The Unfinished and the Idol: Toward a Theory of Jewish Aesthetics

I will begin with an anecdote related by Theodor Reik, the early Viennese psychoanalyst: when his widowed grandfather from the Habsburg hinterland came to live with the Reik family in Vienna one of his first acts was to strike the nose off a marble bust of Jove or Apollo that stood on the family sideboard. ¹ The fact that the bust depicted one of the Greek gods is immaterial: in an analogous case, the Hatam Sofer required a silversmith who had fashioned two figurines of Moses and Aaron as an adornment to the finials of a Scroll of the Law to remove from the figures the tips of their noses. ² Moses and Aaron were required to suffer the same fate as Jove and Apollo.

As these examples suggest, I am taking depictions of the human figure as the acme of an idolatrous image, and I am proposing to try and answer the question why a complete representation is utterly prohibited whereas, in certain circumstances and subject to certain conditions, an incomplete depiction is permissible. Why this should be so is the second question.

The answer to the first question is grounded in the view that inorganic matter is inanimate. It is no more than “wood and stone” (a refrain common to the Psalmist and the Prophets). Habakkuk’s exclamation—“there is no life”—in the carved image of wood and stone encased in gold and silver (2:18–29), is a reiterated denunciation. When the object of the depiction is a human being, the effect of the purported transposition into matter is therefore spurious and destructive. The Prophets find an echo in nineteenth-century Vilna when Abraham Paperna denies to the sculptor’s artifact “the attribute of spirit and the inner movements of the soul.” ³ From twentieth-century Paris Lévinas emphasizes the annihilation that the purported life of artistic infinity imposes on the individual: “Within the life, or rather the death, of a statue, an instant endures infinitely.” Laocoon will never escape from the serpents’ grip; the Mona Lisa will never stop smiling. The future of either will never arrive. ⁴ Time has come to a stop. The two beings have been frozen into immobility. Incidentally, it seems that here is a parallel to the reluctance of the Talmudic sages to sanction the writing down of the Oral Law save in exceptional circumstances. Inscription would give a certain fixity to what is ideally unconstrained and free-flowing. ⁵ If this supposition is correct, then it finds a degree of support from Socratic argument: “Writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” ⁶

The antithesis of inanimate matter and life is also present in Hermann Cohen’s understanding of Solomon’s exclamation at the dedication of the first Temple: “If the heavens cannot contain God, how can a temple?” (1 Kings 8:27). Cohen takes this as a paradigm of the constriction of religion through art. ⁷ In a more recent context, the polarity of inanimate matter and life lies at the heart of Bergson’s analysis of the source of comic laughter.

This is why the thrust of the onslaught on idolatry can be understood as an attempt to save life from extinction at the hands of the artificer or artist. It is consistent with this argument of the polarity between matter and life when the Prophets make merry at the expense of beliefs current in the Gentile world; it is not the particular beliefs that excite their merriment (in fact they virtually disregard the theory of idolatry). Their only concern is with the presence of some venerated material entity through which the beliefs are given expression. If a system of belief requires material adjuncts, this is sufficient to condemn it without further argument.

Clearly, the more complete the depiction of the human being, the more prominent the degree of annihilation; and that, I suggest, accounts for the abhorrence with which a Jewish aesthetic regards the three-dimensional statue...