In September 1991, Piero Canata, a freaky Italian artist, pounced on the statue "David" and smashed the left toe of the masterpiece with a hammer.
During his interrogation he claimed that the sculptor told him to do so.
The weird part is that when I stood in front of "David" in the main hall of the Academy Museum in Florence, something out of the dark matter in my mind also made me understand for a moment the meaning of Cana Coco's act.
Among the works of art that a cultured person should experience, at least once in his life, in my opinion, "David" has the first place.
Not only because it is the most beautiful and impressive sculpture in the world, but because it treasures within it a deeper, darker, frightening power, a feeling that stems from an irrational place.
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, in his office, in March, Photo: Rabbi Kanievsky's office
In 1501 Michelangelo undertook to sculpt the biblical hero, after two sculptors before him had tried and failed in the mission.
He received a huge and damaged block of marble, and three years later managed to create from the marble the most famous statue in the world.
Huge statue - 5.17 m high.
Despite the familiarity of all of us with such a famous image, the real encounter with him is breathtaking.
Not because of the beauty, the accuracy and the size, but because at that moment you feel sublime.
In "The Critique of Pure Judgment," Emanuel Kant creates a complete separation between the beautiful and the sublime.
The beautiful suits our aesthetic taste and affects the judgment of the senses.
The sublime evokes in us a feeling independent of our specific taste, an emotion contrary to the rational judgment.
Because in order to experience the sublime, the mind stumbles itself.
Masses at the funeral of Rabbi Kanievsky, Photo: IPI
The feeling of the sublime evokes in us a storm of emotions.
For example, the thought of the infinite universe evokes in us the feeling of the sublime.
The senses are unable to perceive infinity because it cannot be compared to anything.
The sublime is a state of mind, which arises when the intellect imposes on itself an impossible task.
While the intellect seeks to illuminate reality with human tools and in a definite and final way, the imagination transcends these frameworks.
The tension between the intellect and the imagination and its failure in the face of the imagination ignites in us the same storm of emotions, truly religious, because thanks to it we know that we have a mystical, supersensible ability, a connection to God.
And the statue "David", a human work concerning divine wholeness, every plastic description of it, every learned interpretation misses the power of the sublime.
The same power that made Piero Canata want to hurt him.
Come with me for a discussion of another sublimity, seemingly the complete opposite.
If Michelangelo's "David", the sculpted figure of the most famous Jewish king in history, is the embodiment of the Renaissance of Christian Europe, the glory of Western humanism, the physical sublime - then to distinguish a thousand thousand differences, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who accompanied Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky on Sunday In its last way, they are the embodiment of the renaissance of scholarly ultra-Orthodox Judaism after the Holocaust, a salute to the sublime spiritual-intellectual.
In his humble figure, ascetic life and absolute devotion to Torah study, Rabbi Kanievsky embodied the essence of the ideal of the wise student.
One does not have to agree with the ultra-Orthodox way, and I certainly disagree with them in quite a few areas, however it is impossible not to be impressed and stand in awe in the face of a phenomenon where hundreds of thousands of people are marching on the funeral procession of an extremely elderly man.
They want to pay tribute to a man who did not win battles on the battlefield, who is not a star of a team that won a championship or a pop star - but an elderly Jew who studied Torah.
The late Tommy Lapid was a clever Jew, who usually said nonsense. But his position against Orthodox Judaism sometimes led him to declare nonsense at times as well.
If they had invested the same psychic energies in science - the world would look different.
"2,000 years of mental energy have been wasted by one of the most talented nations that has ever risen on earth."
Tommy Lapid, Photo: Tal Cohen
He had a mistake.
There is no doubt, and all the studies have confirmed this, that it was precisely the quibbling over the issues of Shur Shanach, the commitment to Talmud Torah, the Shekla and the Talmud, that placed the Jews on the intellectual front.
The Jews, deprived of their own land, under persecution and discrimination, developed a society based on an intellectual elite.
While in medieval Europe only a small minority of the Gentiles were literate, every Jewish child visited Hyderabad.
There is no Marx without Rabbi Akiva, no Kafka without the Maharal, and no Spinoza without Maimonides.
Were it not for the study of the beings of Abi and Raba, it is doubtful that an ethnic-religious tribe, which constitutes 0.02% of the world's population, would constitute 24% of Nobel Prize winners.
"If the statistics are accurate, then Jews are only one percent of the human race. A small, flickering, murky and miserable star, lost in the glow of the Milky Way," Mark Twain wrote in "Regarding the Jews" (translated by Arnon Ben Nahum).
"He shines as a planet in the sky no less than the great powers. His commercial importance is skyrocketing in any regard for his number in the general population. On his soul, in all generations, even when his hands are bound backwards. He is allowed to boast about it. "They cease except for the Jew. All power kneels, only its own is arbitrary and exists. What is the secret of eternal life?"
Only the powerless, humiliated Jewish people, whose origins date back to the birth of the great nations - are still joking with their doctors.
Zionism is the most successful revolution in human history.
With a return to history, he experiences a catastrophe along the way, and the result is no less astonishing.
But the physical alone is not enough.
The material needs both for the spirit, also for a spiritual debate.
We are fortunate that the success of the Zionist project also saved the scholarly-spiritual project.
In a world of brutal consumer culture, morbid narcissism where everyone is a unique snowflake - no wonder some have a hard time understanding the phenomenon of hundreds of thousands at funerals.
They despise the mourners out of the shell of their empty arrogance, out of insecurity.
And there are those who hold a real rage.
In the Haaretz newspaper, Rogel Alper and Uri Misgav who watched and whipped, and like Kanata - wanted to break their toe.
The sublime is great upon them.
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