by Yaakov Asher Sinclair

The Dream Factory

Hollywood is a Jewish town. The business of dreams is a Jewish business. Prior to the dream factory, commerce in the United States of America was an East Coast affair dominated by WASPs. They were not particularly fond of the Jews.

The movies changed all that. Overnight. However, like many overnight changes, it took a while for the enormity of the change to sink in.

Movie making was a new business and it was as wide-open as the West. With no WASP cartel to exclude them, the owners of the first movie theaters were, almost exclusively, Jews. Those Jewish movie theater owners became producers, directors, actors – pioneers in a new industry and art form. They looked around for a place with year-round sunshine and cheap rentals and labor. They found some sleepy orange groves a few miles outside the city of Los Angeles – a place called Hollywood. From a few oranges, a legend was born.

If much was new about Hollywood, a lot was not: Hollywood was the latest chapter of a 2,500-year dialogue – a dialogue about how you get beneath the surface of things. About how you get to the Truth. The dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens.

New Greeks For Old

You might have thought that the story of Chanuka is about how a small group of Torah-loyal Jews trounced the armies of the Greek Empire. In fact it’s the story of how the Torah beat out Hollywood – or its second-century BCE equivalent. More of a threat to the Jewish People than the Greeks themselves were those Hellenized Jews, who wanted to be more Greek than the Greeks. The Hellenists changed their names to Greek names. They patronized the theater (which the Greeks conceived of as religious worship). To compete in naked athletic competitions, they underwent painful cosmetic operations to remove the evidence of bris mila, the mark of the eternal covenant between G-d and the Jewish People.

Why did these Jews abandon their faith? Was it just a ticket into society – as conversion to Christianity was for 19^th century European Jews? Or was there something more philosophical about their apostasy?

Art For Art’s Sake

Look up into a cloudy sky. All you can see are the clouds. The sky itself is beyond sight.

“By His breath the Heavens were spread (shifra)” (Iyov 26,13).

G-d spreads aside the curtain of cloud to reveal that which is beyond. He disperses the clouds that conceal so we can see past the obstruction, past the surface. The word for “spread,” shifra, has the same root as shapir, which means “to beautify.” In Jewish thought, beauty is seeing past the surface to the essence. That which is beautiful, by definition, is that which takes us beneath the surface, beyond the clouds, to reveal the endless blue heavens – to reveal the truth. In other words, to a Jew, Beauty can never be skin deep.

Similarly, the word for “ugly” and “opaque” in Hebrew are the same – achur. By definition, something that conceals essence is ugly.

“Art For Art’s Sake” is not a Jewish concept. For if the definition of beauty is that which reveals, something that reveals nothing but itself can never be beautiful.

Art – For G-d’s Sake?

If anyone “invented” art, it was the Greeks. If anyone celebrated the cause of Art for Art’s sake, it was Athens.

It would be too easy, however, to dismiss the Greeks, Art and all that followed after them as merely interested in the surface of things. The Greeks and their heirs, whether Rembrandt or Fellini, believed – and they believe to this day – that Art has power to take you beyond, to connect to that which is above. That through Art and artifice, you can get to the Truth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), British poet and literary critic, writes in Chapter XIV of his autobiography, Biographia Literaria, the following:

The “willing suspension of disbelief” is at the heart of all poetry, of the graphic and the narrative arts, of all theater and film: We all know that the person who just died so messily all over the stage will be doing exactly the same thing at the 3:15 matinee tomorrow afternoon. We all know that the dinosaurs tearing the luckless hero limb from limb are no more than a few billion pixels generated by a computer whiz in an air-conditioned Hollywood special effects factory. And yet these images move us. They affect us. They are illusions, but they create real feelings.

On a more abstract level, fine art creates its own emotions. We are moved, genuinely moved, by the arrangement of blobs of oil paint on a canvas, by the chiaroscuro of a fine photograph. These things move us – but they are illusions.

Torah – For Torah’s Sake

At the heart of the debate between Athens and Jerusalem, the Greek believes that you can get to the truth through illusion – that celebrating the surface can take you beneath the surface; that from illusion can come reality; that a lie can teach you the Truth.

The Jew says that there is only Truth or Illusion – and illusion only takes you to greater illusion. It never leads to the Truth.

If you take the first letter of the Aleph Beis (with which the Torah is written), Aleph, its middle letter, Mem, and its final letter, Tav, it spells Emes – “Truth.”

The Torah is called “a Torah of Truth.” It is truth from the beginning to the end – and at every stage in the middle. It never uses artifice in the service of reality.

Back To The Works

In those Hollywood dream factories, there are may Jews whose talents light up an industry. They can’t resist the challenge to light up the world. Neither could Chagall, Rothko, Modigliani, Pollock, Mahler, Kafka, Mendelssohn, Marx, Trotsky, Freud, or Einstein. Some 15% of all Nobel Prize nominees have been Jewish. The Jewish desire to light up the world, and their “success” in doing so, is totally disproportionate to their numbers.

At all times and in all places, you will find the Jew yearning to light up the world – whether he has Torah or not. Without Torah, however, he will find that there are many blind alleys and dark crevices, places of unredeemed illusion and selfishness, that come from his “light.”

When a Jew lights up the world with Torah, he finds no dark places, no self-indulgence, no immorality, no freakishness, no blind alleys that lead to nothing more than his own ego. He has chosen to light up the world with a light that is True – from Aleph to Tav.

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