Shabbat Ki Tavo
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
Cami’s outstanding introduction to her Torah portion homed in some key themes: the theological problems with reward and punishment in the text, then her psychologically acute description of how she saw Moses as attempting to encourage the Israelites to be the ‘best versions of themselves’ and this came out of his hopes for the future when faced with fears about the future; her comparison with Zelensky’s ‘motivational approach’ was spot on, as were her thoughts about the power of collective action and community as a counter to individualism. I would just like to add some footnotes.
I don’t know if any of you this week watched Melvyn Bragg’s programme on the life and work of David Hockney. Hockney’s 86 now - Bragg’s not far behind that, there were 170 years worth of experience on screen together as they talked in Hockney’s studio near the village of Beuvron-en-Auge - these last few years he’s been living and working in Normandy, where the skies are open, the light intense, the colours rich and vivid, and Hockney’s been painting what he sees each day and what he experiences through the seasons of the year - mostly the fields and trees around him - and his work is filled with a kind of luminous joy and a lightness of being that the landscape is evoking in him. ‘Yorkshire it ain’t’, as he ruefully acknowledged. This late stage of his work floats free of history, of politics, of environmental threats to the nature he paints - and just celebrates what is there, illuminates what is present in the natural world in the here and now. It has a simple and timeless quality. And he’s made hundreds of paintings there, including a 90 metre wall of a painting of springtime that has to be walked along to be seen and experienced. It’s art on a heroic scale, in the spirit of Monet, but entirely his own, it’s where his idiosyncratic evolution as an artist has taken him.
And when Melvyn Bragg asked him at the end of the interview: “what are the public responding to in your work, do you think?” he paused. “I don't know” he said slowly - either with diffidence or feigned diffidence, hard to tell with a showman like Hockney - “I don’t know…but I like to think it might be…space”. “Space?” prompted Bragg, trying to coax out a bit more. “Yes, the depiction of space. These paintings all have space in them” - which sounded at first like a bit of a cliché - but then he continued - and I’d had this thought so I was taken aback when he went on: “My sister said she thought space was God - which I thought was an interesting notion”.
You see, in the Talmud one of the names the rabbis gave to God was ‘Makom’ - space. Moving away from the Biblical and gendered picture of God as a personality that rewards and punishes, the rabbis of a later generation were developing a non-anthropomorphic understanding of God as an energy that animates the universe, that is the space of the universe, that God is what is present in each place, in each space, in the here and now - not an actor in the story but a dynamic within life itself. Divinity not as personality but as potentiality.
Back to Hockney. Because he then developed this idea in a significant and quite poignant way. “I mean”, he said, “I'm going to have no space soon. I'm going to die…somewhere in the next five years or so…and that will end my experience of space, and time”. He smiled. “I think about this a bit - but then I stop, because it might drive me mad” and then with a wry smile he reached out beside him: “I'll just have a cigarette”. And he lit up.
Space. We exist in space. And then we don’t. Many people say that if they do have any sense of the divine, or the numinous, or a sense of awe, it is connected with certain spaces and places linked to nature: parks, gardens, seas, open skies, rainbows, stars at night, deserts, wilderness, sunsets, spaces where we experience our lives in a different perspective perhaps, see our smallness, feel our transience, in the presence of places, spaces, that open us up to something bigger than ourselves, they might be fleeting moments but they link us to the timeless. “These paintings all have space in them” - we respond to space.
Where do we find space? Is there space here and now in our service? Do we have space for our selves? Do we have inner space, space to be with our inner nature, the wonder of our particular being in the world, as unique, as distinctive as every tree that Hockney paints? “They are all different, trees, aren’t they?” he said. “Like people”. We need space, but it can be very hard to find - our world is very cluttered, so much external stuff demanding our attention every day, every minute of every hour. The tyranny of the smartphone, of social media, of every day life stuffed with demands. You know how it is. Where is the space - outside us, inside us? We yearn for it - is this what people see when they look at Hockney’s late work: the space we crave? The blessing of space. A moment of godliness here and now. Makom. Space is God. God is space.
So far so good. We could leave it there. But I think there’s something missing, something Cami alluded to when she spoke of having to find answers to “the randomness of the world”? Because the space of the world gets filled with stuff that isn’t a blessing, that seems far from godly. Even nature is double sided. We can stand in awe at the side of a waterfall or a Scottish loch, or on a seashore, but sometimes the power of nature is awful not awesome: tides can turn into tsunamis, the sun can wither the harvests, cause forests to burst into flames, rivers can flood, destroying land and people alike, avalanches and earthquakes can extinguish us in a moment. Nature is ruthless, amoral and we romanticise it at our peril. And this is even before we address our role in the destructiveness of climate change. These are the curses we live with. If Cami had read on in the chapters from the Torah assigned for today she would have encountered the shadow side of life, the tragic darkness of what unfolds: images of the land blighted, of heat and drought and the death of animals and nature, images of disease and devastation, exile and death, madness, abuse, cannibalism, despair, helpless suffering, populations powerless to resist degradation, persecution, occupation. There are 40 verses that follow what we read today of the most extraordinary and terrifying apocalyptic literature - it’s actually a brilliant and stunning piece of narrative art, Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out - but it’s unbearable to read, though we see it starkly unfolding in the daily news. This is not God’s punishment - I am with Cami on that. But the Torah does suggest that there are consequences we have to face collectively for failures to live ethically, to live what Cami called ‘the best versions of ourselves’. Consequences for individuals, for societies, for the planet.
So, as much as Hockney has to offer us, this divine space we need, and images to contemplate and enjoy, perhaps we need another contemporary artist to fill out the picture, and artist who speaks, to my mind incomparably, of consequences, who speaks not of the timeless wonders of nature, but the vicissitudes of history and the fraught impact of the 20th century on our psyches. His work is also awesome in scale, and if you are drawn to it, it’s not because it offers space for dreaming but because it offers a mirror in which we can see who we are in all our confusion and helplessness and moral darkness.
I am speaking of the great German artist Anselm Kiefer whose sculptural and painted work is filled with the detritus of civilisation, abandoned shopping trolleys, lead books devoid of writing, axe heads, giant wilting sunflowers, scorched earth, human hair and ash mixed into his canvases, scenes of devastated forests and deserted landscapes, broken branches, fragments of glass, weapons of war, skeletal outlines of people, ghosts haunting the present. His work over the decades has been rooted in the apocalypse of German history - but he’s wrestled it into a body of work (also on a heroic scale) that speaks to universal themes: of loss and devastation and hubris and human destructiveness. He’s the antithesis of Hockney’s ahistorical evocation of the simple goodness and joyfulness of life around him.
And yet, in his latest exhibition - and you can still see it online though its just finished at the White Cube - his last room after you walk through the wreckage of consumerism and the shadows and failures of modernity, arranged with artful randomness, his last room contained shimmering works of nature - rivers, woods, fields, golden light, a dense profusion of colour, giant canvases completely different from Hockney - the antithesis of Hockney - but also inducing in the viewer a sense of space, of timelessness, of something that we can appreciate and celebrate and feel blessed by. Life goes on, triumphantly. With us, or without us.
Kiefer’s work will never have the popular appeal of Hockney. But just as the Torah’s vision contains the juxtaposition of blessings and curses, each set of images recognisable, truthful, necessary, to invoke the messy, contradictory complexity of life, so we in our own lives are fortunate to be able to be inspired and taught by two such different artists. They each give us space - to think, to breathe, to reflect on life’s meaning, life’s preciousness, and our place within it.
