religion – From Under the Fig Tree

Woodworking

joselitJuly 28, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

They didn’t offer a course in woodworking or ‘shop’ at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, where I attended high school, and even if they had, I doubt I would have been the least bit interested.

Francis Cape Utopian Benches — Francis Cape. 'Utopian Benches.' Source: Murray Guy website

Boy, what a missed opportunity! I only just realized how fascinating wood can be as a medium of artistic expression in the wake of a recent visit to the Murray Guy gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Located in the shadow of the storied High Line and up a flight of very steep stairs, it now hosts a fascinating exhibition, Utopian Benches, by the artist Francis Cape.

Seventeen wooden benches, fashioned out of poplar, take up residence in the gallery’s austere main room, their clean, unfussy lines echoing the tightly wedged, slender planks of the wooden floor on which they rest. There’s no explanatory text panel, no sound, no video -- no hidden aesthetic agenda -- to distract the viewer from the objects on display. What you see is, well, what you see: row upon row of beautifully made benches of varying size, lovingly and subtly detailed.

It turns out, though, that there’s a fascinating back story, a history, to these benches. In constructing them, Mr. Cape took his cue -- quite literally -- from the backless prayer benches built by the Shakers and other American religious communitarian groups of the 19th century. He measured the originals, researched the ways in which they were used, and then constructed his own.

The gallery prefers to call them “sculptures.” The New York Times describes them as “faith-based furniture.” Students of religion might label them “shared seating,” focusing on their relationship to community and ritual, the leveling of social status and the promotion of equality.

By whatever name (and corresponding perspective), Cape’s benches not only succeed, on their own terms, as art. They’re evocative of history, too, underscoring the ways in which faith, then as now, assumed material form.

That’s what I’d call an ‘object lesson.’

God and man in Tampa

joselitSeptember 2, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

People in funny hats, empty chairs, a capella singing, overheated rhetoric, a red dress -- the Republicans put on quite a show in Tampa last week at their national convention. Most of it left me cold. What didn’t was the ardent public display of religion, especially the ritualized invocation. The sight of thousands of earnest delegates, their eyes shut tight in prayer as clergymen from denominations that ran the gamut from Orthodox Judaism to Mormonism intoned passages from the Bible or evoked the presence of Jesus, really got me going.

Bible by Mike Johnson — Bible. Flickr/Mike Johnson

I should know better, of course. I spend a lot of my time studying, teaching, and researching the history of religion in modern America. My bookshelves groan under the accumulated weight of book after book on this very subject. I’m even at work on a volume of my own -- on America’s embrace of the Ten Commandments -- the very point of which is the entangled relationship between religion and culture.

And yet, while watching the Republican convention, I was truly taken aback by the ways in which religion was repeatedly affirmed. Some of my coreligionists, I suspect, were thrilled when Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik appeared on the vast stage of the convention hall to deliver the opening invocation, his hard-to-pronounce and decidedly un-American name emblazoned across the screen. Their hearts might have beat a little faster as the rabbi, in ringing but yeshivish tones, highlighted the connections between Biblical and American notions of freedom and, for good measure, punctuated his remarks with a hefty dose of Hebrew. Hebrew! In Tampa! What a triumph for the Jews!

My heart beat a little faster, too, but it wasn’t out of pride. The whole thing, from start to finish, made me really uncomfortable. It’s not that I think that American Jews should hide their light under a bushel; far from it. But the overt politicization of religious expression, let alone the calculated staginess of it all, unsettled me.

There was more to come. Integrating Mormonism as well as Orthodox Judaism into the proceedings, the Republicans invited Kenneth Hutchins, a Mormon bishop from Boston, to give the invocation on the last day of the convention. Replete with explicit references to Jesus in lieu of the more anodyne 'heavenly father,' his remarks made a point of underscoring just how much Mormonism had in common with the other Christian denominations. And lest anyone within earshot might have missed that connection, Hutchins concluded his presentation by blessing the assembled in the name of 'Jesus Christ, our Lord.'

Only in America.

Being there

joselitFebruary 14, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The recent revelation that iTunes has created an “app” that seems to substitute for confession underscores the power of technology to redefine the very notion of ritual practice.

So, too, has “Tweet Your Prayers,” in which electronic kvitlakh, or personal petitions, can be sent to the kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, via twitter, or www.e-daf.com, in which the age-old custom of studying a page of Talmud a day can now be handily accomplished online.

Whatever will they think up next?!

More to the point, perhaps, what are we to make of these newfangled phenomena? Should we embrace them? Hold them at arm’s length? Or simply shrug our shoulders and give them a pass?

I, for one, would have wanted to know what Charles Silberman would have made of it all. The author, among other things, of A Certain People: American Jews and their Lives Today (1985), Mr. Silberman, a longtime Upper West Sider with a keen and discerning eye, died recently in Florida at the age of 86.

I had the pleasure and privilege of spending time in his company at a secular humanist conference in Detroit several years ago where the two of us -- for different reasons -- felt like fish out of water. Our mutual sense of perplexity brought us together and for a while, in the wake of the conference, we kept in touch.

But then one thing or another got in the way -- his relocation to Florida, my comings and goings between New York and Princeton and D.C. -- and that was that.

I never did get around to asking Mr. Silberman where he stood on the digitization of Jewish life, but I suspect that, in his gentle but firm manner, he would have aptly taken its measure, totted up its strengths and limitations and then made a case for the importance of actually being there -- in the belly of community.