The unfortunate phenomenon of turning ethical decisions over to the courts is a result of the Israeli public’s spoiled and irresponsible-and sometimes downright ignorant-attitude towards the law. We have not been trained to think legalistically; thus, we transfer all responsibility to that mysterious cult of the black robes. It’s not that we don’t have opinions, of course; every cab driver thinks himself a philosopher. But a nation accustomed to amateurish thinking is also accustomed to shunning responsibility for its judgments. The result is a culture of lazy, populistic thought; of an endless and fruitless venting of steam; of an emotional, at times hysterical wrangling-a culture that is incapable of rational, substantive debate.

Legalistic thought, by contrast, is substantive. In Judaism, this type of contemplation has been de rigueur for centuries, practiced and perfected in every beit midrash. It is this way of thinking that must be incorporated into the Israeli school curriculum, alongside the fundamentals of the secular law we live by. Only then will Israeli students be able to define their perspectives and articulate their positions, to base arguments on fact, to draw legitimate conclusions, to substantiate, to apply broad principles to individual situations, and to express themselves in eloquent Hebrew. Above all, they will recognize that human beings are responsible for their actions, in accordance with the Jewish-halachic concept of man.

If we equip our children with these tools, we could shape a Jewish public sphere. True, the majority of the country would remain secular. But the public’s way of thinking would be Jewish, thus enabling, at least theoretically, a genuine integration of the secular, Haredi, and religious Zionist sectors of society. If it is our desire to formulate mutual goals, we must first begin to devise a common language. The educational, and not the judicial system can and should take up the task.

  

Regarding the arts, one wonders: What is “Jewish” about the Israeli visual arts?

“Jewish art,” wrote Israeli artist Michael Sgan-Cohen in 1977, “is the art of the word and the symbol, the art of nuance and not of plain textual meaning.” It is not, in other words, naturalistic, but it is not abstract either. “It is not art for its own sake,” Sgan-Cohen insisted, “but a socio-ethical enterprise.”²³ As opposed to pagan and Catholic art, which became synonymous during the Italian Renaissance, “Jewish art is not given to Monumentalism…. It is wary of the beauty of material and form (echoes of the golden calf) which serve no purpose other than to be beautiful…. Classical art and what it represents is, to Jewish art, idolatrous.”²⁴

According to Sgan-Cohen, the undisputed representative of idolatry in Israeli art is Yigal Tumarkin. “His art is fundamentally linked to Monumentalism…. His concept is materialistic, dependent on the object itself and its aesthetic value; there is no ethical or Jewish rationale in those monuments…. As such, even if one of Tumarkin’s central themes is an anti-war sentiment, it is ironic that his sculptures are the best example of Israeli militarism rootless, aggressive, and arrogant.”²⁵ And arrogant, high-handed art, as Sgan-Cohen describes Tumarkin’s work, cannot, by definition, be Jewish.²⁶

Just as he loathed Tumarkin’s brash conceit, Sgan-Cohen abhorred the work of Rafi Lavi, one of the leading Tel Aviv painters in the 1960s and 1970s. Lavi was the antithesis of Tumarkin. Whereas the former’s work is monumental, heavy, and aggressive, Lavi developed a lean, “secular” aesthetic of scribbling, or “doodling,” as he himself described it. Nonetheless, this anti-Tumarkin posture was, to Sgan-Cohen, “a senseless avant-garde movement” consisting of “works without any cultural roots.” Works, that is, that “are a mere weak echo”-derivative and pathetic-“of what is going on in other cultural centers.”²⁷

To the poet Meir Wieseltier, this was no accident. “Tel Aviv,” he wrote in 1999, the year Sgan-Cohen died at the age of fifty-four, “is a stifling black hole of spiritual desolation…. It is a city without awareness. Without a memory. A city that is ‘just like’ or, even worse, deludes itself that it is ‘just like,’ is dying to be ‘just like.’ Just like New York. Just like Amsterdam. Just like Stuttgart. Just like something. But its sparkling cultural exterior is fragile and fuzzy with the lifespan of a neon sign.”²⁸ To return to Sgan-Cohen’s observations, this Tel Aviv-Tumarkin’s and Lavi’s-is the capital of “our cultural provincialism, and the lack of that kernel of selfhood in our culture.” “We Jews,” he concluded, “are not some faraway province, but rather the nerve center of enormous colliding forces”-East and West, tradition and modernity, “Hebrewness” and Judaism, the national and the individual.²⁹ Who among Israeli artists understood and expressed this potential? Sgan-Cohen tentatively named Mordechai Ardon, Pinhas Cohen-Gan, Moshe Castel, and primarily Aryeh Aroch, who developed “a world of private ideas and images employing Jewish language.”³⁰

When Sgan-Cohen passed away, he was eulogized by his friend Adam Baruch in the latter’s book Seder Yom (“Agenda”). Baruch explained that the Jewish-Israeli art for which Sgan-Cohen yearned was not art whose Jewish character could be measured by biblical motifs (as was the case, for example, in the sentimental art of the Betzalel school) or by kabbalistic themes (as in the works of Ardon and Yaacov Agam), but rather art whose Jewish character emerged “without any modernistic or post-modernistic posturing,” from a Jewish way of thinking.³¹ “The core of what makes art ‘Jewish,’” wrote Baruch, is “the conscious and critical look inward,” which captures the Jewish conceptual and moral essence.³² Thus, artists whose works burst with Jewish motifs have, in most cases, missed the point. At issue, maintains Baruch, is not how to employ a Jewish repertoire, but how to employ a Jewish outlook.

In his speech to the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901, Martin Buber spoke of his yearning for a distinctive Jewish art.³³ One hundred years later, in Jerusalem, an art competition was organized with the theme kedusha (“holiness”).³⁴ The very selection of such a central Jewish concept-an abstract principle opposed to aesthetic idolatry-dictated that the participants should employ a Jewish outlook and mode of expression. Two hundred fifty artists rose to the challenge, and the twenty-two winning compositions were compiled in a volume entitled Limits of Holiness.³⁵ The objective of the contest, explained the book’s co-editor Avigdor Shinan, was “to encourage the connection between the creative arts and the beliefs and values that are at the core of Judaism.”³⁶ In an essay included in the volume, Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish thought, defined Jewish artistic representation as “depictions that hide more than they reveal, images that hint and indicate, but do not expose or desecrate.”³⁷

 

The same question can be asked of Israeli literature, theater, cinema, music, and dance. In an essay that delineates the values befitting Jewish art, professor of Bible studies Uriel Simon wrote that they must include “the preference of wisdom over cleverness; of the moral over the aesthetic; of self-restraint over materialism; and of happiness over pleasure.”⁴⁰ He also mentions “loyalty to meaningfulness,” “faith and optimism,” and “longing for spirituality” as Jewish approaches to life and culture, all of which stand in stark contrast to the bitterness and despair that characterize much of art today.⁴¹ Simon made do with a general prescription. He did not attempt to outline its practical application to various artistic fields. What follows are several suggestions.