in turn the Jew maps herself onto nature, changing it via her re-presentation of it. Things change and they stay the same, seemingly. Every culture intuitively possesses and requires this immediate, often unstated connection of the artist to external reality, the individual to the group, the member to her tradition. We read words in a Jewish book and that act of reading guides, if not determines our impressions.
We improvise, too. We stand outside of the sacred circle; our immediate self, conscious and unconscious, often compels us more than an organic link to Jewish nature that we may lack in the first place. We create our Judaism from a deeper, more personal place, an infinitely more subjective feeling leaves us in a more uncertain, liminal relation to "Judaism." We may dispense with the words of a prayer book altogether, or the words may transport us to fresh images from our inner lives, barely if at all connected to the classical ideas the words meant to convey.
Most radically, we compose. We may purposefully create new rituals (speaking of museums, the Jewish Museum in NYC now has an exhibit on that subject!). One could argue that Zionism represents that for Jews. Rather than rituals tied to religion and a mythologized history, we now create civil religions tied to everyday realities of politics, state, society and a reality-based history.
Which of these is most authentic? Is that even a good question? Authenticity, i.e. being true to oneself, is, as Lionel Trilling wrote, a shallower approach to morality and to culture than a sincere desire to see oneself as part of something larger than oneself, which is what a tradition forces us to engage.
I thought a lot about this on our long family trip over winter break, visiting my wife's elderly relatives. Her two uncles were both born in Poland, during WWI. One became a rabbi who served a congregation in Burlington, Vermont, for over half a century. The other became a hazzan in suburban Philadelphia, also for over half a century. The rabbi passed away this year; the hazzan stills leads davening at the small Orthodox shul in Ventnor, N.J. I thought about what made these two men special, aside from their sheer goodness and talents.
I realized that they stood out, to me and I'm sure to the thousands of people whom they've touched, because of where they stand in relation to tradition. They live effortlessly inside of a Judaism that constitutes a life system. They each had their own particular take on it, one more liberal than the other intellectually and otherwise, but that's besides the point. No gap separates them from Judaism, no gap separates them from that "nature." Religion isn't a sphere of life, it can only be artificially reduced to an activity. A religious person, like an artist, lives both consciously and unconsciously inside of nature. The techniques of religion just physically express this deeper connection.
A connection now exists for me between these men and the Kandinsky art. To live with moral, intellectual, spiritual sincerity is to be at home with a deep tradition, one that demands as much as it provides. If one is fortunate enough to live such a life of substance and purpose, one can make an art out of one's life, practicing any and all modes of creativity: impressions, improvisations and compositions. It remains, as it has always been, about the freedom and dignity of the self in dialogue with the seriousness of the nature around us, the traditions that nurture us.
--David Starr
Dr. David B. Starr is Vice President for Community Education, Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Dean of Me'ah.