The
first time I was exposed to the idea of midrash was as a sixteen year old
reading a book called “The Organic God” by Margaret Feinberg. She, a Protestant
Christian, discussed her Jewish heritage and claimed the practice of midrash to
be one of the most precious things that she retained from that tradition after
she converted. She describes it as a practice that “challenges us to explore
that which we do not know in order to better understand the One we want to
know”. Feinberg additionally references Judith Kunst who, in her book “The
Burning Word”, explains midrash as a view of the “Bible as a one-sided conversation,
started by God, containing an implicit invitation, even command, to keep the
conversation—argument, story, poem—going”.
I
think, first of all, that the medium of film works as midrash because it
enables us to distance ourselves in order to reflect on its content. Film can
be viewed and reviewed to clarify points of confusion, and when discussing the
events of a film there are no excuses for misremembering what was done or said
and how—you just rewind the tape. This is relevant to a discussion of God and
morality because God is frequently portrayed as some sort of observer who
understands everything, and there is some sort of comfort that we humans take
in the fact that we are not observers
and so we cannot understand
everything. So we can say insulting things to the suffering like “it’s all part
of His plan” or “the Lord works in mysterious ways”...implying that the
suffering would all be justified if
we could only see everything. On a
related note, if the film cycle works to contextualize the commandments in an
individual’s life, it is in its linking of the characters by their apartment
complex more than it is in their individual narratives. It is possible to
imagine that their actions as a microcosmic community somehow “fill in” the
things that I, as a viewer, cannot understand after viewing the components separately.
Film,
as a medium, gives us the sense that we can see it all. Film makes us, in some
strange sense, God-like. So when we’re forced to watch a film where it seems as
though God is behaving badly, when watching something that makes us feel
powerless, we are forced to question how, when we have all of the information,
we still can’t understand the “why” of tragedy. When a father performs a
calculation using his God-given intellect, then tests the ice himself
anyway...when he uses everything at his disposal to make sure his child is
safe, and his son drowns anyway...what more was the father supposed to do? Is
there a limit to how much we should exercise our intellectual capabilities? Is
God somehow threatened by our understanding? No, and we think that in part
because we as viewers were not
threatened by his attempts to understand his universe. And if we weren’t
threatened, how can God be?
The
visuals of the film were powerful, but two stood out to me in particular, both
in the first Decalogue. The first was the image of the homeless man sitting by
the fire, in particular when his scene was juxtaposed between the scene of the
son talking about God’s existence with his aunt and his playing the chess game
alongside his father. This visual was striking as a commentary on the isolation
felt by the father and son as they tried to make sense of the universe—the use
of reason is frequently described as “cold” because it is implied that using it
to determine action will yield only one acceptable course, and that course
might be painful. The homeless man is trying to escape the cold by use of fire,
warms but it unpredictable...unreasonable. This visual is used to emphasize the
boy’s openness to the suprarational—first in his conversation with his aunt,
then in his stepping outside of a closed system of logic (the chess game) and
focusing on the unpredictable in the situation (the other player’s psyche).
The
second visual that really hit me was the spilling of the father’s ink as he
worked. I think that served to materialize an idea that the worlds of reason
and the inexplicable are inseperable, and that the distinction might be false.
He was using ink to create ordered thoughts, to rationalize existence somehow,
and then the same ink that could be used to order covered itself and created
chaos. The commandments are given to us as a supposed means of love, but we try to understand them better by hypothesizing situations in which they seem to go against God, to work against Love. Is this really disrespectful, is it really creating an idol to try and understand? What more can we do, really?
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