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AN INTERVIEW WITH STEVE COPELAND In his fall course Art and Jewish Experience: Philosophic and Educational Perspectives, Dr. Steve Copeland cultivated a dialogue so fluently comprehensive and so imaginatively liberating that it prompted MAJS student Lisa Sheiman to start bringing a tape recorder to class. She'd head to her car after the lecture, she recalls, and her thoughts would still be racing with the flow of ideas and "the interconnectedness of everything"—from art to life to texts to traditions. "The class opened up new worlds to me," she says. Margie Berkowitz P'61, MJEd'82, director of Prozdor and a former student of Copeland's, puts it this way: "What Steve gives to us lesser mortals is magic."
Framing the subject of his course in provocative questions about the essence of Judaism and art, Copeland guides his students through a text-based syllabus that draws on literature, visual art, film and music and a litany of thinkers as likely to include Akira Kurosawa as Rav Kook. He hones in on the topic at hand through rapid-fire free association—on the subject of the prophets, he glides from Second Samuel to Leonard Cohen; on Jewish mysticism, from the Zohar to Mark Rothko. In addition, he directs the dialogue inward. Encouraging his students to express themselves artistically, he asks them to keep journals in the form of sketchbooks over the course of the semester. Those pages, some exhibited, enlarged, on Copeland's office walls, shine with a vivid intimacy. Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Education at Hebrew College and on the faculty for 16 years, Copeland attributes his multidisciplinary approach to a range of influences. For almost 20 years, he worked with high-school age students in the integrated learning environment of the Zionist youth movement—both during the school year and in the summer months at camp. "It's not the formal classroom; it's nature, it's art, it's film—eating together, singing, dancing—Frisbee!" he enthuses. Among his teachers, he credits Dr. Michael Rosenak, with whom he studied in Israel, Dr. Michael Fishbane P'60, BJEd'64 at Brandeis University and Dr. Isadore Twersky z'l, P'44, HC'48, MHL'51, at Harvard University. "Professor Fishbane expressed it strongly, seeing the educator's role as modeling a possibility—that there can be meeting points between the texts of the past we receive from tradition and the immediate experience of our present lives," recalls Copeland. In the interview below, he speaks with Hebrew College Today about his innovative teaching style and thoughts on the relationship between art and Judaism. HCT: What is the instructive value of art in Jewish education? SC: For myself as well as for my students, I've found that the nonverbal expression of the arts can contribute to actualizing some idea being addressed by a classic text we're approaching. The text is engaging some question of the human situation, but in a coded way that isn't familiar to our literal-minded conventions of reading and experiencing. So we have to find means that can conjure up something of the reality that "our" text wants us to consider as being at stake in how we live. HCT: One of the ways you introduce art is to encourage your students to be artists themselves within the context of the class. You have them keep journals of words and images in response to the texts they're reading and discussing. SC: Oh-ho-oh! This is key: that we ourselves be artists, writers—interpreters. Art in particular can be a very inviting way to explore ourselves in relation to what is not ourselves, to what is not yet a part of ourselves, but could be. In one of his prayer-meditations, Yehudah Halevi says to the Divine: "I saw You coming toward me when I went out to greet You." Understanding calls for a two-sided encounter. And my side of the meeting—what I can bring to it—is of critical importance. There's a rabbinic play on the word "banim," which means "children" as well as "students," "disciples": When we say "banim," let's also hear "bonim," which means "builders." Because to significantly carry on a culture, a tradition, we can't just repeat it exactly as it was before it reached us. We have to add to it in a creative, innovative way that entails not merely a quantitative appending, but a qualitative reinterpreting that is transformative. So when we study a text together, if we write something of our conversation with it in our journals, and even draw or paint something of what it evokes in us (which can be very freeing, very opening—expressing ourselves via various artistic media in relation to "our" text), and then share that with one another, this can be a compelling way toward our becoming both banim/banot and bonim/bonot—recipients as well as participants in the ongoing event experience that is revelation, that is Sinai, that is Torah. HCT: In the syllabus for the Art and Jewish Experience course, you say that students should strive to make their journals something like the folio pages of the Talmud. SC: Yes, by placing this text I seek to approach next to other expressions that can be seen as addressing the same or similar questions—other texts, but also the colors and shadings, the textures of visual art—unanticipated angles of access and appreciation vis-à-vis "our" text open up. So I encourage the developing of journals as something like scrapbooks that juxtapose different kinds of expression: cutouts of different words, passages of writing from the texts that we study closely in our weekly meetings and from our in-between-class essay readings, together with writing and drawing and painting. Each journal thus presents a unique conversation with the life questions all these are addressing. When we situate next to one another that which we ordinarily don't think of as going together—that don't themselves come into the world in this interrelated, textured, textiled way—all kinds of meaning-possibilities start happening. So yes, this is similar to the large folio page of the Talmud, because it's about finding, recognizing ourselves on the page, in the book—in relation to a tapestry of differences that can be expansive of who we are, who we can become. Belonging to a culture, to a tradition, is like taking our place at a seminar table around which there are teachers, writers, artists of different times and places and modes of expression—all of whom are nonetheless participating in what can be seen as the same conversation. HCT: You're also bringing a range of art into the classroom, different paintings, films, music and literature. SC: Sure, that's what I'm saying—how we can become a part of—a range, a broader horizon, an interplay of rich, related and diverse contextual conversations. Belonging to a culture, to a tradition, is like taking our place at a seminar table around which there are teachers, writers, artists of different times and places and modes of expression—all of whom are nonetheless participating in what can be seen as the same conversation. So there's Rabbi Akiva and Maimonides and the Maggid of Mezeritsch, Martin Buber and Rabbi Soloveitchik, and Israeli poets Yehudah Amichai and Zelda—as well as Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf—as well as Rembrandt and Chagall and Ben Shahn. When the Rabbis came together as the Sanhedrin court in their deliberations, they sat in a semicircle. One reason the Talmud suggests for this is that the Sanhedrin can be compared to the navel of the beloved, praised in the Song of Songs as being like the crescent curve of the moon. Now there's a visual, aesthetic, indeed sensual image! Still another reason is given by the Mishnah itself—so they could see one another. I love that! It seems rather obvious. But it's actually very far-reaching in implication. It's all about the interfacing of the plural—whether people or ideas or modes of expression or diverse elements of our very own humanity. HCT: In looking at some of the journal pages, it strikes me that keeping a journal may compel students to reflect or respond on a more personal level. SC: For sure! It's the bonim part of the equation. The other day, in my Six Modern Jewish Poets course, one of the students asked, "Why don't they just say it straightforwardly? Why is it so riddling?" Well, one reason is because otherwise we wouldn't have to add ourselves to it. The difficult, hiding quality of a classic work demands that I wrestle with it, search and research my self in relation to it. And again, enlisting the arts in this effort can be very repercussive. But then we have to contend with the either/or approach of most people who are involved with the visual arts as well as with Judaism—that either they're not at all consonant with one another, or that they go perfectly fine together. I think both of these views are inaccurate. There's actually significant tension between them. HCT: Between Judaism and the visual arts? SC: Yes, though less so in the mystical stream of Judaism. But in strongly defining currents of biblical and rabbinic orientations, the Divine is not a humanlike reality at all—we don't have Jesus, we don't have Krishna. And so if I'm going to be religious, I have to get close to . . . what?! To that which is nothing like what I know or can imagine. My goal is the unthinkable! Indeed, George Steiner says this is the deepest unconscious reason why there's antisemitism: that the non-Jew hates the Jew, hates Judaism—because its message makes you feel faint! The monotheistic demand—that the Divine is qualitatively other than what we know—and absolutely so—runs counter to our nature. In Schoenberg's opera, Moses and Aaron, there's no singing! There's a kind of chanting, intoning of words, but no singing, really—especially not from Moses—because to sing would be to give form to the inexpressible truth of the Ultimate Reality. On the other hand, Judaism's love affair with halakhah is very life-affirming of this world in all its concrete, particular detail—and thus not inimical to the aesthetic realm. Law is not the abstraction of the Divine that cannot be expressed. And yet law is nervous about just letting things happen—which is a vital element of art! So there is considerable tension here. But I see it being all about living in the middle of contradiction, diversity, debate, dilemma—with no complete resolution. To be a Jewish artist is to explore, to depict, to bear witness to this in-between, this challenging tension between word and image, ethics and aesthetics, concealment and revealment, what we can and cannot express. Download a PDF of this article to view Steve Copeland's written and illustrated commentary—as he does for his students' journal entries and papers. [1.1Mb] |
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