If this sermon had a title – and I have a fondness for the thing you sometimes see outside Churches where the title of the sermon is posted for all to see – if this sermon had a title, the title would be ‘Walter Benjamin and the Unicorn’
The Walter Benjamin piece is inspired by a pilgrimage
my wife and I made to Benjamin’s last resting place in Portbou, right on the
Spanish side of the border with France.
And the Unicorn … well … one should never really need
an excuse for talking about unicorns. In the Talmud, Tractate Zevachim folio 113b,
the Rabbis discuss the Reima – a mythic beast of incredible size.
Rabba Bar
Hanna said, I have seen a day-old-Reima and it was as large as Mount Tabor. How
large is Mount Tabor, the Rabbis ask, 40 parasangs – that would be 120 miles to
you or me. And its neck was three parasangs long, and its head a parasang long
and – would you forgive me for being a little scatological? But this is a
direct quotation from the Talmud, which isn’t as dry as you might think - רְמָא כַּבָּא וּסְכַר יַרְדְּנָא – it sprayed out feces and dammed the river Jordan.
I’m sure you
are all wondering about the same thing the Rabbis, wondered about as cited on
page 113b of Talmud Zevachim – how did Noah get a beast of that size into the
ark.
There
follows a discussion about whether you could get the whole head of the Reima
into the ark, or just the tip of its nose and eventually the Rabbis settle on
the notion that the Reima and a massive Giant, named Og, who the Rabbis assume
was alive before the Flood and is finally defeated in battle by Moses, survived
the flood tied to the Ark and were fed through a window by Noah.
Elsewhere in
the Talmud (TY Shabbat 2:3) [1]
there is discussion of a special pure animal, hidden since the days of the
construction of the desert tabernacle – a Keresh. And Rabbi Hoshaya taught that this animal had
a singular horn.
And that was
enough for the great Jewish fable-ist, Gertrude Landa, to create a tale,
published in 1919 book Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends
that included this.
Then the various creatures began to march forward into
the Ark. Father Noah watched them closely. He seemed troubled. “I wonder,” he
said to himself, “how I shall obtain a unicorn, and how I shall get it into the
Ark.”
“I can bring thee a unicorn, Father Noah,” he heard in a
voice of thunder, and turning round he saw the giant, Og. “But thou must agree
to save me, too, from the flood.”
“Begone,” cried Noah. “Thou art a demon, not a human being. I
can have no dealings with thee.” “Pity me,” whined the giant. “Once I was so
tall that I could drink water from the clouds and toast fish at the sun. I fear
not that I shall be drowned, but that all the food will be destroyed and that I
shall perish of hunger.”
Noah, however, only smiled; but he grew serious again when Og
brought a unicorn. It was as big as a mountain, although the giant said it was
the smallest he could find. It lay down in front of the Ark and Noah saw by
that action that he must save it.
For some time he was puzzled what to do, but at last a bright
idea struck him. He attached the huge beast to the Ark by a rope fastened to
its horn so that it could swim alongside and be fed.[2]
And here, I
suppose, we should leave our unicorn and turn to Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin, 1892-1940,
was one of the great Jewish minds of the last century, a close friend of Hannah
Arendt, a close friend of Gershon Scholem. He’s best known for his extraordinary
critique of the impact of modernity – by which he means the ability to mass
produce stuff.
He’s
thinking of factories and chainstores and especially art. He was deeply interested
in the transformative technology of his age – the camera. The fact that art
stopped being something that only a select few people could ever see, but that
art could be photographed and everyone could then get to see the photo. He
started to think about the difference between the thing itself and the mass
reproduced version of the thing – the photo in what he called ‘the age of
mechanical reproduction.’
He comes up
with this word, aura.
The aura of
a thing is the real quality of a thing. It’s the very painting itself. To stand
infront of a painting is to appreciate the aura of a painting. A photo of a
painting has less aura. There are good things, particularly if you are a
Marxist – and Binyamin was a Marxist, about being able to take photographs and
goodness knows what he would have thought of the digital cameras in our phones
and the ability to upload to Instagram and everything else. But there is a loss
of aura. Something about works of art gets lost in the ‘age of mechanical reproduction.’
Benjamin was
living and working in Paris when the Nazis invaded but he managed to get a Visa
to the States, and he fled south, to Spain – officially neutral in the Second
World War. But at his first stopping point south of the French border, in
Portbou – and it’s hard to imagine the trauma of what must have felt like, he
was told his paperwork was wrong. The rules had changed and he was therefore to
be deported back into the hands of the Gestapo. And for Benjamin it was too
much and he took his own life rather than be deported into the hands of the
Nazis.
His great
friend Hannah Arendt wrote to his other great friend, Gershon Scholem,
“The report
of his death took nearly four weeks to reach his sister and us. Jews are dying
in Europe and are being buried like dogs.”
Benjamin has
no grave, no gravestone his body was dumped, like a dog. It’s somewhere on the
top of a promontory overlooking a beautiful bay and there it lay until 1994. Thirty
years ago a memorial to Benjamin, by the Israeli artist Danny Karavan, was opened
and last week Josephine and I went to see it.
Here’s a
photo.
Here’s another.
Doesn’t look
like much, does it. Got no aura – these photos. Let me try and explain.
The reality,
the unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of going inside the memorial, taking
time to climb down a flight of clanking metal stairs inside a dark and slightly
rusting iron corridor-like tunnel, overlooking a stunning bay in which life teems
and promises and looks so beguiling is extraordinary. It made me want to cry
for the sheer waste of a remarkable life – Benjamin’s life, and every life
brutally brought short then, and since.
The memorial
to Walter Benjamin, unmistakably, brilliantly and clearly completely deliberately
has aura.
And there is
nothing quite like aura. No photo, no blog post, no social media viral meme can
ever match the aura of the thing itself in all its reality.
And that’s
why I like this. That’s why I think this is important.
What do I mean
by this – this Jewish thing, this Shabbat thing, this Synagogue thing, this Bat
Mitzvah thing. This thing of family members and friends and a community of
fellow Jewish travelers coming together to experience the reality, the unique,
unrepeatable, exquisite reality of a young girl preparing to read from the
Torah, to read from a vellum scroll written in ink made from a recipe 1,500
years old, reading a tale that is thousands of years older still and in the
process she becomes almost magically a woman, an adult member of the community right
infront of our very eyes. This thing has aura.
No Facebook
post can match that.
No Bat
Mitzvah present of the latest mass produced I-don’t’-know-what matches the very
reality of what, Edie, you did here, on this Bimah. Nothing ever will.
This is the
thing itself. This is aura.
That’s what
Shabbat is really all about – aura. The thing we only get to experience when we
switch off the phones with their extraordinary lenses and apps. Shabbat is the very
essence of turning round to Benjamin’s Age of Mechanical Reproduction –
which is indeed amazing, and I’m not even a Marxist – and saying, thank you,
and I’ll be back tomorrow, for now I want to concentrate on the reality, the
unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of the aura of the work of art which is
my life.
כִּי־שֵׁ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֗ים עָשָׂ֤ה יְ-הוָה֙
אֶת־הַשָּׁמַ֣יִם וְאֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבַיּוֹם֙ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י שָׁבַ֖ת וַיִּנָּפַֽשׁ׃
For across six days did God create the heavens and
earth and on the Seventh Day, God rested – Shavat - and was re-ensouled -
Vayinafash.
And for any of us who ever feel a bit lacking in that feeling
of being rested and re-ensouled. I recommend turning off the age of mechanical
reproduction, of digital reproduction for a day, even part of a day, and encountering
instead the the unique,
unrepeatable, exquisite reality of Shabbat, or, really anything that has aura.
I recommend
coming to Shul.
I recommend
being in a community where every week someone is celebrating or mourning, or
hoping or fearing or some combination of all three that can never be explained
or recorded, but can only be experienced.
I recommend going
to see real art – like Danny Karavan’s sculptures.
I recommend
going for real walks in real parks with real trees.
I feel like
we need to make much more of the desperate value of aura, we need to be so much
clearer about the dangers of thinking that value can be reproduced, reprinted, reposted.
Which brings
me back to my friend the Keresh, or the Reima or the Unicorn. It’s gone, I’m
sorry to say, the reality behind these glorious mythic tales of pooing beasts
the size of mountains with single horns so strong they could be tethered to an
ark in a flood that destroyed the world.
And all the
memes and cute sparkly prints just don’t cut it.
And it’s not
the unicorn. It’s the dodo and the wooly mammoth and the megalodon and the
sabre-toothed cat.
And it’s not
just the animals, it’s Walter Benjamin and all 6 million of them, and my
grandparents of blessed memory and every life lost and remembered.
We have, in
this fragile, unique, unrepeatable and exquisite reality that is our life, we
have the opportunity to do real unique, unrepeatable, exquisite things. And if
we don’t do them well, if we don’t do them carefully, those moments will be
lost.
Organising
our lives around mechanical or digital reproductions won’t cut it. Life cannot
be lived well in reproduction. We’ll lose the very that is most special about
being alive. My mind goes to a remarkable Midrash in Kohelet Raba.
When the Holy One blessed be He created Adam the first man,
He took him and showed him all the trees in the Garden of Eden, and He said to
him: ‘See My creations, how beautiful and exemplary they are. Everything I
created, I created for you. Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy My
world, as if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you.[3]
Choose life
Experience
aura whenever you can
Shabbat
Shalom
[1] כֵּיוָן שֶׁעָשָׂה בָהּ מְלֶאכֶת
הַמִּשְׁכָּן נִגְנְזָה. רִבִּי אָבוּן אָמַר. קֶרֶשׁ הָיָה שְׁמָהּ. תַּנֵּי
רִבִּי הוֹשַׁעְיָה. דְּחָדָא קֶרֶן. וְתִיטַב לָיי מִשּׁוֹר פָּר מַקְרִין
וּמַפְרִיס. מִקֶּרֶן כָתַב רַחֲמָנָא.
[2] https://dianabuja.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/the-unicorn-and-the-ark-a-talmudic-story/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Talmud%2C%20the,and%20growing%20a%20single%20horn.
[3] 7:13
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