The creation of beauty by its destruction: the idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art

Contemporary commentators are well aware that\ud the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far\ud from suppressing art, the Second Commandment\ud produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses\ud halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce\ud figurative images that at once cancel and restore\ud the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests\ud that Jewish art’s observance of the Second Commandment’s\ud proscription of idolatrous images (a commandment\ud that belongs indivisibly with the First) is ever more\ud relevant to a contemporary image-saturated mass culture\ud whose consumption induces feelings of both hubris\ud and self-disgust or shame. The article revisits Steven\ud Schwarzschild’s interpretation of the halakhic requirement\ud that artists should deliberately mis-draw or distort\ud the human form and Anthony Julius’s account of\ud Jewish art as one that that mobilizes idol breaking. As\ud an aesthetic consequence of the rabbinic permission to\ud mock idols – and thereby render the ideological\ud cults for\ud which they are visual propaganda merely laughable or\ud absurd – distortive, auto-destructive and other relatedforms\ud of Jewish art are not intended to alienate the\ud sanctity of the human. On the contrary, by honouring\ud the transcendence of the human, especially the face,\ud idoloclastic art knows the human figure as sublime,\ud always exceeding any representation of its form. Idoloclastic\ud anti-images thereby belong to a messianic aesthetic\ud of incompletion that knows the world as it ought\ud to be but is not yet; that remains open to its own futurity:\ud the restoration of dignity, in love.