The Grammar of God by Aviya Kushner

Author:Aviya Kushner [Kushner, Aviya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64526-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

Back in Iowa my teacher changes direction to discuss the broader goals of the course.

“To make the Bible accessible to you—to make you used to it.”

I write this down.

“To talk about it as literature.”

I write that, too.

“It’s a very great literature, with as much influence as anything,” she says next.

She is devout—I can hear it—and she is a major literary writer. It is hard to be both an artist and a person of faith: how lucky I am to have her to read with me. I used to think the conflict between believing in God and making art was a particularly poignant problem for Jews, many of whom believe that the line from Exodus 20:4—“Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,” in the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation—applies to any human being who attempts to create a work of art. In Hebrew, the word pesel, translated as “graven image,” is the modern Hebrew word for sculpture. The next word, t’muna, translated here as “any manner of likeness,” is the modern Hebrew word for a painting. This passage from Exodus has haunted Jewish visual artists who grew up in observant homes, including the artist Marc Chagall, who actually hired a beggar to pose as his father praying—in his father’s prayer shawl and tefillin, or phylacteries. One of those paintings is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I like to go look at it. Chagall wrote that he painted the image because he felt the need to capture a way of life that was dying out. I imagine he thought his own father would never agree to sit for him.

I used to feel that the verse was a direct challenge not only for the Jewish visual artist but for the writer, too, those of us who insist on inventing images with words, creating characters, making people live on the page as God makes them live in the world. A writer who has labored on a character for a long time can feel a love for the invented being, perhaps a love not far from what the idol worshipper feels toward the god he has made with his own hands. But the conflict between art and faith is not, I have gradually decided, just a Jewish issue. It is not about that line between graven images and an unseeable God. Instead, it is the very idea of belief that is a problem for a devoted artist. Belief implies acceptance. An artist is different—a questioner in the heart, not necessarily a believer. An artist does not accept first and do next, as the Jewish people supposedly did at Sinai. An artist is a—

“Supercessionism,” my teacher says, jolting me from my thoughts.

“What is that?” I ask.

“The Christian habit of treating the old as subordinate,” she says.

Isaiah in second place? Moses as runner-up?

I wonder about

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