Faces

When I was a child I found it common that pictures of deceased parents hung on the walls of homes I visited. It seemed natural to remember these distant figures that way.

When my own Dad died in 1972, I couldn’t look at his picture. It was too painful. I did not hang a picture of him on the wall. Even now, 42 years later, all I can bear is a glance.

Other faces bring their own pain, though hardly at the same level. Thus, I have a picture on display of the late Rabbi Benjamin J. Zilber, as holy a man as I have ever known. To look at his face mostly serves to inspire, but in a paradoxical sort of way. When I gaze on his pictured countenance, I am overwhelmed by how far I fall short of his service of G-d. His single-minded focus. His impassioned prayer. His sense of being in the presence of G-d every moment.

Tzelem Elok-m, the Biblical phrase from Genesis, is usually translated “the image of G-d,” as in “He created him in the image of G-d” (Genesis 1:27). Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, a teacher of mine, a towering Hebrew scholar who also has a PhD in English from Harvard and a fine touch with the English language, translates the Hebrew as “the human face Divine.” This beautifully captures the Hebrew nuance.

Faces.

Though each one means something different to each of us, a human face ought to convey something positive, reflecting in some sense “the human face Divine.” What, then, are we to do with faces that are sacrileges? How can we even mention them in the same breath as beloved parents, teachers or friends?

A picture of a mostly hidden face has been making the rounds, the masked face of “Jihadi John,” supposedly Mohammed Emwazi of London, who beheads human beings on videos, taunting his viewers as he does so.

What happened to his “human face Divine”?

Better, “human face Monster.”

How can human beings change colors so radically as to undermine their status as a human being?

How can one absorb the reality of Nazis who shot children for fun?

Or the reality of a “serial killer”?

How does a human face assume the visage of an animal — a metaphor, truth to tell, that is wrong, since animal behavior is not chosen. Human beings, when they choose evil, well, they choose it. In some sense they remain human in a way that animals can never be. To compare the likes of “Jihadi John” to an animal is an insult to the animal kingdom.

Faces.

Our son Rabbi Mattis Goldberg publishes picture books of rabbinic faces. Some are arresting in their profundity. Of course, it is often the eyes that give the human face, especially a profound one, its character. Some of the eyes in these photos of rabbinic faces invite prolonged meditation on the struggles for holiness that have gone into them.

Then there is physical beauty, often a curiously empty prism. Supposedly so alluring, mere beauty in a human face is often, as least in contemporary society, a reflection of a flight from meaning. Surely not equivalent to the dehumanized, evil human visage, the beautiful face in its own way can diminish “the human face Divine.” Not always, of course.

Suffering offers its own commentary on the human face. Sometimes the visage of a person in deep suffering conveys nothing more than defeat and distortion, their own diminishment of the Divine human creation. Other times, the face wrapped in suffering coneys a nobility, a transcendence — the finest realization of the Divine potential in the human being.

A human face can transcend itself.

A human face can dehumanize itself.

Faces.

How many of them pass through our lives?

On the bus or the plane, in the line at the grocery, in the ball stadium or on the public street, in auditoriums and crowds, we see hundreds, or thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of faces in our lifetime — not to mention, the faces we see on electronic media.

It’s best not to think too deeply about this. Each human faces is, in the rabbinic phrase, an olam katan, “a microcosm of the world.” Notwithstanding the few basic types of faces we have identified, we have barely scratched the surface. We know next to nothing about this vast kaleidoscope of human faces that depicts our co-occupants of the planet Earth.

Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News