Two things happened to me during trips back to the US, both having to do with taking, or not taking, photographs. The first was when I went for a walk outside on a shabbat afternoon. It was really beautiful outside in the desert and as I walked by the stunning views I regretted not having my camera with me. Photography has been somewhat of a hobby for me and I would have loved to have brought my “good camera” (a Nikon digital SLR) along to try to capture some of the Arizona outdoor beauty. Alas, I had decided not to take pictures that day in keeping with my desire to try and keep shabbat a little bit more by trying not to use electricity unless really necessary. So I just walked by and enjoyed the views instead of capturing them on film. (or on chips, or whatever it is they’re captured on these days…)
The second thing was when we were at a Sukkot dinner a few weeks ago at a friend’s house, and someone wanted to take a picture of all of us friends celebrating together. There was a brief discussion over taking the picture since it was the first night of Sukkot, a holiday not unlike shabbat in its technical restrictions regarding the use of electricity, but we were a “mixed crowd” and without too much fuss the picture eventually was taken. I remember thinking, having not grown up orthodox, how strange it is that you theoretically can’t ever take pictures on shabbats or holidays – the exact times that everyone you care about is together. (You actually could during all of the intermediate days of Sukkot – same with Passover – just not the first or last days. And not on shabbat.)
Both of these experiences made me think about our relationship to time, as photographs can be a way to freeze time. My walk through the desert brought to mind a podcast I had heard from the Shalem Institute in Israel during which Rabbi David Hartman had remarked on one way to conceptualize the meaning of shabbat. He said, imagine you are walking through your garden in the few minutes just before shabbat starts. You see a beautiful flower in one of the bushes. There exists an invisible line in time which if crossed, fundamentally changes how you relate to that flower. In the minute before shabbat starts, you might pick the flower and bring it back into the house to grace your shabbat table as a beautiful centerpiece. And there is nothing wrong with that – indeed it may even legally be considered a good thing, part of “hiddur mitzvah,” a way to beautify the mitzvah of shabbat. However, after the next few minutes pass and shabbat starts, you are now prohibited from picking the flower. In that case, rather than the flower serving as a tool for your personal use, it co-exists with you independently. You can observe it, watch it, exist with it, take in its beauty as it is – but you cannot manipulate it or use it. It’s relationship to you changes from object to subject. And that, Rabbi Hartman said, is part of the magic of shabbat – that for one day in seven we treat the world around us as if it is perfect in its own right and not simply a tool to be used for our personal benefit.
I thought of that podcast because as I walked by the desert beauty, my initial reaction was to want to photograph it. To use it for my own purposes – to practice using some of the features on my expensive new camera, or to make a picture to hang on the wall of my house, or a snapshot to post on instagram to show the world how cool I am and to see how many likes I can get, etc. And then I said to myself, you know what? There’s time for all that, too. I’ll come back another day to take pictures. But today I will just take in the beauty.
As I thought about the other situation, about not taking family pictures on shabbats and holidays, I thought to myself how there really is a feeling that we should capture this family moment because who knows when we’ll all be together again? And then I thought how, specifically by not taking a picture, we are in a sense trusting, almost binding ourselves even, to the never ending spiral of the holidays coming back again and again. The photograph keeps that moment in the present for us, and yet, unlike a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, the holidays come around every year so that they are always with us in the present. In a sense, we don’t need the picture because we always have the next holiday, with its reality of family and friends being together. And it’s not that I’m so against picture taking. Rather, the concept just made me appreciate a little bit more, even if you enjoy taking holiday pictures, how lucky we are to have a culture of holidays which keep bringing us back around to each other; which are somehow constantly in the present, even as time goes by.
(Here are some of the desert pictures that I eventually went back for…)
