We live in the age of the screen. Almost overnight, from the moment the light of the first movie projector began washing over the silver screen, cinema has nearly totally eclipsed literature, philosophy, poetry, and theater.
In the years that followed, screens have come to dominate every corner of our lives. From the TV sets that strategically positioned themselves in the center of our living rooms to the smartphones we all hold in our palms, the screens have become the technological equivalent of the ancient tribal fires around which our forefathers listened to the stories that shaped their understanding of the world.
How should we understand the sharp turn our culture has taken from text to image?
The Lifeblood of the Soul
Screens trade in images. What place does imagery play in our psyche?
As always, our best starting point is the Hebrew word for image, dimuy (דִּ מּ ו ּי). This word, alongside its siblings demut (figure) and dimayon (imagination), all derive from the two-letter Hebrew root d-m (דָּ ם ). This root has a meaning in and of itself: “blood.”
What does this mean? Simply put, it seems to suggest that the role images play in our psyches is somehow akin to that of blood. Just as the blood’s circulatory system underlies our entire biological existence, supplying each organ with the substances essential for its function, so too our mental images serve as the psychological infrastructure of our soul.
Beneath all our lofty ideas, abstract thoughts, and moral deliberations lies the rich, silent ground of our psychic images, nourishing everything that is planted in it. It is through the lens of the images we are soaked in that we evaluate our lives and choose our next steps. Where would be without an image of the ideal future we’re striving for, an image of who we want to become, an image of what success looks like, etc.
And yet, something strange has happened. Though no sane person would dare let a stranger with dubious intentions inject unknown substances into their bloodstream, this is precisely what the vast majority of the modern world does when it comes to the soul.
Millions of us flock to darkened theaters, sit at the feet of giant screens, and allow groups of complete strangers to pour gallons of vivid, stirring images into our souls—images whose origins and contents we have never evaluated. We even go further and do the same to our children, leaving them (not to say abandoning them) in front of the home screen for hours on end. We do all this without knowing the creators to whom we entrust our souls, nor the nature of their motivations.
This compels us to raise the possibility that perhaps we are not as clear-minded as we imagine we are. Just as with the circulatory system, our imagination can either be clear and healthy or murky and diseased. If the images absorbed into our soul are of a holy and refined source, they are pure and clean. If, however, they come from unrectified sources, if they draw from the lower rather than higher strata of the spirit, if they are stitched together, Frankenstein-like, from assorted myths and legends of dubious origins—then our imagination is tainted and clouded. We may be great scholars, filled with a massive amount of knowledge, data, and insights collected from all over the world. But if the ground of our imagination is not clarified and cultivated, we will never deeply and truly understand what we think we know.
This seems to be exactly what has happened to the screen generation. From a young age, we are soaked with images upon images—spaceships, gangsters, mythical creatures, can-can dancers, samurais, cigarettes, cartoon animals—but all these are scattered in our psyches like so much flotsam and jetsam, without any flowchart to organize, place, or rank them.
One of the Hebrew words that derive from the root d-m is dimdumim, “twilight.” And so, we might describe ourselves as living in the twilight of the soul.
What can be done when the blood is so tainted? In ancient times, the common practice was bloodletting. Today, it’s more typical to introduce fresh blood into the body, gradually stabilizing and balancing it. In the case of the blood of the soul, our imagination, bloodletting is impossible, and perhaps even undesirable. Therefore, the solution is indeed a transfusion: we must find a source of clear and good images to clarify our world of imagery and reignite our imagination in a proper and purified way.
The Serpent’s Venom and Its Remedy
The Talmud recounts that the serpent in the Garden of Eden not only enticed Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge but also “implanted impurity” within her—injected her with a poisonous venom that has been simmering in the blood of humanity ever since.
There are many opinions as to which desire the serpent represents: Is it sexual desire? The urge for idolatry? The craving for food? One of the greatest Chasidic masters of all time, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, offers a new, surprising interpretation that is particularly relevant to our generation: the serpent corrupted the imaginative faculty (ko’ach hamedameh) of the soul. It muddled and tainted our world of images, filling us with coarse and distorted images. Indeed, the first thing the serpent did was to instill within us an inflated self-image with his promise that, “you will be like God”.
This interpretation clarifies the continuation of the Talmudic midrash, which describes that there was a single moment in the history of the Jewish people when their blood was cleansed from the serpent’s impurity: when they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and received the Torah. Somehow, the revelation of the Torah purified the muddled world of imagery in its recipients, even if only momentarily.
The explanation for this is that the Torah presented, for the first time, an alternative to the prevailing religious practices of the time, which had revolved entirely around idols—meaning around tangible figures with defined facial features. The creation of an idol is an act of denial of the wonder that lies at the core of existence, an attempt to confine in form what cannot be grasped. This is the root of the corruption of the imaginative faculty.
In contrast, the Torah was the first to proclaim the existence of a single, hidden Creator behind all natural phenomena, and it forbade the making of “any graven image or any likeness.”
The purification of the imaginative faculty lasted only a short time. Forty days after the Giving of the Torah, when it seemed that Moses was delayed in returning from the mountain, the Israelites fell back into the trap of idolatry and built the Golden Calf. Indeed, according to the midrash, the idea that Moses was delayed was nothing but the product of a false image: Satan came to the people of Israel and showed them “an image of darkness, confusion, and disorder, saying, ‘Moses has surely died, and that is why confusion has come into the world.’” Moreover, the numerical value of the Hebrew term for “Golden Calf,” Egel HaZahav (ﬠֵגֶל הַ זָּהָ ב ) is precisely equal to that of “the imaginative faculty,” koach hamedameh (כֹּחַ הַ מְ דַ מֶּ ה). The Golden Calf embodies, more than anything else, the corrupted imagination clothed in idolatrous form.
Although the purification of the imaginative faculty wrought by the Torah was temporary, the very fact that it occurred teaches us that the Torah is the means by which we can renew and clarify our world of imagery. Indeed, an entire layer within the Torah, the aggadah or lore layer, is dedicated to constructing a holy and rectified world of imagery. The aggadot form a rich tapestry of stories, legends, and metaphors whose initial seeds are planted in the stories of the Bible, but from which has since blossomed a vast orchard of stories, expansions, completions, and interpretations.
The aggadah section of the Torah must be studied just like any other Torah or Talmud topic, with depth and diligence. In addition, the Jewish tradition of interpreting aggadah does not stop at finding the general moral or message behind the legends; it also examines every detail of the story’s imagery. In non-Jewish parables like Aesop’s Fables and the like, the choice of symbols—say, fox and stork, etc.—is of no real significance. They are mere trappings hiding the moral of the story. Not so in Jewish lore, where the image, symbol, and even exact wording is essential to decoding the story at hand. Details that may seem marginal at first glance are revealed, upon deeper examination, to contain a wealth of inner meanings.
The aggadah tradition offers a perspective that rests outside the whirlwind of contemporary culture’s images, including those in films, and it enables us to understand, organize, and clarify them. It provides a reference point against which any image can be measured—whether it be the image of a hero, a monster, romantic love, tragedy, or anything else you can imagine—and it allows us to grasp its nature, cleanse it of its distortions, and seek its pure heart. Afterward, we can weave new stories using the same images but reorganizing them so that their meaning is clarified and corrected.
(Here, once again, we must mention Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who was the only individual in his generation to take the imagery of European folklore and craft entirely new stories from them, connecting them to the service of God in his book Sippurei Ma’asiot MeShanim Kadmoniyot, “Tales of Ancient Times”).
By cleansing ourselves of the serpent’s venom we rectify the sin of Adam. We restore our original form, true to the calling of what humanity was meant to be. Indeed, the word “Adam” (אָ דָ ם) is built from the letters of d-m (דָּ ם ), “blood,” with the letter aleph (א) preceding them. This suggests that the full stature of the complete human is made up of a “flesh-and-blood” level over which should reside an aleph—the recognition of the single divine source from which the multitude of images flow and to which they must return and relate.
Hollow Masks
It would be fruitful to examine the two main words we have been using in their Hebrew version: “screen,” masach (מָ סָ �), and “movie,” seret (סֶ רֶ ט), as they are reflected in the mirror Torah’s imagery.
The Hebrew word masach comes from the root n-s-ch, meaning “pouring,” “covering,” and also “libation.” One of the words derived from this root is massechah, which means “mask,” possibly since masks were originally made from molten metals that were poured onto a face or mold and covered them (in fact, the English word “mask” derives from the Hebrew massechah).
Now, interestingly, massechah is one of the words used in the Bible to refer to idolatrous images: “You shall not make for yourselves molten gods [elokei massechah].”
It turns out that in some mysterious way, the modern screen culture is related to the idols of the Biblical era. In fact, the first time the word massechah appears in the Torah is in the making of the Golden Calf, the epitome of the degeneration of the imaginative faculty: “And he made it into a molten calf [egel massechah].”
Today’s screens, one could argue, are the modern reincarnations of the massechah gods of old. They gaze at us from all directions like temples on the side of the road, offering sparkling promises of happiness and abundance, drawing the eye and captivating the heart. Of the idols, it is written, “They have eyes but cannot see; they have ears but cannot hear... Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.”
In the same way, the gods of the screen fashion their viewers in their own image, gradually casting upon them hollow mask-like expressions. This is especially true for the younger generation, who on the one hand “have eyes”—their eyes have seen everything, more than any generation before them; but on the other hand, precisely because of this, “cannot see”—their eyes are dull to seeing anything, and they become indifferent and apathetic.
The Hebrew word seret (film) is a modern one. It is, however, identical in sound to an ancient verb which appears several times in the Bible, which means “scratch,” “gash,” or “incision.” It appears in the verses “You shall not make any gashes for the dead [seret la-nefesh] in your flesh,” and “in their flesh they shall not make gashes [yisretu saratet].”
The idea arising from the juxtaposition of these cognate terms is that too many movies tear metaphorical gashes in our heart. Indeed, the term “flesh” in both verses can also be understood in the sense of a “heart of flesh,” a term appearing in the book of Ezekiel as the opposite of a “heart of stone”:
I will sprinkle pure waters upon you, and you will be pure; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
The tearing of the heart of flesh from too many negative films scars it and hardens it, turning it to stone. Against this bleak fate, Ezekiel’s prophecy promises that there are “pure waters” capable of reviving the heart and making it beat again.
From Movies to Books and Back Again
In the age of the screen, the greatest revolution we can start is to once again elevate the book. Indeed, this is the very revolution we proclaim every time we raise the Torah scroll in the synagogue. This humble act challenges the technological age. It bravely declares that the screen cannot redeem itself, and that visual culture cannot be understood unless viewed through the eyes of scholars who have delved into the written word.
In fact, reconnecting to the sacred texts will enable us to return to visual media from a more rectified position. The sages say that “in the future, the princes of Judah will teach Torah publicly in the theaters and circuses of Rome.” On the surface, this seems to mean that the Roman theaters will be converted into large study halls, and instead of performances, Torah lessons will be delivered there. But we can propose a bolder interpretation: that those same “princes of Judah” will perform plays and dramas in these theaters; plays and dramas whose content and spirit will emanate from the Torah and become part of it, to the point where they will be considered Torah study in every respect.
The idea that the Roman theaters will be converted to Jewish use aligns with the midrash that says that on the same day that Jeroboam the son of Nebat erected two golden calves as an alternative to the Temple in Jerusalem, Romulus and Remus built the first two huts of Rome. The Roman Empire—kingdom of external and forceful idolatrous images and mother of modern Western culture—drew its power, as it were, from the worship of the Jewish calf. Therefore, its rectification must come through the rectification of the sin of the golden calf within us—refining our imaginative faculty until we can produce sacred plays.
The modern incarnation of the ancient Roman theaters and circuses are today’s movie theaters (with regular movie theaters being the “circuses” that screen the more popular, commercial films, and arthouse cinemas being the “theaters” that screen more serious films). If worthy “princes of Judah” rise in our generation, they will be able to fulfill the prophecy of the sages, and under the inspiration of the Book of Books, create “films of films”—sacred films that teach Torah in a tangible, experiential way.
“And through the prophets I shall be imagined.” From proper, inspired words the faculty of imagination can be rectified and revealed anew. Now is the time to return to sacred words, to leaf through them, study them, compare them, and interpret them. Instead of being flooded by external images, we must rise above them, view them from the outside, and clarify them. When our psychic lifeblood is cleared and our imagination purified, images will once again flow from us like prophecy.
And afterward, I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”
