Bizarro Torah

So I’m driving home and listening to Judaism Unbound, as I’m wont to do. The latest episode (Episode 332: “Is Judaism Mosaic or mosaic?“) pokes around the territory of the place of the arts and the artistic impulse in shaping Torah. I want to open the door to exploring this in more depth from an artist’s point of view.

Now, when I say Torah, I don’t just mean the official canon of rabbi-approved texts. I’m also talking about prayers, blessings, rituals, folklore, mystical teachings, and all the other things that contribute to collective Jewish wisdom.

The place of the arts and the artistic impulse in Torah and the broader Jewish community is something of a recurring theme of the podcast. It makes sense, given a name like Judaism Unbound. It’s also something I’ve been mulling over for a while, probably since shortly after I started listening to the show a few years ago.

During the episode, Lex says:

We talk about them [Jewish communal arts organizations] as if they’re like toppings on a sundae. They’re not the sundae itself. They’re nice add-ons to Judaism, but they’re not Judaism. […] It’s almost like a path in, like a means towards Judaism. […] We gotta get past that and recognize that the art is actually The Thing. It’s what we need. We need […] to be creating the next iterations of what Judaism even is, not from scratch, but using wisdom of the past and their own intuition, if we’re going to be functioning at the level we should be.

Lex Rofeberg

This corresponds to my general impression that, at least within mainstream contemporary Jewish communities, creativity is allowed to be decorative but not essential. We’re allowed to use our creativity to reflect Torah but not to shape it (1). Fiddler On The Roof may be an exception, depending on how contemporary American Jewish understanding of authentic Jewish life is directly connected to that film.

Compare that to something like Arthurian legend. The historical King Arthur, if he even existed, would’ve been a very different person from the various versions of him that exist in the popular imagination. Fiction, poetry, films, TV shows, theater, and visual arts have a direct influence on contemporary understandings of Arthurian legend—how the characters looked and spoke, their personalities, the look and feel of the world they lived in, the customs and taboos they adhered to (or broke!), the values they upheld or undermined, etc.

If you as a creator say, “I want to create something with Arthurian legend that hasn’t been done before,” you can play around with it a lot. You can make it a futuristic sci-fi thing. You can change the genders of the characters. You can turn Camelot into an evil empire. You can pull a Baz Lurman’s Romeo + Juliet and have the characters speak Elizabethan English in a contemporary setting. You can make like Akira Kurosawa and set it in Warring States era Japan. You can make Camelot a queer sanctuary. There’s so much you can do, and it would still be recognizable as Arthurian legend. Whether or not these incarnations of that legend are accepted as authentic has less to do with how well they adhere to conventional renditions of the story than with their deeper questions and themes.

Yet, when it comes to Torah, I often sensed a kind of skittishness in mainstream Jewish institutions about giving the creative impulse too much leeway. In a way, it reminds me of stereotypical Victorian attitudes toward sexuality, a kind of prudishness that hints at a paralyzing fear of what the urge to create would do if unleashed.

Hold up. Let me walk that back.

It reminds me of the wariness that cishet people have of queer and trans people. There’s something about us that they find deeply threatening, even though we just want to live and be ourselves. Sometimes, I think it’s because openly queer people who are thriving are a threat. We’re a threat to the notion that there’s only one right way to love or fuck, one right way to make a family or community, one right way to have or express gender, one right way to live a good life filled with joy and love and meaning.

My intuition tells me that there is a link between the threat of queerness and the threat of the creative urge to normative society, but I can’t quite bridge the two yet.

What do you think?

Footnotes

1. Frankly, this strikes me as odd since, historically speaking, people creatively reshaping Judaism is even more traditional than the practices that some like to think of as eternal and unchanging.