The Artist's Torah

V’zot ha-B’rakhah: Going Back, Going Forward

(Deuteronomy 33:1 – 34:12)

Parashat V’zot ha-Brakhah is the end of a long journey.  We have now read all of the Five Books of Moses, dozens of parashiyot, encountering countless characters and stories, following the Israelites as they wander and wander toward the promised land – and here they are ready to enter at last.  Yet we also know that it’s as much a beginning as an end.  Each year at the holiday of Simhat Torah we read the end of this final parasha – and then we read the beginning of the very first parasha in Genesis.  Before the Israelites even set foot into the land, before they complete their journey, we return to where we started, and we begin our journey all over again.  At first glance, this might seem like a bizarre anticlimax; we’ve come this far and we’re just going to circle back to the beginning?  On second thought, though, most readers start nodding their heads in recognition.  This is, after all, pretty much how life works.

It’s no wonder that choreographer Meredith Monk once said, “I don’t think of my work as a line.  I always think of spirals or cycles”; a line would take us into the Promised Land and bring us to a full stop there, but spirals and cycles bring us back to the work – and is the work ever truly done, truly complete?  We tend to define being an artist not as having created but as being a person who is in the habit of creating.  It is, by definition, ongoing.  According to novelist Walter Mosley, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day….You don’t go to a well once but daily.  You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning.  Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse.”  Conceptual artist Eva Hesse was so committed to her work that she continued to create sculptures even from her deathbed.  She had already achieved a great deal by then, but nonetheless, rather than resting on those accomplishments she always found herself starting at the beginning of a new piece.

This can be a scary thought, the thought that one is forever beginning again.  Is there no change, no growth, no development?  Of course there is.  When Monk talked about “spirals” she was talking about something that both circles and moves in a direction.  Consider the experience of going through the Torah again every year.  I can tell you that, in the experience of many, this text is new each time we encounter it.  But how can that be?  We’ve read these parashiyot before; we know these characters and stories.  What’s changed, of course, is the reader.  Consider the analogy of prayers which we repeat regularly in synagogue.  According to Rabbi Reuven Hammer, “Of course, the main thing that is ‘new’ is oneself.  Depending on my thoughts, my mood, my feelings, my existential situation of the moment, what I say, no matter how many times I have said it before, takes on new meaning.”  Even when we engage with the same material again and again, we are not static, because we are changing and our understanding is growing.  Similarly, there is a kind of accumulation that comes through Monk’s spiraling.  Visual artist Judy Chicago said, “The more I grow as a person, the larger my ideas become, & the larger the framework I have to build to accommodate those ideas.”  In this way you move forward even as you go back.

Now, of course it’s not quite accurate to say that the journey never ends.  Ask Moses, who dies not only before the Israelites enter the land but also before the Torah ends, before we return to its first verses again.  In his death we see that even truly great people pass away before their work is finished.  At some point we get off this loop – done, without having completed what we meant to complete.  How do we face this?  The answer comes partly through a recognition that we are not alone in our work, and that there will be others to carry it on after we’re gone.  According to songwriter Bob Dylan, “Usually the way things go is that someone else comes out, out of the crowd, of considerable ability who can cover what you’re doing and take it another step.”  In fact, usually they’re waiting eagerly for the opportunity.  Author Norman Mailer recognized that fact late in his career: “I think the younger writers are sick of Roth, Bellow, Updike and myself the way we were sick of Hemingway and Faulkner.  When I was a young writer we never talked about anyone but them, and that feeling grew into resentment.  Since they had no interest in us, we began to think, Yeah, they’re great – now get off the stage!  We want the lights on us!”

And so, like a lot of other things, it’s about acceptance – acceptance of the fact that we can’t do it alone in a single lifetime, anyway, and that we are fortunate enough to have allies in our struggles.  Eventually that acceptance can become generous indeed, as in the case of Dylan: “I don’t know what’s gonna happen when I’m not around to sing anymore.  I hope somebody else comes along who could pick up on what I’m doing and learn exactly what it is…that makes it quite different.  I keep looking for that somebody…not necessarily to cover me, but to take it a step further.”  In the meantime, though, there’s work to do.  Whatever we’ve done, there is always the need to return to the beginning, to the task at hand.  As the Mishneh tells us, It is not incumbent on you to finish the work, but neither are you free to abstain from it.  And tell the truth – would you really want the freedom to abstain?

 

One other thing: For me this is the end of one journey.  After a full, rich year of posting these commentaries on The Artist’s Torah, it’s time for me to turn my attention to other things – like pulling all of this together into a book, for starters.  (Anybody know any likely publishers?)  It’s been a pleasure to share these thoughts with all of you.  May your work and your life be vibrant with meaning and creativity!

Ha-azinu: Success

(Deuteronomy 32:1 – 32:52)

In 2001 I was on a roll.  I had been submitting my work to literary magazines for six years by then, and in all that time I had published just five short stories and no poems at all – but things changed in 2001.  From December 2000 through September of 2001 – only nine months in all – three stories and three poems were accepted for publication, and one story was selected to be read dramatically in a theatrical production.  All of a sudden it felt like I had figured the game out, had conquered the publication world.  I would meet someone at a party and, after introducing myself as a writer and getting the question that always comes in response to that – “Are you published?” (how unhelpful and off-the-point this question is!) – I would sigh a contented sigh and say something like, “Oh, sure.  The big thing for me now is to get the book in print, now that I don’t have any problem publishing individual stories and poems.”  You can see where this story is going.  After that last acceptance in September of 2001, I got nothing but rejection letters until June of 2003 – twenty-one straight months of nothing but rejection letters.  Over those dry months I became, as you can imagine, increasingly distraught.  It wasn’t as though rejection was a new idea for me – the typical writer who’s trying to get published receives rejections on a daily basis – but my string of successes had convinced me that maybe those old rules wouldn’t apply to me anymore.  I began to think I’d risen above it all.  In the twenty-one painful months that followed my burst of publications I realized that success had been far more dangerous to my well-being than rejection ever had been. 

Unfortunately, I am not alone in having this problem; this has been a troublesome part of human nature for a very long time.  For evidence of that, we need look no further than the Torah.  In Parashat Ha-azinu, Moses offers up a poem containing his final thoughts.  This is his last moment with the people before he climbs Mount Nebo to die, and it’s therefore the crucial moment to leave the people with the most essential wisdom he can give.  It’s significant, then, to see what he decides to focus on.  Much of the poem is a complaint against the Israelites’ ingratitude toward God.  Moses reminds everyone what God’s done for them – Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings,/ Gliding down to his young,/ So did He spread his wings and take [Israel],/ Bear him along on His pinions (Dt 32:11) – and then notes that the people met those acts of loving with thanklessness, that we grew fat and kicked—/…grew fat and gross and coarse (Dt 32:14). The poem goes on to describe the people seeking after other gods.  In other words, the very fact of having been given these gifts made us ungrateful for them, and left us only wanting more.  This is what Moses warns us about in his final words.  He has only one more chance to tell us what we needs to know, and he focuses not on how hard it is to respond to challenges but on how hard it is to respond to success.  That tells you how deep this issue runs in us.

It is, in fact, a constant struggle for many artists.  As we explored in the commentary on Parashat Mattot, the striving for material or social success can itself be destructive.  Here we see that it can be destructive to attain it.  Author Norman Mailer is an interesting study.  Rather than laboring for many years to get recognition, he became famous with his very first novel – The Naked and the Dead.  Mailer remained famous all his life, never really struggling seriously to get a book into print again.  Certainly many young writers would be happy to have such a big success so early on – yet they might want to consider the downside of Mailer’s story.  First of all, some might argue that he never again wrote a book more successful than that first.  What Mailer faced, then, was the problem of trying to maintain success, and trying to live up to his own hype – and dealing with the suffering that came when he couldn’t do these things.  He wrote: “Some writers receive not enough attention for years, and so learn early to accommodate the habits of their work to little recognition.  I think I could have done that when I was twenty-five.  With The Naked and the Dead a new life had begun, however.  I had gone through the psychic labor of changing a good many modest habits in order to let me live a little more happily as a man with a name which could arouse quick reactions in strangers….I had learned to like success – in fact I had probably come to depend on it, or at least my new habits did.” 

The problem is that the publishing world, the literary establishment and the reading public are fickle and unpredictable, and one can’t possibly hope to depend on ongoing adoration from any of them.  Mailer had unwittingly set himself up for a fall: “I’d taken myself a little too seriously after The Naked and the Dead.  Do that, and the book review world will lie in wait for you.  There are a lot of petty killers in our business.”  Coming down to earth is awfully hard after your successes float you up way too high for safety.  Mailer later wrote this about watching The Deer Park come out and seeing it do somewhat well in sales, but not incredibly well: “Like a starved revolutionary in a garret, I had compounded out of need and fever and vision and fear nothing less than a madman’s confidence in the identity of my being and the wants of all others, and it was a new dull load to lift and to bear, this knowledge that I had no magic so great as to hasten the time of the apocalypse but that instead I would be open like all others to the attritions of half-success and small failure.”  Mailer had to learn to deal with the fact that he was, after all, not much different from the rest of us, and that success (as defined by sales and reviews) was an absolutely undependable source of support.

Just as our striving for success can make us forget the point of our art, so can our attainment of success make us forget the point.  As Ecclesiastes would say, this too is vanity.  This, too, is a kind of idolatry that values the wrong thing and devalues the thing that is most crucial.  If we are not careful, what we lose is the work itself.  Successful artists – truly successful ones, in the best sense of the word – are the ones who don’t lose sight of the goal.  As painful as it was for Mailer to see his later books received less enthusiastically than his first one, he wrote them anyway – forty books total over his lifetime.  Ultimately he was able to develop some healthy perspective.  He wrote: “Getting a bad review these days in the Sunday Times affects my wallet.  My ego, however, remains relatively intact.”  As for me, I can’t claim that I feel just as happy in times when it’s hard to get things published as in times when it’s easy – but I can claim that, either way, I get up in the morning and get back to the original task of writing.  That, I think, is a measure of success I can believe in.

Louise Nevelson

On this date, September 22nd, in 1941, sculptor Louise Nevelson had her first solo show.  It was mounted in New York's Nierendorf Gallery, a prestigious gallery that had been known for showing well-known European artists.  Her work, plaster pieces heavily influenced by cubism, met with positive reviews in the art world, and this led to more exhibitions in the Nierendorf Gallery and elsewhere.  Certainly it was the beginning of a stellar career.  What’s interesting is that Nevelson was no early-twenties whiz kid when she got this major break; she had been working as an artist for years, and was already forty-one years old.

The Days of Awe

Tonight begins the first night of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish new year.  This holiday is joyous, but it isn’t about parties and Auld Lang Syne.  Instead it opens the Days of Awe in Judaism, a stretch of ten days that culminate in Yom Kippur – the day of atonement.  All in all, this is a time to think intensely about where we’ve been and where we’re going (themes I’ll be discussing at length in a few weeks in response to Parashat V’zot ha-Brakhah).  It’s a time to take careful note of our current course and to correct it if necessary – and it so often is necessary.  As people, we think about how we behave toward others, about whether we are living with integrity.  Certainly as artists, too, we might think about what our art does in the world and about our artistic integrity.  We wonder, too, about whether we’re properly examining our assumptions, our motivations and goals as artists. 

It’s fitting that Rosh Hashanah – a time for celebration – comes before the unsparing self-examination of Yom Kippur.  We do have a great deal to be thankful for; at the very least, we’ve made it to this moment, which is no small thing – and we recognize this first because we gain strength from celebration.  Then we can turn to the hard work of questioning ourselves.  At times, this can seem too earth-shaking to bear.  Chagall once worried about artists that are “afraid of plunging into chaos, of shattering, of turning upside down the familiar ground under our feet.”  Luckily, we have been here before.  There’s nothing to be afraid of, because we know what this intensity leads to: the fullness of the new year.  We celebrate, we walk through the gates of self-questioning, and we emerge into our promising future.  Having worked toward re-creation of the self, we are all the more ready to get back to the work of artistic creation that roots in that self, that finds its nourishment there.

Nitzavim-Va-Yeilekh: In Your Mouth and In Your Heart

(Deuteronomy 29:9 – 31:30)

There are many places of illuminating wisdom in the Torah – places where something crucial becomes clear.  For me, there is probably no brighter moment in this respect than the one we find in chapter 30, verses 11-14, of Parashat Nitzavim.  The people are assembled before Moses, hearing his final words, thinking about this covenant they’re entering with God and one another, listening to some pretty exciting promises of blessings (if the people live up to expectations) and some fairly daunting threats (if they don’t), and then Moses says this: Surely, this instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach.  It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?”  Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say: “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?”  No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.  This is, of course, a pep talk, a reassurance: you can do it!  It’s also, however, a statement about ownership.  Are the ideas of Torah in heaven?  You would think so, if heaven is where God dwells – but in fact the Torah is not in heaven but on earth, in the people themselves.  This wisdom and these commandments are rooted in human beings – not imposed on them.  These words are also a charge: this Torah is yours, and so all the more reason that you’d better take it on.  The minute that charge gets daunting, though, you can return to the sense of reassurance offered by these verses.  You can do this.  It’s yours.  You must, in fact, do it – and you can.

That tri-fold message of reassurance, ownership and obligation is a good message for artists to hear.  If the Torah is a map of engagement with creation, and artists turn to it to navigate their own creation, these verses – all aspects of them – become awfully relevant.

First of all, many potentially creative people struggle with the issue of entitlement.  Am I worthy of the arts?  Do I have a right to claim a place as an artist?  At times we all feel unworthy, but successful artists – those who do the creative work – are those who have found a way past this struggle.  The working artist claims a place for her- or himself.  Sometimes this takes the form of just doing the work without settling the entitlement question.  “You do it because you do it,” writer Natalie Goldberg has said.  Similarly, art historian Donald Kuspit referred to painter Chaim Soutine’s “radical naiveté” or even “defiant naiveté” – the artist instinctively doing things his way without concern for what the “old masters” might say.  In other cases, though, one makes a more explicit claim, as in the case of visual artist Judy Chicago: “What is art?  That is debated all the time.  I have a right to be thrown into the debate.”  According to psychologist Otto Rank (as summarized by art historian Laurie Lisle), “The first step in becoming an artist…is when one calls oneself an artist.”  Either way, doing it consciously or not, a working artist is someone who has overcome the entitlement problem.

To make your claim, you have to make the art form your own, to find it in your mouth and in your heart.  Composer and choreographer Meredith Monk describes her relationship to dance in this way: “I had to find my own style, my own way of thinking about movement, my own way of structuring in space.”  Many artists go through a process like this, figuring out how to take personal possession of a form that has been in the hands of so many before them.  Yet one of the central messages of this blog is that art is yours for the taking, is yours personally, is in fact already in you.

Perhaps more dauntingly, the other message is that you must claim your creative life.  Successful artists feel this urgency intuitively.  “I have to make Art,” wrote Chicago.  Composer Allen Shawn describes fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg as “an artist who hears a ‘call’ that others do not and has the obligation to heed this call.”  Now, some of you might be protesting, “Well, that’s Arnold Schoenberg.  What does that have to do with me?”  To my mind, what makes the difference for Schoenberg is not that he is called while others are not, but, just as Shawn suggests, he, unlike others, hears the call.  Presumably it’s out there for the rest of us, and not in the heavens, but close by, waiting for us to hear it.  In other words: You can do this.  It’s yours.  You must, in fact, do it – and you can.

Ki Tavo: First Fruits

(Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8)

In Parashat Ki Tavo we see Moses preparing the Israelites for their long-delayed entry into the promised land.  We are, of course, on the cusp of a moment of tremendous significance for this people, and Moses makes sure the people know it.  When they do enter the land, he tells them, they must give an offering to God for getting them there, and, specifically, they must offer up the first fruits of their harvests from the land (Dt 26:2).  Because this is such an important moment, it won’t do to offer other gleanings from the harvest – it has to be the first fruits.  But why?  As artists, we know that our first attempts are not necessarily our best.  Given that we see so many rough, rough drafts and unsatisfying initial sketches, it might seem strange to privilege the first fruits of someone’s labors.  Why not give the Israelites a whole growing season, or maybe more, to get the hang of things, and let them select the very best part of the yield?

Well, even if our early attempts aren’t as high quality as what we’ll produce later, they’re crucially important – more important than what we make in the long run.  This is probably why God implicitly privileges rough things when demanding, elsewhere in this parasha, that an important religious altar be built from unhewn stones (Dt 27:6) – stones that are imperfect, unrefined, uneven.  This is a statement of God’s values – God wants to be worshipped not from a place of perfection but from somewhere humbler.  But why value imperfection? 

Without a first fruit, without some rough thing to get things started and to show us how to do better, there will be no last fruit.  Trying to perfect one’s work before beginning is a creative dead end, and usually just another form of procrastination.  Sometimes you just have to get going.  As songwriter Bob Dylan once said, “You see, I spend too much of my time working out the sound of my records these days....I’ve got a lot of different records inside me, and it’s time just to start getting them out.”  In other words, better to create and keep creating than to waste your energy on perfectionism.

As a matter of fact, though, those firsts can sometimes be our best.  Writer Natalie Goldberg says that “first thoughts” “have tremendous energy,” because they come from “the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see and feel.”  Those first thoughts can be surprising, even alarming, but generally they are more fertile than the safer ideas that come once you’ve had time to think things through.  Dylan again: “I don’t spend a lot of time going over songs.  I’ll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts” – and those are, for the most part, his best-beloved songs.  The initial impulse can, in some cases, be more alive and better than what we make once we’ve refined things.  Perhaps for this reason sculptor Louise Nevelson actively sought the “place of t beginning-ness.  The place of pureness, t first place, t one-ness & there you are.  It is t place you [tap] life itself.” 

This is not to say that the first fruits are the only good ones – but it is to say that this parasha reminds us of the unique importance of our earliest attempts.  Rather than seeing them as garbage to get out of the way, it might be more appropriate to see them as holy offerings, the most sacred gift a person can give to a universe that rejoices at every new creation.

Ki Teitzei: Preoccupations

(Deuteronomy 21:10 – 25:19)

The Torah is a document with preoccupations.  I mean, the famous line about the Torah – everything is in it – is true (this blog is proof enough of that), but some things do show up more than others.  First of all, we see that God is preoccupied with the idea that the Israelites have to act a certain way in order to be holy.  Parashat Ki Teitzei, which contains more laws than any other parasha, is a good place to make the point.  The laws cover some things especially heavily.  For one thing, there’s a recurrent interest in social justice, in protecting the well-being of the disempowered, as in You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer….you must pay him his wages on the same day (Dt 24:14-15), and you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn.  There are also a number of laws about marriage, sex and family (though not always in that order), things that matter to a lot of people.  Perhaps more peculiar is the deep and intense preoccupation with categories, with separating one thing from another.  Men and women are not to dress in one another’s clothing (Dt 22:5); your field should only have one kind of seed in it, rather than two or more (Dt 22:9); you shouldn’t have a plow run by both an ox and a donkey (Dt 22:10); you shouldn’t wear garments that are made up of both wool and linen (Dt 22:11).  Over and over we see the Torah saying This is not that; this is this and that is that.  It’s not just in this parasha, either – think of the dietary laws, the different types of sacrifices one might make, the firstborn versus the secondborn son.  For one reason or another, God cares a lot about making distinctions.  So one thing this section of the Torah does is demonstrate, once more, that we are b’tzelem elohim – in the image of the divine.  I mean, all the preoccupation in this parasha is kind of familiar; God has fixations – and so, of course, do we.

Artists often see this in their own work.  Judy Chicago, for example, has spent a career making visual art about the issues informing women’s lives, and using images that in some sense call up the experiences and physical forms of women.  In graduate school, she found that “male instructors felt uncomfortable with [her] ‘female’ images, and made [her] feel that there was something wrong with [her],” and as a result set this preoccupation aside for a while – but not for very long.  It was too much a part of who she was.  Even after creating her masterpiece The Dinner Table, Chicago has continued work in these areas.  Similarly, it could be argued that most of the novels of Chaim Potok tell the same story over again: a young person (usually a child) struggles because his or her developing individual needs and talents are in tension with the requirements of the surrounding Orthodox Jewish community.  Or we could look at Amedeo Modigliani, who painted portrait after portrait after portrait, all in a signature style.  There are Mark Rothko’s many, many multiform paintings of pure blocks of color.  Louise Nevelson made countless sculptures out of little discarded items, an interest that’s been traced back to her childhood – “Even as a child she gathered pebbles, sticks, marbles, and other trinkets to display in little boxes”– and her connection to her junk-dealing father. 

Many of us can relate to this kind of persistent focus.  Whether we get wrapped up in a topic or approach for a month or for a lifetime, many of us do find ourselves, at least for a time, working and working on one kind of thing, unable to shake it.  So here we have God as a model for our own sometimes-obsessive lives.  In fact, in this we can see a model for our very individuality as creative people.  What about God’s somewhat idiosyncratic interest in making distinctions?  Here we see a concern that not everyone shares, that seems sometimes a little strange – really? we can’t mix wool and linen? – and so in this we are reminded that each of us has preoccupations that mark us as distinctive, as individuals.  Not everyone is as fascinated with little pieces of wood as Nevelson was; not everyone is as endlessly interested in bars and blocks of color as Rothko. 

Yet it’s also true that, if we take God as a model, we see that our preoccupations might often be relevant, or even helpful, to others around us – that they might respond to the needs of people around us.  After all, God’s tendency to return and return to the subject of family relationships is good news, given the fact that we mortals are pretty interested in those relationships ourselves – and the recurrent emphasis on social justice is something that has benefits for us, too.  In other words, one’s obsessions might be personal, but they are not necessarily only good for oneself when they’re played out in the world.  Take Judy Chicago again – her work exploring the experience and contributions of women has both served her interests and helped the world.  Her installation The Dinner Party anchors Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art, a place where feminism can – through art, mainly – influence what we know and how we feel about the role and position of women across human history.  Similarly, Modigliani’s passions didn’t just affect him – they also had an impact on the people who encountered his work, as painter Augustus John commented: “The stone heads affected me strangely.  For some days afterwards I found myself under the hallucination of meeting people in the street who might have posed for them.”  When we honor our own fixations, we do work that turns out to be significant for other people, too.

All in all, I see Parashat Ki Teitzei as divine authorization – authorization to get worked up, and to stay worked up, about the things that catch and hold our interest.  It may turn out that our preoccupations are of great value to the world, actually – but that’s just a bonus; the real news is that they are already filled with the sacred, with the example of the divine.

Leonard Bernstein

On this date, August 25th, in 1918, composer Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  He studied music from an early age, and was only twenty-five when he was appointed Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic.  Shortly after that, when one night Bruno Walter (the person scheduled to conduct the Philharmonic) got sick, Bernstein stepped in and so dazzled the audience that he was soon in demand as a conductor all over the country.  “The conductor’s work encompasses such a tremendous range,” he once wrote.  “Unlike an instrumentalist or a singer, he has to play on an orchestra.  His instrument is one hundred human instruments, each one a thorough musician, each with a will of his own; and he must cause them to play like one instrument with a single will.”  Bernstein also went on to become well-known for the music he composed, from symphonies like “Jeremiah” and “Kaddish” to music for West Side Story and the movie On the Waterfront.  A gifted teacher as well, Bernstein’s lectures and writings on music were remarkable for their accessibility and effectiveness.  He once summarized his feelings about music this way: “Ultimately one must simply accept the loving fact that people enjoy listening to organized sound (certain organized sounds, anyway); that this enjoyment can take the form of all kinds of responses from animal excitement to spiritual exaltation; and that people who can organize sounds so as to evoke the most exalted responses are commonly called geniuses.  These axioms can neither be denied nor explained….No matter what rationalists we may profess to be, we are stopped cold at the border of this mystic area.  It is not too much to say mystic or even magic: no art lover can be an agnostic when the chips are down.  If you love music, you are a believer, however dialectically you try to wriggle out of it.”

Shoftim: Appointing Yourself Judge

(Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9)

One senses that a lot is going to change for the Israelites when they enter the promised land.  Among other things, with the loss of Moses, the greatest prophet and closest confidant to God that we have ever had in our midst, God will inevitably be a little more distant from the people.  Without Moses to act as such a faithful intermediary, the people may have to live without regular statements, commands and advice from God.  Thus it’s no accident that Parashat Shof’tim begins with the line You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.  The people – all grown up now and ready to take possession of their inheritance – will need to find wisdom among themselves.  The nineteenth-century Torah teacher Sfat Emet wrote that this line was, in part, “a promise to the Jew, saying: ‘You will be able to make yourself into your own judge and officer.’”  In other words, as we make this seismic shift, we are not only finding people in our community to help guide us – we are being empowered to, in fact, guide ourselves. 

Here we have crucial wisdom for the artist, and particularly the beginning artist.  It’s natural, as we start out, to be heavily or even totally dependent on the feedback of others in judging our work.  After all, we probably lack confidence, experience, clear knowledge of our own strengths and weaknesses.  Filmmaker Woody Allen said, “When I was first making films, I used to have many screenings.  And I would sneak into the back of the cinema and listen to the reactions and make my changes and cuts according to that.”  Yet these were just the early films.  Allen naturally became “more self-reliant over the years,” so that his process of reworking things changed over the years: “Then I had less screenings.  I had like maybe two big screenings.  Then I started to screen the films in my screening-room.  And now that’s pretty much all I do.  When I’ve finished a film, I screen it five, six times in my screening-room.  I invite my sister and some friends.  And when it’s over I say to them, “Is there anything you want to tell me about this?  Anything you don’t understand or anything I should know?”  And they might say that they liked it or didn’t like it, or that there might be some scenes which were unclear or misunderstood.  And then I take that into consideration.  But basically, when I show a film to them, it’s 99 per cent finished.”  Over time, he has become confident enough to know when he’s doing well and when he’s not.

One way or another, most successful artists come to this place of self-reliance.  Visual artist Judy Chicago once wrote, “I know that I’m really doing good work.”  Songwriter Bob Dylan said, “I kind of know myself well enough to know that the line might be good.”  Allowing himself to trust his judgment on that line has led him in productive directions: “It is the first line that gives you inspiration and then it’s just like riding a bull.”  Appointing oneself a judge of one’s material allows you to go further into the work – and to do it well.  According to literary scholar Joseph Cohen, the fact that novelist Amos Oz is such “an excellent judge of his material” makes Oz especially “accomplished in determining which literary structure is best suited to its exploitation.”

Of course, this self-reliance doesn’t have to be completely inflexible.  After all, the Israelites aren’t just going to rely on individual judgment – they’re also going to appoint those officials that God is calling for.  Allen, for one, has continued to take in advice from others: “On the set, when I am filming the movie, everybody tells me how to do it – the script girl, the assistant director, the focus-puller.  Everyone contributes with their comments.  ‘That joke is not funny, you should do this joke instead.’  Or, ‘That doesn’t look real!’  I mean, everybody has opinions.  And I listen to all of them, and sometimes they are right and sometimes not.  But nobody ever comes around in a serious way with suggestions or changes in the script.  People feel I’ve made enough movies to know what I am doing.”  More importantly, he feels that way, too.  Having a trusted inner voice means having a crucial ally in your work, an ally that will challenge you, push you, and tell you when you’re on the right track.  Painter Ben Shahn described this collaborative-feeling experience like this: “The inward critic is ever at hand, perpetually advising and casting doubt.  Here the work is overstated; there it is thin; in another place, muddiness is threatened; somewhere else it has lost connection with the whole; here it looks like an exercise in paint alone; there an area should be preserved; thus the critics, sometimes staying the hand of the painter, sometimes demanding a fresh approach, sometimes demanding that a whole work be abandoned – and sometimes not succeeding, for the will may be stubborn enough to override such advice.”

God’s call to the Israelites in the beginning of this parasha is really a daunting call for them to take responsibility for their own community.  Imagine what that must have felt like for a people that had so recently been entirely dependent on God in getting out of Egypt.  Well, those lines also call on us as individuals, call on each one of us to take responsibility for ourselves.  As artists of course we turn to others for fresh perspectives.  In the end, though, only one person can – and should – act as the final judge on the matter.  Luckily for us, that person, given a little training, patience, and self-awareness, is eminently qualified for the job.

R'eih -- The Open Hand

(Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17)

In my experience, being an artist in the world can sometimes feel like being a person who walks up to a deep, deep well and drops a pebble in – but it turns out the well is so deep that, strain as you might, you never do hear the splash.  Except the real thing can be more painful than the analogy suggests because in the case of the artist you’ve actually made the pebble, made it with painstaking effort, and have probably loaded it with a great many hopes and expectations, and perhaps above all you really wanted to hear an excellent, affirming splash.  And yet in many cases your efforts not only go unrewarded – they might even go completely unnoticed.  According to art historian Laurie Lisle, one of Nevelson’s biggest difficulties was “the necessity of repeatedly unearthing and exposing her deepest perceptions in the face of probable neglect.”  Modigliani was, in fact, completely unknown in his lifetime.  His friend, poet Anna Akhmatova, said, “I knew him when he was poor, and I did not understand how he survived – he didn’t possess even a shadow of recognition as an artist….All that was divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a sort of gloom.” 

And yet we persist.  Visual artist Judy Chicago said, “It’s really hard to keep on struggling – to push oneself forward – farther & farther – & yet, there’s no going back & no standing still.”  This might seem crazy.  Why on earth would people give and give and give without getting anything back from the world?  This question certainly comes up for people who are not artists, puzzling about those who are – but it also comes up for those of us engaged in creative work, from time to time, when another pebble drops splashless into the well.  At times, we are tempted to say that it’s just not worth it.

The Torah, however, would argue strongly that it is worth it, that it is our obligation to give even when we might not get anything back – even when it’s very unlikely indeed.  In Parashat R’eih there is a substantial discussion of a phenomenon called sh’mittah – the remission of debts.  As the Torah explains, every seven years we are supposed to forgive all the financial debts owed to us; no matter how little our fellow has been able to repay us so far, we are to let him or her off the hook for the rest of it.  It seems clear that this is meant to help the poor.  Well-off people make loans and poorer people strive to repay, but they are prevented from entering a downward spiral of indebtedness.  It seems like a compassionate and sensible system – but of course there’s a flaw.  Let’s say the seventh year is almost here and a needy person approaches you, asking for a loan.  You hesitate; after all, you’ve worked hard for your money, and if you give it to this person, with sh’mittah close at hand, it’s unlikely you’ll see much of your money repaid – ever.  You’ll be giving with no reasonable expectation of getting anything back.  How likely are you to give, under these circumstances?  The Torah, of course, has already considered this problem: Beware lest you harbor the base thought, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is approaching,” so that you are mean to your needy kinsman and give him nothing…Give to him readily (Dt 15:9).  You are in fact commanded to give even when it’s unlikely you’ll get anything back.  The Etz Hayim translation of, and commentary on, the Torah suggests that, in this case, “This is not so much a loan as an investment in a decent, compassionate, stable society.”

Artists feel this instinctually.  We give because we are believers in this kind of investment.  Composer Leonard Bernstein said: “This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist: that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably.  It seems rather an odd way to spend one’s life; but it isn’t so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that something checks throughout, something that follows its own laws consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down.”  Even when our work makes no immediate splash, we go forward with the expectation that we are doing something good.  Perhaps the more apt analogy is planting a seed; we see no sudden sprouts just after we cover the seed with soil, but nonetheless we have started something worthwhile in motion.

Yet we can’t really be certain that the seed will ever sprout for others.  We can’t be sure that our art will ever reach a grateful and moved audience.  And so that composer who gives everything “just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably” can’t be doing so under the assumption that those notes will one day change the world.  They might, in fact, never be heard by anyone else.  That artist has to be doing it for the sake of doing it.  In the words of writer Elie Wiesel, “Authentic writers write even if there is little chance for them to be published; they write because they cannot do otherwise.”  I think again of Modigliani, who died basically unknown.  It happened that he went on to become posthumously famous, but he didn’t know that while he was working.  On one level – his poverty, for starters – that was a big problem in his life; on another, it didn’t matter.  Art historian Jeffrey Meyers suggested that “his haste to finish a painting showed that he cared more about the act of painting than the finished work.”  This is probably how he was able to produce so much astounding art despite the fact that he was getting virtually nothing back for it.  “Write good poems and let go of them,” writer Natalie Goldberg has advised us.  And so, you stand at the well with the pebble in your hand; you kneel over fertile soil holding a seed; you stand in front of a needy world asking for help as sh’mittah approaches.  You give.