Writing / Published Works

Not far from where we gather today, on the other side of the Sinai Peninsula, in the Holy Land, we witness one of the most challenging eras ever in the history of Jewish/Muslim relations.

So, it was Immanuel Kant (d. 1804).

It was Kant who birthed the conception of “art for art’s sake,” where the significance of human creativity was said to represent little more than the product of creativity itself. It was Kant that originally conceived this reductive vision of the human imagination, starting the downward spiral that has sent art from the center of society, into the marginalized cultural eddy where it now circumnavigates its own tail. Ultimately, his ideas led to a denaturing of art’s immanent meaning to such an extent, that it spawned a cottage industry of critics, analysts and market purveyors, redefining art away from its position at the center of human spiritual experience, and into the little cesspool where it now breeds like mosquito larvae.

You cannot be for one thing, without being against something else. As the great 13th century Sufi saint, Jalluludin Rumi stated: “There is nothing in this world that is not a blessing for one person and a curse for somebody else.”

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Medieval Judaism was deeply influenced by Sufism. Virtually all-Jewish thinkers between the 8th and 12th centuries assimilated some, or much of Islamic mystical thinking, allowing it to color their interpretation of their own Hebraic practice. With nearly 90% of the world’s Jews living under Islam at the height of the Muslim Caliphate, everyone from Saadia Gaon (d.

Every era of human development represents a time of profound crisis, one in which the very survival of the species hangs in the balance. The invention of the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. foretold a time of unlimited casualties in war, leading to the potential destruction of civilization.

Little is said around the art world these days about beauty; the beautiful is simply a quaint and mistaken idea from some past that no longer exists. It is seen as a bit too sincere, a touch saccharine and absolutely irrelevant to the contemporary art scene. In some circles, it is even viewed as reactionary, subversive to the idea of being subversive.