Last night’s shooting at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater is
obviously shocking and disturbing, and following on the heels of another
upsetting article I happened to read yesterday – about an 18-year-old Taiwanese
man who was found dead in an Internet café after a 40-hour marathon session
playing the game Diablo III – it got me thinking, as I sometimes do, of the
culture we have created.
Today is the first day of Av, which begins the countdown to
the Ninth of Av, the Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem. I know that for some the practice of mourning and fasting for
the destruction of a two-thousand-year-old building seems perhaps meaningless
and outdated.
Sometimes in my daily prayers, I too wonder why I am
beseeching God to rebuild the Temple. Do I really want to see animal sacrifice
reinstated? Mary had a little lamb and then brought it to the Temple Mount for
slaughter? Will I look stupid walking through the Mamilla Mall with a ram
trailing behind me? And won’t PETA be
all over Israel and the Jews for this? I mean, doesn’t Israel get enough bad
publicity without adding dead cows to the picture?
The shooting in the theater and the death of the video game
player, events that have occurred as close as they have to the Ninth of Av, are
reminding me of what the Temple and its loss really mean. I teach AP Art
History, and if you ask any AP Art History teacher (and this should be pretty
easy to do since there are about six of us), the idea of Sacred Space is one we
return to in the class repeatedly.
I’m constantly asking my students, Do you see how this
society created its sacred space? Do you see what was important to these people
and how they chose to honor their God or gods by enclosing space in a particular
way and with particular materials? How did they view themselves in relation to
their Deity and how did they use their space to honor that relationship?
Lord knows, we have many malls in America, many movie
theaters, arenas, Internet cafes, fast-food restaurants. We have abundant
choices and areas where we can relax, enjoy ourselves, buy what we need and
want. But these areas are not sacred. Sacredness comes from carving out a space
in the world where people can contemplate quietly what it means to be human.
For religious people, a sacred space is a place to honor and thank God and to
remember that our role in the world is to improve it.
The shooting and gaming death are the opposite of what
should happen in sacred space.
In addition to art history, I also teach English literature,
and I spend a lot of time discussing Gothic literature, its pull, its
fascination with the culturally transgressive. I even show Batman Begins in some of my classes, discussing its ‘Gothic-ness’
and the role that the twinning of good and evil plays in depicting how easily people
can slip from good to bad. Most people know that stories should stay in books
and movies, but some do not.
We don’t yet know the motives of the killer in the movie
theater, but it seems to me that both he and the gamer in the Internet cafe got
lost in stories they could not get out of. One ended up hurting only himself,
but the other enacted a sick and twisted tale on others.
As a teacher and lover of the arts, I often ponder, with my
students and alone, what role art should play in the world, and it seems to me
that art should always make us think. Rihanna came under fire last year for
making a video in which she kills a man who has raped her. Her initial response
was that she is an artist, and it is not her duty to monitor what children or
people view. It’s her job to make art.
Art often uses violence as an aesthetic tool. Remember Andre
Breton’s famous claim in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism that “the simplest
Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and
tiring blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” That’s an
eerily accurate description of what happened in the Colorado movie theater and
what the Diablo III player was busy doing in his game when he forgot to feed
himself, sleep and live.
I don’t think it’s art’s role, necessarily, to get you to do
the right thing. That’s the job of ethics and morality, and, because I’m an
Orthodox Jew, I’d add, religion.
Judaism, like the cultures my students and I study in
art history, places a premium value on sacred space. And the tragic events of
the past few days – to which I’d add the murder and injury of Israeli tourists
in Bulgaria – remind me that no movie theater or Internet café is going to show
us how to be moral agents.
The public spaces we have created for ourselves, so abundant
in America, the malls and movie theaters, the restaurants and coffee houses,
will never teach us that our primary role in the world is to help, not hurt,
others. We need more spaces where we can go not to indulge in or plug into dark
and deep desires, but where we can find ethical sustenance and food for the
soul.
This Ninth of Av, it seems to me meaningful and timely,
then, to mourn the loss of the most sacred space that my people once created
and to think that rebuilding it might offer the world some of the moral
nourishment such a place should supply.
