Time Passing

Cherubim and Idolatry in Terumah

Make two cherubim of gold—make them of hammered work—at the two ends of the cover. (Exodus 25:18)

CHERUBIM — They had the form of a child’s face (Sukkah 5a). —Rashi

The Torah bans idolatry, especially the construction and worship of “graven images.” And yet, the Torah is not strictly iconoclastic. The people are still obliged to build a Temple and to decorate it, as we read in this week’s parasha, Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19). If God were purely abstract, there would be no need for a Temple, and certainly no need for a gaudy one. Asked critically, is the gap between a decorous idol and a decorous Temple really so great? Isn’t aesthetic beauty a distraction from the purity of mind needed to contemplate the God who has no image, the God who shall be whatever God shall be?

The question gains strength when we consider that the ark cover was to be populated by cherubim, figures of human form, whom the sages understood to be child-like. Why, given all the labor to leave Egypt, and all the fanfare and plague around the sin of the golden calf, would God command the people to put human forms right in the heart of the Temple? It seems to be a contradiction?

Now, a skeptical person might say that the point is to prove that God can make up the rules. God is, in the terms of Carl Schmitt, the sovereign who decides on “the state of exception.” Bible critics might take a different, but no less skeptical approach: the priests did not agree with the premise of iconoclasm, seeing representation of God and ornamentation of divine sites as a legitimate form of monotheistic worship. What we have is an intra-Biblical conflict about theology. A more moderate, but still skeptical position, is that the Temple represents a compromise. The ideal remains worshipping a God who is abstract, but the practical constraints of human psychology being what they are, let the people have a Temple. (We find a similar pattern around the issue of spying out the land and appointing a king. Perhaps these are not great to have in the first place, but, oh well, here we are.) For me, none of these approaches are satisfying.

I’m taken with the positive idea of child-like faces covering the ark. While I can’t prove that my interpretation of the mysterious cherubim is correct, I’d like to offer a Midrash, a playful interpretation of the scene. The cherubim do not represent God or angels, but us. We look at them looking at the scene and identify with them, or should identify with them. They summon us to have a child-like wonder, to be naifs, beginners. Why is this important? Why is it important to have at the center of the Temple, at the boundary between the human and the transcendent?

From one point of view, children are the ultimate idolaters, animists and totemists all of them. They get attached to stuff animals and imbue all kinds of things with life that are in fact powerless. But from another perspective, children are the ultimate resisters of idolatry, because they are resisters of complacency. They take little for granted. Their concepts are flexible. The world is not yet hardened into a place of total sense. That openness is needed to be a follower of the God of Israel. Levinas contrasts Totality to Infinity. Totality is about systematic thought, coming up with answers to everything. Infinity is the experience of awe I feel in the presence of another. Children are cyphers and messengers of Infinity in a world too often governed by Totality.

The Cherubim face each other, mirroring the play of mystery beholding mystery. In seeing them see each other we see what it might mean to see God, to behold the transcendent realm not as an object, but as an Other.

For the Torah it is not enough to know God, the goal is to transmit a story and a way of life to future generations. Spiritual experience may be an important element of this, but if it’s not shared, taught, disseminated, scaled, and applied, it’s not durable. The cherubim, I like to think, are a kind of reminder of the Torah’s constant call: “Teach it to your children.” There is no completion of the spiritual quest, because we have to pass on the torch to those who will not know what we know and who will not experience the world as we do. The Temple is a fixed place, but time is not fixed. The cherubim will one day grow up and have children of their own. One day the Temple will not exist. How will we cope without a Temple? The Temple hints at an answer, as if forecasting its own destruction—a kind of trans-historic mandala. It says “the point is not to worship the correct object, but to exist in the right way. There is something about being like a cherub that we are supposed to learn, here, and something about relating to others as though they were cherubim. The God-idea is to be found in these relationships, in these ways of relating.

It’s natural to become complacent as one becomes successful. In a sense, it’s a sign of success that things get easier; one has more “leverage.” But should being a religious person get easier, should life be about achieving certain ends, certain virtues and then coasting? Or is striving itself a paradoxical ideal, so that one becomes better at striving as one grows, one becomes more ambitious (or perhaps a better word here is more “consilient,” more devoted), not less? It’s easy to gloat: Look, we’ve figured it out. This is an occupational hazard of prophets and “gurus,” of “chosen people,” of elites. But the cherubim are there to remind us not of our excellence, but of our constant need to begin again. It is a privilege to remain a beginner, it is a privilege to have the opportunity to share one’s insights with a new person.

Hannah Arendt describes natality, newness, as the primary phenomenon that can liberate us from the oppression of systematic thinking. I see the cherubim as figures of natality. And it’s pointed that we place them inside a building that, over time, might seem anything but new. Baroque structures can have a stale and heavy energy, beautiful as they are.

Of course, we don’t need the cherubim to remind us of the ephemeral. The Tabernacle was itself designed to be portable. Another reason why the Tabernacle avoids idolatry is that one has to deconstruct it to move it from place to place. It is a practice of impermanence and humility to invest so much in a structure that has no roots, a poignant metaphor for life as something that requires our whole-hearted engagement and our whole-hearted acceptance of its dynamism, and non-staying power.

Survival and transmission are paradoxes involving an interplay between passing away and continuing, giving over and forgetting. Idolatry is not just about the kinds of things worshipped, but the way we worshipped. Hold on to anything too hard and it becomes an idol. To practice holding things more loosely is difficult. For the opposite of rigidity is apathy. But the cherubim are not apathetic. They are playful. They delight in a process.

Heschel says that Judaism is a religion of time. Just as we cannot see God’s face, we cannot see time (iCal not withstanding). The cherubim are visual representations but they attune us to that which cannot be represented.

We see God’s face when we feel time passing.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

P.S.— I’m thrilled to share that I’m launching a new podcast, Meditations with Zohar. Subscribe and listen to the trailer here. First episode coming next week!

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