Thursday, November 15, 2012
Hasidism, in Living Color
With all due respect to the impressive collection of circular fur hats, the best and most revealing exhibits at "A World Apart Next Door: Glimpses Into the Life of Hasidic Jews," the Hasidic-themed show now at Jerusalem's Israel Museum, are the videos. In one of a half-dozen such offerings, mitzvah tantz (difficult to translate beyond "mitzvah dance"), a bride, dressed and veiled so that the only skin you see are her hands and a flash of bare jawline, grips a long sash that serves both as an umbilical attachment and a barrier to the dancing rebbe at the other end: From a modest but breached distance, the two circle each other at mismatched tempos in front of a pulsating wall of Hasidim.
It's a weirdly intimate moment, in a different spiritual key than we're used to: There are no other women in the frame. Although the bride's movement is restricted to stepping in time with the way-more-excited rebbe, they are without question dancing together. (If you don't appreciate how momentous that is, may I suggest the excellent Roman archaeology exhibit across the hall?) In tish (literally "table" in Yiddish, it denotes a kind of semi-mandatory rebbe-centric get-together), an enormous table surrounded by waves of sitting and standing and screaming Hasidim is headed by the rebbe, who stoically dispenses fruit from towering platters. Everyone is clamoring for a piece, like it's manna. A boy walks on the table—it's the width of a one-way street—and with all of his weight drags one of the platters closer to the rebbe.
These videos, along with much of the photography, are poignant and surreal, in equal parts compelling and confusing, as edifying as they are mystifying—and, for precisely these reasons, make for great art. There's an uneasy beauty to the rituals and their opaque choreography, to the masses of identically costumed men, to the fierce devotion to customs that most of us probably can't relate to. Hasidim, say what you want about their sartorial sense, make for very arresting visuals.
The best of the exhibit illuminates and artistically leverages the tension between rituals' normalcy (on their end) and strangeness (on ours). We are uncomfortably transfixed—maybe because we can stare without shame or reproach. "I can't believe we're of the same religion," I overheard a non-Hasidic American Jewish tourist mutter to his wife. There are photographs of Hasidic rituals I'd never heard of, like pouring water from an urn into a pan to ward off the evil eye, or that I had thought were no longer performed, like the redeeming of a firstborn donkey (delightfully decked out for the occasion in, yes, a black hat). Photos of Hasidim in full garb in a wheat field, reaping for their matzoh; dressed up as Cossacks on Purim; in crowded family portraits; and firing arrows at a target representing the yetzer harah, the evil inclination: There is humor, joy, weirdness, pride, death—the constant is celebration of the extraordinary nature of everyday life.
But the exhibit, however compelling, is arguably less interesting than the fact that there is an exhibit at all, because Hasidic culture a) isn't lost or dead, and therefore isn't an obvious suspect for museum treatment; and b), is extraordinarily insular and suspicious of the outside world. Here's an overlap of two worlds—hoity-toity secular museum culture and the beard 'n' sidelocks crowd—that pretty much never get along, and yet somehow the result has been a runaway success, even among Hasidim, who've been literally lining up to see it (including, amazingly, some rebbes, one or two of whom, I'm told, went incognito). But to understand how a Hasidic exhibit avoids the social and artistic politics you'd imagine would have plagued it, and why it was not only not shunned by the Hasidic community but even on some level embraced, you have to understand that the exhibit—and Hasidism in general—is not only, or even really, about religion.
It's a weirdly intimate moment, in a different spiritual key than we're used to: There are no other women in the frame. Although the bride's movement is restricted to stepping in time with the way-more-excited rebbe, they are without question dancing together. (If you don't appreciate how momentous that is, may I suggest the excellent Roman archaeology exhibit across the hall?) In tish (literally "table" in Yiddish, it denotes a kind of semi-mandatory rebbe-centric get-together), an enormous table surrounded by waves of sitting and standing and screaming Hasidim is headed by the rebbe, who stoically dispenses fruit from towering platters. Everyone is clamoring for a piece, like it's manna. A boy walks on the table—it's the width of a one-way street—and with all of his weight drags one of the platters closer to the rebbe.
These videos, along with much of the photography, are poignant and surreal, in equal parts compelling and confusing, as edifying as they are mystifying—and, for precisely these reasons, make for great art. There's an uneasy beauty to the rituals and their opaque choreography, to the masses of identically costumed men, to the fierce devotion to customs that most of us probably can't relate to. Hasidim, say what you want about their sartorial sense, make for very arresting visuals.
The best of the exhibit illuminates and artistically leverages the tension between rituals' normalcy (on their end) and strangeness (on ours). We are uncomfortably transfixed—maybe because we can stare without shame or reproach. "I can't believe we're of the same religion," I overheard a non-Hasidic American Jewish tourist mutter to his wife. There are photographs of Hasidic rituals I'd never heard of, like pouring water from an urn into a pan to ward off the evil eye, or that I had thought were no longer performed, like the redeeming of a firstborn donkey (delightfully decked out for the occasion in, yes, a black hat). Photos of Hasidim in full garb in a wheat field, reaping for their matzoh; dressed up as Cossacks on Purim; in crowded family portraits; and firing arrows at a target representing the yetzer harah, the evil inclination: There is humor, joy, weirdness, pride, death—the constant is celebration of the extraordinary nature of everyday life.
But the exhibit, however compelling, is arguably less interesting than the fact that there is an exhibit at all, because Hasidic culture a) isn't lost or dead, and therefore isn't an obvious suspect for museum treatment; and b), is extraordinarily insular and suspicious of the outside world. Here's an overlap of two worlds—hoity-toity secular museum culture and the beard 'n' sidelocks crowd—that pretty much never get along, and yet somehow the result has been a runaway success, even among Hasidim, who've been literally lining up to see it (including, amazingly, some rebbes, one or two of whom, I'm told, went incognito). But to understand how a Hasidic exhibit avoids the social and artistic politics you'd imagine would have plagued it, and why it was not only not shunned by the Hasidic community but even on some level embraced, you have to understand that the exhibit—and Hasidism in general—is not only, or even really, about religion.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/116484/hasidism-in-living-color
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