via YouTube Capture
Transcription:
So there I was, in the Met for the first time, on layover between my first visit to Jerusalem and home, and I turned a corner and found myself all alone frozen between these overwhelming imposing statues. I did not need to read the description to know that these were guardians and figures of power. They exuded a sense of majestic mercilessness. The Rilke quote "Every angel is terror" applied perfectly. When I recovered, I looked to the official museum plaque to tell me what these were, and I received a second shock. The Assyrian name for these mythological creatures, found throughout the near Middle East, was lamassu, but the Hebrew name was כרב. These are cherubim. These are the guardians who arched their wings toward one another over the ark. It's very common to hear a Jewish educator say, "Well, nobody knows what the cherubim looked like," and that is simply not true by current archaeology and art history. For the time a keruv was a familiar mythological creature with a specific form-- the head of king, a lion or bull's body, and huge wings-- just like today we all know what a unicorn looks like, even though no one has ever seen one. It's just that, unlike the pomegranate, the original keruv has become a very unfamiliar, uncomfortable symbol-- way out of line with current aesthetics. These figures are awe-ful in the original sense of the word, and encountering them even today forces us to reimagine the artistic intentions that went into the ark as intimidation, protection, and above all power all at once.
Now, I speaking of imagination, I can already imagine the objections-- oh come on, historical reproductions were enough of a stretch, under what normal condition are we going to be working with actual antiquities? Well, have you ever been to a place called the Kotel? Have you ever spoken to your students or colleagues about the Kotel? Because when you lay your hands on the Kotel, you are touching some,thing that still exists, because of its value as art. The wall that stands today has been strong enough to last thousands of years because Herod's renovation of the Second Temple was one of the architectural wonders of the world, the masterpiece of a lifelong builder. In fact, one of the most potent recent examples of the power of actual antiquities concerns the door pillars of Herod's Temple, which are still standing within the Dome of the Rock. Qanta Ahmed, a British Arab doctor and journalist visiting the Dome of the Rock in August of 2013, wrote of the pillars, "Before this place was made ours, it had clearly been theirs. We were on borrowed ground. Incredible at something so ancient, confronted with the profound reality preceding Islam, we fell into the shared silence of young believers."
But how do we bring actual antiquities into the classroom. Well, with rare exceptions, we can't. The best we can do is to bring one another our stories of our encounters with actual antiquities, the effects they had on us, the meaning we found in them. And these stories, of course, can be written down-- at which point, they become text, and we become able to come full circle, with new insight into the texts that have been passed down to us, because of our own experiences with trying to pass on our experience.

свернуть