The Commentator

What does American culture have in common with Sarah Imeinu’s devastating good looks?  Reading last month’s Kol HaMevaser provides a clear answer: both are only noteworthy for the religious attributes contained within.  Fitting for a publication about pop culture, it fell into a trap of contemporary pop-Hashkafa, namely: “spiritual beauty.”

Imagine, an entire edition dedicated to the virtues and drawbacks of culture, wrought from the palette of YU voices, and not a single mention of our society’s most redeeming trait: beauty. Western culture a la 2007 overwhelms us with a cornucopia of aesthetic experience unprecedented (quantitatively, at least) in human history.  Those to the Right are right- we face a flood of secular culture, with billboards and browsers aimed straight for our souls.  But the Right is also wrong, for they ignore just how beautiful culture’s arrows are: the New York skyline on a moonless night; the songs she turns on when it’s late and it’s lonely; the comics section on a lazy Sunday morning.  I speak not of labs or libraries, of high art and Aristotle - it’s the basest, most popular cultural creations that provide that untouchable yet ubiquitous, mysterious yet inspiring tease we call beauty. Dear Kol HaMevaser contributors, have you never felt the damned frustration of gazing at the credits, realizing that it’s a full 167 hours before the next episode? Have you never marveled at how that trashy dance track makes an impromptu pillow fight really rather appropriate? Have never invested your heart in five men, one ball, and .2 seconds until redemption? I ask you, YU student intelligentsia, have you never lived?

Your defense of culture speaks of ethics, but not aesthetics.  You argue that pop culture, or very select portions thereof, sharpens one’s moral sensitivities.  You claim it grants depth to the religious personality. You reason that it provides a well-needed water-break from the spiritual marathon that is the Jewish life.  But is nothing valid if not religious?! Is beauty qua beauty outside the four cubits of hashkafa?  I claim that the pleasure of the beauty-encounter is good in and of itself, whether or not my lips burst forth in shevakh and hodaa.  (Which, for the record, they occasionally do.)  I add to the ever-discussed equation of Modern vs. Haredi the fact that Bnei Brak Ben Greenfield shall never hear Dave Matthews live.

So why is this opinion only that of the minority?  Because the flirt with beauty may lead to religious promiscuity. The derekh to off-the-derekh occasionally contains a tricky fork: the restrictions of halakha to the left and an uninhibited quest for aesthetic sensations to the right.  Unfortunately, many have made the wrong choice.  But, afraid of that tragic right turn, we’ve ignored the road that runs directly ahead: the middle path.  I say, if we can juggle secular and Torah knowledge, surely we can manage the dialectic of physical beauty and Torah restrictions.

Until then, we’ll guard against any literal use of the word beauty. Sarah will be “spiritually beautiful.”  Pharoah will “spiritually kidnap and make her his wife.” The only moment a Kol HaMevaser contributor will use the term to defend culture (you can Google it too, if you like) she will describe music’s “beautiful message.”  But in reading the educative into every instant of the seductive, we fashion a Judaism colorblind: eyes open to the outside world, but seeing only the dullest gray.

Ben Greenfield is a sophomore in YC   

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