The Menorah, the Rebbe and the Aesthetics of Transcendence: A Response to Reviel Netz

“The ultimate skill of an artist,” the Lubavitcher Rebbe once wrote, is “to transcend the superficiality of an object.” I was reminded of this line while reading Reviel Netz’s insightful essay, “Straightening Out the Menorah.” Netz suggests that the Rebbe’s championship of a straight-branched candelabra—following Maimonides’s famous diagram rather than the curved branches engraved on the triumphal arch of Titus—may have been underwritten by a perceptive suspicion that the latter depiction is “too elegant, and in a very Greco-Roman way.”

In a rather brilliant leap of association, Netz correlates the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s interpretation of Maimonides’s mathematical diagram with the abstract expressionist school of art, mainly developed by Jewish New Yorkers who were the Rebbe’s contemporaries. He rightly intuits that, like them, the Rebbe recoiled from the superficialities of ornamentation and instead embraced a geometrical plainness that faithfully continues a distinctly Jewish tradition of “scientific-philosophical purity,” of which Maimonides is the most recognizable avatar.

According to Netz, understanding that medieval and ancient diagrams were not like ours may suggest that Maimonides’s “straight lines . . . need not represent straight lines.” But surely, he would agree that straight lines, even in medieval representations, signified straight lines at least as often as they did curved ones. Given the arguments summarized by Netz himself in favor of a more straightforward reading, and given that (full disclosure) I’m a Chabadnik myself, I remain less than convinced that straightening out the menorah amounts to a “likely . . . misinterpretation of Maimonides’s drawing.” At the same time, I applaud Netz for transcending the superficial externalities of this debate in order to probe the profound conceptual stakes of visual representation.

In fact, the Rebbe’s engagement with contemporary questions of aesthetics and Jewish visual culture was surprisingly deep and continuous. He carried on extensive correspondences with many artists, including Jacques Lipchitz, who arrived in New York at precisely the moment that abstract expressionism was beginning to emerge. Perusing Lipchitz’s archive I discovered a copy of a long letter from the Rebbe to a lesser-known sculptor, Erna Weill, about her bust of the Ba’al Shem Tov, Hasidism’s founding figure, which she had carved out of Vermont Black Marble. “I can safely assume,” he wrote, that “you wished to depict in a symbolic way the ideological person.”

In 1977, the Rebbe received an illustrated monograph by Frank Popper on the work of the Israeli artist Yaakov Agam. He took particular note of Agam’s “original use of elements that would ostensibly seem to have no connection to artistry, such as light and shade, lines, and all sorts of geometrical forms, whose combination . . . [make] a striking impression, even upon someone whose eye hasn’t been trained in this field.” The Rebbe went on to connect this to the Jewish imperative to approach darkness constructively, to orient the shadows of life in such a manner that they too become sources of illumination and light. It isn’t surprising that Agam was later recruited to design the iconic menorah that Chabad continues to erect each year at the corner of 5th Ave and 59th Street, near Manhattan’s Central Park.

The Rebbe’s comment that “the ultimate skill of an artist is . . . to transcend the superficiality of an object” comes from a letter he wrote to Hendel Lieberman. Although best known for his neo-primitive depictions of the lost life of the shtetl, Lieberman was also described by a critic as “showing a thorough understanding of cubism.” Less well known are his forays into pure abstraction, which boldly experiment with the interplay of geometric form and vivid color. Some of these are finely crafted, finished pieces. Others are more amorphous, with shapes disintegrating into one another at their edges, and flashing sweeps of color barely emerging from the surrounding blackness.

Of all the paintings Lieberman showed the Rebbe, it was apparently one of these that he liked the most. The Rebbe suggested the as yet unnamed work be titled “Creation: Past and Future,” and Lieberman agreed. Here, art was not merely stripping a given object of its superficial appearance, it was abstracting the creative essence underpinning time itself.

I was also reminded of something else as I read Netz’s article. It was an anecdote I had heard more than a decade ago from Michoel Gourarie, a rabbi who directs an educational organization in Sydney, Australia. In 1977, his grandfather took him on a trip from South Africa to visit the Rebbe in New York for his Bar Mitzvah. They also visited Chabad’s seventh rebbetzin, Chaya Mushka Schneerson, at the home she shared with the Rebbe on President Street. There they noticed a beautiful golden menorah, which had been given to the Rebbe by an admirer. Gourarie’s grandfather asked if the Rebbe actually lit it on Chanukah. The Rebbetzin replied with an epigram: “As I’m sure you know, my husband likes simple things.” (Veyst dokh, mayn man gleikht poshute zakhen.) In fact, the Rebbe would light a cheap menorah in the old European style, with cups mounted directly on its base rather than on branches either curved or straight, and forged of neither gold nor silver.    

Read Reviel Netz’s original article here.