Abstract
Monotheist religions oppose the idolatry which makes space sacred and the mythological world upon which all idolatry depends. Art, used by monotheisms and mythologies, is neutral in this opposition. The example of Judaism is invoked to show how two apparently “sacred spaces,” the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and the conjugal bed of the home, represent not sacralizations of places but displacements through the intensification of an ethical extra-territorial u-topos.
Highlights
It is difficult to define the terms in the title of my presentation: art, sacred space and utopia
To avoid misunderstanding, I must say that Temple worship, or synagogue services today, and conjugal relations, or marriage itself, are not events within Judaism that can be spiritually isolated from the rest of Jewish communal life
Summary
It is difficult to define the terms in the title of my presentation: art, sacred space and utopia. Do not think of this as a retreat into the particular, the ethnic, the anthropologic, or any kind of special pleading While it has its own vision of sacred space, which while unique in certain particularities of texts, traditions, places, personnel, rituals and language, which are of special interest to Jews and Judaism alone, Judaism – trusting its highest self-interpretation – has universal aspirations. Greater aspiration, one far more challenging, but at the same time faithful to both philosophy and the Jewish perspective This is the claim that within the Jewish vision of sacred space there is a teaching for the entire world. Perhaps art has never been but presently is not as independent as its connoisseurs would have us believe
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