Encountering the Jewish Future: with Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt, Levinas

Epilogue

243 Though my encounter with our great Jewish thinkers began many years ago, this book took shape as I was reconnecting in Korea with my student Father Mun and subsequently was developed for a lecture I was invited to give at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In the advertisement for my Rothko Chapel lecture, I noticed that, without discussing the matter with me, a response by “Three Rabbis from Houston” had been scheduled. This surprised and annoyed me. I felt that a double standard was being applied to me and to other Jews who held similar understandings about the Jewish future. The rabbis presumably were the authentic representatives of the “real” Jewish community in ways that I was not. At least that is how they presented themselves. Obviously, the administration at the Rothko Chapel had been pressured to agree to this. In the early years, no doubt, this had happened to Richard Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel as well. Had it also happened to Hannah Arendt? After protesting this double standard with the organizers, I decided to deliver my lecture as I had agreed. I am glad that I did. The Rothko Chapel evokes a spirituality and commitment that flows from the murals of Mark Rothko. Since going there previously to see Rothko’s murals, I delved deeper into his life and art. In preparing for my lecture I reviewed James Breslin’s beautiful and engaging biography of Rothko. I noticed that Rothko signed the contract to produce his murals for the chapel in 1965, the year when I became a Bar Mitzvah. By that time Rothko had become affluent Epilogue Encountering the Jewish Future 244฀฀฀•฀฀฀Encountering฀the฀Jewish฀Future and famous. Yet he was also on the verge of giving up on the art world because he hated the commercialism that had invaded it. He also didn’t want his paintings to be seen primarily as decorative objects in homes or museums. Art had to mean more than what the market could bear. Rothko longed to return to the connection between art and the sacred. As the one who approached Rothko to paint murals wrote: “What is wonderful about Mark is that he aspires, and is still capable of believing that his work can have some purpose—spiritual if you like—that is not sullied by the world.”1 When you are in the Rothko Chapel, surrounded by his murals, you feel like you have entered sacred ground. Is it therefore outside the world? Or is sacred ground part of the world that is set aside for us to think again about the world we live in? I think of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel. The sacred is in the world. Sometimes the sacred survives the world or reenters the world we have barely survived. Sometimes the sacred surrounds those who have not survived the world but is carried by those who survive. I think here of the Holocaust as well as so many others traumatic experiences of displacement and destruction. Is there beauty after violence and atrocity? I also think of Emmanuel Levinas’s invocation of the sacred as a place of violence. So many innocent people suffer around the world, victims of what others “know” is their redemption. Rothko’s murals were created in the world and survive in it. He did not. Several years after the murals were finished, he committed suicide. When you view these murals, all of various forms of gray, is it any wonder that Rothko created so much beauty and also committed suicide? There is also light in the darkness of Rothko’s murals, if we can see it. Light and darkness have to do with our ability and inability to see the light that is there. In darkness, we search for light. Sometimes it is found by us, other times by others. Light exists. It waits to be gathered. Then we can see again. As with Rothko’s art, there is much light to be found in the Jewish thinkers we have considered. There is also much darkness. We can see either, or both. The light we gather can be carried forth into the Jewish future. We might experience the sacred surrounded by murals or in encountering Jewish thought. Most often, however, we experience the sacred in contested places in the world. That was the case for Rothko and for our Jewish thinkers . We might also experience the wrath of Levinas’s sacred, as it comes from outside and from within...