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Imitation and finitude: Towards a Jewish theology of making
Vincent, Alana M.
Vincent, Alana M.
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2015-03-01
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Abstract
It has long been taken as a truism that Judaism as a whole is marked by a pervasive “hostility to the image”. The prevailing narrative takes the Second Commandment very much at face value, as a prohibition against the attempt to imitate anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. However, this narrative is based on an incomplete understanding of the textual and artefact record. This paper takes more recent scholarship into account, and attempts to contest this narrative, and to suggest that we can identify a Jewish tradition not just of visuality, but of art, and that, further, we can get there with the help of, rather than in spite of, the biblical text. It engages with a reading of the last third of the book of Exodus, weighing the duelling narratives of Bezalel and the Golden Calf against the theories of art which have risen to prominence in the modern era, attempting to formulate the basis for a Jewish theological aesthetics which affirms and embraces the visual arts.
It has long been taken as a truism that Judaism as a whole is marked by a pervasive “hostility to the image”. The prevailing narrative takes the Second Commandment very much at face value, as a prohibition against the attempt to imitate anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. However, this narrative is based on an incomplete understanding of the textual and artefact record. This paper takes more recent scholarship into account, and attempts to contest this narrative, and to suggest that we can identify a Jewish tradition not just of visuality, but of art, and that, further, we can get there with the help of, rather than in spite of, the biblical text. It engages with a reading of the last third of the book of Exodus, weighing the duelling narratives of Bezalel and the Golden Calf against the theories of art which have risen to prominence in the modern era, attempting to formulate the basis for a Jewish theological aesthetics which affirms and embraces the visual arts.
It has long been taken as a truism that Judaism as a whole is marked by a pervasive “hostility to the image”. The prevailing narrative takes the Second Commandment very much at face value, as a prohibition against the attempt to imitate anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. However, this narrative is based on an incomplete understanding of the textual and artefact record. This paper takes more recent scholarship into account, and attempts to contest this narrative, and to suggest that we can identify a Jewish tradition not just of visuality, but of art, and that, further, we can get there with the help of, rather than in spite of, the biblical text. It engages with a reading of the last third of the book of Exodus, weighing the duelling narratives of Bezalel and the Golden Calf against the theories of art which have risen to prominence in the modern era, attempting to formulate the basis for a Jewish theological aesthetics which affirms and embraces the visual arts.
Citation
Vincent, A. (2015). Imitation and finitude: Towards a Jewish theology of making. In C. Welz (Ed.), The ethics of in-visibility: Imago Dei, memory, and the prohibition of images (pp. 87-100). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
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Mohr Siebeck
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Book chapter
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en
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Religion in Philosophy and Theology
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9783161538100