The Jewish Elvis

It’s the first day of Rosh Hoshana and I’m thinking: Elvis.

Six Elvises, to be exact. Andy Warhol's silver Elvises all lined up in a row, six silver guns aimed at the viewer, point blank.

“Speak!”

That’s what those guns seem to say . . .. today. Speak your truth. It’s now or never. Well, at least until this time, more or less, next year.

According to Lisa Katz’s blog (a primer for understanding Judaism),

It is believed that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribes us in “books.” God decides not only whether we will have a good or bad year, but also whether we will live or die in the upcoming year. Then on Yom Kippur, God seals these "books."

It follows that during the Ten Days of Repentance, the "books" are still open. God has judged, but not yet passed sentence. Repenting (as well as praying and giving charity) during the Ten Days of Repentance is the way to reconcile with God and change His inscription in the "books".

I love the idea of being inscribed in books. Not only does your fame last longer than fifteen minutes (if that’s something you care about), but you become part of another world, a parallel universe full of possibility. Even more, I love the idea of the book being re-writable for ten days, and then again for another ten days the following year, and so on, and so on. The book is never really closed then, is it? As long as you are alive, you have ten days every year in which to get the story right. And not only do you have a willing listener, but you have the most powerful listener in the universe. Getting your story down is none other than God. OK, so in the end you don’t get to decide your ultimate fate, but you do get to plead your case, which you are given ten days to reflect upon first, and ten days in which to perfect your story telling technique, a process you get to repeat for ten days every year until you die.

What I love most about the whole shebang is this: Repetition. Repetition exists in absolutely every part of our lives. It’s in the change of seasons, in the way we learn to play piano, in each attempt to reproduce Bubbie’s breaded chicken wings (which no one has successfully accomplished, but we all keep trying), in every relationship we work at in the hopes of getting it right this time, and so on. We repeat ourselves for many reasons: to hear ourselves think, to enjoy that cake again, to turn a wrong into a right, to learn a lesson we have not yet learned. Cliché as all this may sound, and even though I know you know what I mean, it still bears repeating.

Repetition often gets a bad rap – being called tedious, or boring, etc. – but a truth about repetition is that it is not only necessary for our ongoing survival (we learn as often through non-repetition as through repetition, the former being intimately tied to the latter), but we actually find repetition exciting because no two repetitions are alike, thus keeping repetition fresh! Summer is never the same as last summer. And next summer will inevitably be different again, giving us something to look forward to. When Gertrude Stein wrote a rose is a rose is a rose, what she really meant was a rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose because each one takes up a different position in time and space. You are not saying them at the same time, you are saying them (or reading them, or experiencing them ) in discrete moments. So each rose is either a painted rose, or a written-or-spoken-word rose, or a plastic facsimile, or a thorny reality, or a metaphor, or a cliché and so on . . .

Also, I must emphasize: repetition is not simply a copy, i.e. a poor substitute for the real thing, with a higher value placed on the latter. Within repletion lies the idea of a first instance, but we really don’t know when that happened. Far more poetic is this idea that repetition simultaneously contains the value of the singular moment and the potential of every other moment. For instance, take Andy Warhol’s approach to image making – churning out multiples as if they were widgets in a factory. The volume of output undermines the art-market value that gets assigned to one-of-a kind objects, imparting an accessibility (financially and otherwise) to art works hitherto denied the average person. Ironically (and this is the beautiful paradox of repetition), Andy Warhol’s renown, not to mention Elvis’s, ended up increasing the perceived value of the multiples, transforming them into rarified works that ultimately fetched the astronomical prices allocated to the aforementioned one-of-a-kinds. Similarly (but not the same), Andy Warhol’s multiples both reinforced and undermined Elivs's status. The proliferation of Elvis's image ensured he became a household celebrity, but also ensured no one Elvis was The Elvis: everyone could have their own Elvis. As such, he is both out of our reach and within our grasp.

If we count ourselves among those who believe singularity is the ticket to heaven, we may agree with Tori Amos who laments, “There’s too many stars and not enough sky.” But I see celebrity itself as a repetitive category into which any number of persons can be inserted at any time. In other words, the sky is endless, big enough for us all, and endlessly reproducing shooting stars, and endlessly letting them fall. Personally, I prefer falling stars, like wilting flowers, finding beauty in their dying. We all die, celebrity or not, but we don’t all die in quite the same way, do we? (Elvis died sitting on the toilet.)

As I said earlier, repeating a story gives us a chance to perfect it; Yet, as I am writing it again, I realize that repetition does not always strive towards perfection. Andy Warhol’s mechanical approach to image making deliberately undermined the concept of perfection (I was going to find another word for ‘undermine’ because I’ve used it already, but then I remembered I had not used it in this sentence yet). He made sure each print resulted in imperfect colour and image registration, (Andy Warhol’s process suggesting that even a machine cannot create a perfect copy). The results, which vary from print to print, also undermine the possibility for locating a static identity: Elvis is slightly different in each iteration. When you first stand in front of the six silver Elvises, you are hit with a wave of sameness. As you stand there a little longer, you begin to look for, and see, little licks of difference.

But what I loved the most about the silver Elvises at the Warhol museum in Pittsburg is this: a rabbi wrote the didactic panel. More to the point, Rabbi Mark N. Staitman discusses the silver Elvises in terms of repetition, which he says is a key strategy in the Torah:

It is not uncommon that Torah seemingly repeats itself. Often the seeming repetition has a slight variation, but always a variation in context. While some may see this as a redundancy, Judaism sees each statement as having different meaning. God would not be redundant.

I did not expect Andy Warhol’s Elvises to evoke thoughts of Judaism, but the good Rabbi’s panel sent me down a path towards further research.

According to John J. Parsons at www.hebrew4christians.com,

The Hebrew word for emet [truth] has a more concrete meaning than the English word for “truth” (the English word derives from the Greek/Western view of truth as a form of correspondence between language and reality, but invariably languished over epistemological questions that led, ultimately, to skepticism). . .

. . . Indeed, Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” is a category mistake, since truth is not about “what” but about “Who.” That is, truth is not something objective and static, a thing to be known and studied from a distance. No. Truth is essentially personal. It is a personal disclosure of the character of the subject. Understood in this way, truth is a way of living, a mode of existence, a relational truth.

In other words, truth is always my truth or your truth, not the truth. Since it is always tied to a person, it is necessarily filtered through that person’s experience, views, contexts and relations. Yet we cling to the idea of The Truth the way we grab hold of an anchor that seeks purchase on a shifting ocean floor. We believe The Truth will give us a point of reference: once we have located our true North, we will understand where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. (Also, we think that if discover where we are, we will have a better idea of where you are.) This desire to find a singular truth is what sends us to our synagogues, our churches, our temples, our mosques, our meditation mats – we retrace our steps each day, each week, or at certain holidays to our particular Meccas and repeatedly offer up our prayers for some kind of answer. For me, our endless search for truth (or beauty or love or whatever it is we are after) is no less than our declaration and celebration of being alive, no less than the repetition of breath, or step. The process is the truth and the beauty.

For me, Andy Warhol’s Elvises are a kind of prayer. Like repeatedly fingering worry beads, I run my eyes over the silver Elvises, from first to last and back again. Each Elvis stands in relation to the last Elvis as well as to the next Elvis and to Elvis himself – to all the ideas of him: the sexy, young buck who made girls swoon; or the fat, wasted Las Vegas Elvis who barely fit into his white leather pants. And each of those Elvises carries within him kernels of truth: Andy Warhol’s truth – that Elvis was and is both a celebrity and a reproducible image; and Elvis’s truth – that he was famous and the sky was the limit and yet he must have known he shit like the rest of us; and our truths – that Elvis lives as an idea in everyone else’s head. We cannot locate one truth about Elvis, only all the truths we each carry in our Elvis-loving hearts.

On this day, the first day of Rosh Hoshana, as I pack my bags to conclude my one-month stay in Berlin, and reflect on the various and competing stories of my life, I realize that one thing seems to remain true about me: I love to tell a story. That’s why I have always felt painfully dismissed when my listener complains, “you told me that already.” While I understand, and have experienced myself, the frustration of hearing a story again for the umpteeth time, there’s usually a reason the story gets trotted out again. My desire to retell the story is almost always about the particular moment I’m in, and usually related to the particular listener I’m with, and more often than not, it has less to do with the story itself and more to do with the tossing of a rope, hoping that you’ll catch the line and let me pull you in.