When two giants meet: a modern midrash?

It is axiomatic that our Torah learning should always be fresh and exciting. Even when we are reviewing the same passages of biblical text, the same laws, the same parables and tales for what seems like the thousandth time, they should be as new and challenging to us as if we had never met them before. If they feel stale and boring, it is for us to make the effort to generate a tangible sense of excitement when we encounter them. This is why, at Avot 1:4, when Yose ben Yo’ezer Ish Tzeredah urges us to open our homes to Torah scholars, he says: “drink in their words with thirst”.

To illustrate this, R’ Chaim Druckman (Avot LeBanim) cites a story told of the celebrated American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein visiting the iconic Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, whom he found painting the railing (ma’akah) at the studio where he worked. Calling in on Picasso for a second time on the following day, Bernstein was surprised to find him painting the same railing again. When Picasso was doing exactly the same thing when Bernstein called in on him a third time, the composer asked him what was the point of painting the same railing every day. Responding with great feeling, Picasso said: “So they say you are an artist—but don’t you understand anything about art! Can’t you see with your own eyes that I’m not painting the same railing at all!”

The point, explains R’ Druckman, is that, if Picasso could find some chiddush, something new, when painting and repainting the same ma’akah, how much more so do we need to learn Torah in a way that is fresh to us every day. I am curious to know the provenance of this strange story, since there appears to be no factual basis for it. Though the lives of both Bernstein and Picasso are both well documented, I have found no evidence that they ever met at all.  I even tried to trace the tale on the hypothesis that it was not Leonard Bernstein but another musical Bernstein, Elmer (composer of the movie themes for The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven), who may have visited Picasso, but to no avail.

That Picasso was painting a railing can however be explained. In 1953 he painted a picture, La Balustrade, which is illustrated here. La Balustrade is the French word for ma’akah and in English this work is known as The Railing. If Picasso was painting and repainting the railing that forms the most prominent feature of that work, his repetition and quest for a fresh visual image would be perfectly explicable.

I suspect that this is a made-up tale, a sort of modern midrash that is designed both to provide a powerful illustration of an important point and to show that it is understood not only within the world of Jewish scholarship but in secular society too. If any reader can assist me in finding out where it originated, or how R’ Druckman got to hear of it, I should be most grateful.

There is a further issue to consider: is it right to tell a story involving real people in order to illustrate a point that one is validly making, if it never actually happened. On the one hand, there are those who oppose this practice on the basis that it is bringing sheker, falsehood, into the world. Against that, there are those who feel that the end justifies the means and that if that is the best way to teach a principle -- and particularly a Torah-based principle -- there should be no objection to it. In our own tradition we have midrashim that contain tales that are powerful and vivid aids to our understanding. Some may be true, some may not -- and some certainly cannot since they cannot be reconciled with other midrashim or even the Tanach. But these midrashim were composed by scholars of a bygone age who were far closer to the giving of the Torah than we are, and whose words have received the approbation of Torah scholars ever since. Does that mean that we have a precedent that permits us to do the same thing, or that we certainly should not?

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