Kadishman, Myth and Modernity
Edward E FryMenashe Kadishman is an artist of great power who possesses the rare gift of a unified response, both aesthetic and moral, to the historical world. The realities of this historical experience of Israel have surrounded Kadishman, as man and as artist, since his birth. But it is his interweaving of life and art, and his ability to see the universal human meanings within particularities of circumstance that have made Kadishman an exemplary figure for Israel and for the world at large.
The Sacrifice of Isaac - one of the oldest and most fundamental myths of Judaism -was once more relevant to the contemporary consciousness of Israel and to the world at large. When Abraham obeys God's will to sacrifice his son Isaac, God intervenes at the last moment to spare Isaac, and the ram is sacrificed instead. Thus the trust of man in divine will and in his covenant is justified and vindicated. But Kadishman transforms the fundamental structure of the myth: God does not intervene, Isaac dies, and the ram is victorious. This transformation is extraordinary because with it Kadishman not only links the sacrifice of Isaac to the deaths of young soldiers in battle, be they Israeli or any other nationality, but also because he has secularized the myth itself without destroying its metaphorical power. In secularized form, God becomes the political nation-state, Abraham is Everyman, Isaac is the innocent idealism of youth, and the ram is the blindness of existence without wisdom within an amoral universe. Abraham's dilemma is tragic, for he may save Isaac only by violating the social contract of the nation-state, but if he does not, he loses his own son.
Kadishman's historicizing secularization of myth, in which tradition is revealed and transformed under the pressure of contemporary experience, creates an exemplary pathway leading to a new modernity. But there is something else. Menashe Kadishman brings to this task his unique gift for absorbing the infinite details of experience and memory, for sifting them until nothing which is not humanly essential is left, and then for plunging those essentials into a hidden crucible of faith in life itself, so that what emerges from that inner fire not only contains all that was seemingly left behind but also illuminates all that is yet to come.
Edward F. Fry
Art Historian and Curator, USA