Finding the Sublime: Leah Hochman - Scholar-in-Residence Program at Beth Israel, San Diego

Some might think that regional and ethnic studies are too narrowly focused, but without such specific area and demographic focal points, we run the risk of studying generalities that lack application to the tangible contexts in which we find ourselves. Courses of study need balance and a connective tissue to how we understand the world and the many narratives that define human history.

This is where Leah Hochman’s discussions will engage the participants in this eclectic weekend at San Diego's Congregation Beth Israel. Here are several questions I posed to Hochman to discover her approach to these topics of universal interest – about art and beauty, about food and about God.

Leah Hochman will be Beth Israel’s Scholar in Residence the weekend of February 20-22, 2015. She teaches classes in medieval and modern philosophy, modern history, about Jewish identity and literature, and even about food and religion at the University of Southern California and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. She also directs the Louchheim School for Judaic Studies at the University of Southern California.

Joe Nalven: As the Scholar in Residence at Beth Israel, you will be taking up a number of topics – beauty, food and God. I am puzzled about each and I wonder if you might share the approach you will be taking at this three day event.

Leah Hochman: All of the topics come together under the one big umbrella concept of taste. We use that term to express so many different ideas—flavor, of course, what something tastes like, if it’s spicy or bland and also its flavor profile, a food’s unique impact on our palates. But taste also has a connotation as a quality of judgment; we use expressions that describe people having good taste or whether they are tasteful. 

Usually that means that a person has an element of discernment—she or he can discriminate between what society thinks of as good or valuable. Sometimes that is related to the idea of class (in both a refinement sense and an economic sense) and sometimes that has to do with a sense of panache. But taste can also mean having a sensitivity toward the different ways sounds and sights and smells affect our assessment of an object or a person. In theology—especially Jewish theology—sensory perception is one of the many gifts the divine has bestowed on human beings in order for them to access and organize knowledge. So using taste as an overarching theme for the weekend brings in all the different elements of our topics—aesthetics, theology, food and Judaism.

Joe Nalven: When talking about art and beauty, is there any benefit to starting the conversation with a comparison of different cultures, of east versus west, men and women, modern perspectives versus medieval classical Greece, or religious versus secular ones?

Leah Hochman: There is always benefit in making and using comparisons. Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th century Jewish philosopher whose work people credit as the religious foundation of both Reform and modern Orthodox Judaism, used to say that that you have to leave some place in order to know it. In experiencing other cultures—using them to help assess and describe ideas and behaviors—one has a vocabulary to think broadly of the human condition and how we—as individuals, as members of a community—fit into it.

Joe Nalven: I see variations in how Jews are portrayed—not in the negative stereotypes we often confront. Very positive and curiously beautiful examples. Here is one done by Rembrandt (and one that hypnotized Van Gogh) and another, more contemporary example, by Kehinde Wiley, an LA artist who travels the world for his imagery, and this is one from Israel from a series that focuses on youth from Jewish-Ethiopian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli communities. 

Rembrandt / Isaac and Rebecca (The Jewish Bride) / 1665-1669
Van Gogh is quoted about this painting: "I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food."

Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage series, Israel / Mizrah (2011)

Leah Hochman:  Beauty and ugliness are good examples of how we look at our own culture, and of how others looking at us imagine who we are. Each culture has its own principles by which it understands who is beautiful and what is ugly. I remember my parents’ set of National Geographic magazines and all the photos of indigenous peoples with tattoos or piercings or those women with those incredible neck rings that elongated their necks. One person’s beautiful might be another person’s ugly. But there are some universal principles to the idea of the Beautiful that we know as universal because they apply cross-culturally and across time periods. The Rubenesque female form is very different from the Greek male athlete but they both have their respective senses of harmony, balance, coloration and coherence that signal to the viewer that they are both beautiful.

Joe Nalven: As you’ve mentioned, from a cross-cultural perspective, we encounter a multiplicity of forms that define a multiplicity of beauties. But if we look to the emotional element which we attach to magnificent art – take Michelangelo’s David or Pieta – can we illustrate a universal notion of experiential beauty – what some have described as the aura and mystical moment when engaged with art?

Leah Hochman: I think what you're asking for in terms of a single image that can represent or invoke or project or foster or provoke the sense of being beyond the (necessary pragmatics of the) senses doesn't really exist. Like the formal element, I suspect the emotional element is also entirely cultural. For believing Catholics, that image may be Jesus on the Cross or Mother Mary weeping over her dead son. Those images are almost always signifiers for the experiential; they are meant to symbolize sacrifice, redemption, love, etc. In other places and times, there may not be a visual analogue for a culture's great experience. For the Israelites it probably was the revelation of Mt. Sinai; Judaism turned explicitly to literature (i.e., the non figural) in order to describe what it mean/continues to mean (think, the poetry of the Psalms or the imagined music that accompanied the Song of the Sea at Mt. Sinai).

Joe Nalven, Finding the Song of the Sea

For the folks in the 18th century it was the destruction of the earthquake in Lisbon that gave rise to a whole series of artistic attempts to render natural disasters -- events well beyond the ken of human beings -- in ways they could comprehend the death and destruction. Maybe for Americans of a certain age there are parallels to be drawn to the assassination of JFK or to 9/11. There are always attempts to represent these big, suprasensory events in some kind of art (be it literature, music, plastic arts, or architecture) but hugeness and incomprehensibility of their very nature reject the kind of coalescing that I think you're implying. That's the thing about the sublime (which all of those events are) -- because it's overwhelming it can't be categorized like other experiences. But there's nothing about the sublime that says it needs to be universal.

That's sort of the connection between my first talk and my second one--the Sublime. Moses Mendelssohn names God as most sublime. So when we start talking about divinity we will need to think about what sublime really means.

Joe Nalven: About food. I enjoy cooking and find myself wandering from Mexican to Middle Eastern to European to American comfort food. And, yes, Asian cooking as well. We have a lot to choose from for the contemporary palate. Can we stick with the food court approach without offending others or are there areas where we risk confusing food selections with ethical and ritual biases?

Leah Hochman: Food is another area in which comparisons can show us our own presumptions and preferences. To paraphrase a line from above: one person’s delicacy is another person’s disgust. Context is king, for sure. In general, the American palate prefers food that tends toward less spice (in the sense not of flavor but of heat), so the delicious (even spicy) Thai dish you might love at your favorite Thai restaurant might be a very pale reflection of its “authentic” form in a fully Thai environment. 

But what’s wonderful about food in the contemporary American environment is the context of fusion and adaptation. The academic term for that is hybridization. Authentic American Thai food—Thai food eaten in the US by people living in the US—gets to have its own rules and flavor profile. An easy example from Jewish American eating practices could be the inclusion of sushi at a Shabbat meal. It’s normal now—especially in California—to see sushi at dinner on a Friday night. In LA, the major kosher grocery markets have sushi chefs rolling sushi right on the premises. Now, that signals that sushi is still considered special enough to be appropriate for the Sabbath, but it also shows just how far “ethnic” foods have entered into the mainstream. Even 20 years ago, sushi was nowhere as ubiquitous as it is now. But why shouldn’t it complement a nice piece of gefilte fish?

Joe Nalven: I often get into discussions about religion and find that most individuals have their own construction of what counts as religious or spiritual. I am amazed that many atheists think of themselves as spiritual? So, where does this spiritual world come from – from magic, from God, from a Star Wars’ mantra of ‘let the force be with you’? One way out of this odds and ends approach is to adopt a theological orthodoxy in religion or in some other ideology of economic, or environmentalism, or of some Comic Con confluence of science fiction beings sharing the same space with fans. Instead of adopting a pre-existing orthodoxy, is there a meaningful way to write our own theological script? Do we get lost in a world of subjectivities?

Leah Hochman: I think there are lots of different ways to approach the divine—even in (or especially within!) Judaism—and that the recognition of such diversity goes as far back as the recording of the Mishnah (ca 200 CE)! No one has the full market on spirituality or on conceptions of the divine. And the process of seeking out of new spiritualities (or new ways of describing a single spirituality) is woven into the fabric of the American ethic (we had not one, not two, but many Great Awakenings). One of the gifts of the Enlightenment has been the empowerment of the individual to make his or her decisions. (One of the challenges, of course, has been figuring out how to retain synagogue memberships!) Part of the goal of that session at Beth Israel is to use some tools to be able to articulate one’s own ideas about God and theology and spirituality. We are so often told not to talk about any of those topics and I have found that many people feel as if they do not have the right vocabulary. Reform Judaism took a survey two years ago of their readers’ feeling about God; the results were really quite amazing. It turns out that we aren’t too subjective in our sentiments toward the divine; most people think of the driving force of nature or the world or ethics or morality or religion or Judaism as all encompassing. We just choose to pay attention to different aspects of it.

You are invited to the Scholar-in-Residence program to hear Dr. Leah Hochman.

Congregation Beth Israel

9001 Towne Centre Drive
San Diego, California   92122
Contact:  858-535-1111

Jewish Taste and Tastes: Thinking about Beauty, Food and God

Friday, February 20
6:15 p.m. Shabbat Service/Scholar Sermon: What is Beauty? Modern Jews and Jewish Thought

Saturday, February 21
8:30 a.m. Torah study led by Dr. Hochman
10:00 a.m. Minyan service
12:00 p.m. Catered lunch
12:45 p.m. Study session: Developing Your Own Theology.
Hochman will look at what theology means and how Jews from different time periods and in different places have understood and defined their ideas about God. Each of us is asked to think creatively about ways that we can implement our own ideas about God as modern, contemporary Jews and Americans living in diverse, multi-layered communities.

Sunday, February 22
9:00 a.m. Registration
9:30 a.m. Brunch10:00 a.m. Study session: Food, Faith & Conflict will investigate the complexities and meaning of food and our religious, cultural and historical relationship to it. In all religions, food can reveal the history and culture of allegiances and disagreements; the values and judgments we have about who belongs and with whom we are willing to eat; cultural predilections, ethnic mores, and those ideas and symbols that people hold dear or disdain.

Fees:
Friday dinner $25 members, $35 nonmembers
Saturday lunch and study session $15 members, $25 nonmembers
Sunday brunch and study session $10 members, $15 nonmembers