Believers shook their fists at Shlomith-Shkhina and read passages from the Bible. “You’ll burn in hell!” they might shout in chorus, rhythmically, pounding their feet on the floor of the gallery. But Shlomith-Shkhina let all of them approach. She didn’t draw the line anywhere, except, this time, around her physical integrity.
At this point unfortunately we need to turn back to the performance we mentioned a moment ago in passing, unfortunately because it may still agitate some. It agitates us anyway. Under no circumstances do we intend to rehash Shlomith’s entire curriculum vitae, which would be inexpedient since there are simply too many performances. Including some (especially from the early stage of her career) which are less deserving of trumpeting. For example, the rolling about in food. But perhaps we can share a little about this after all? There was a milk basin and a basin full of roasted lamb shanks, and between them a large hourglass and Shlomith, who wasn’t Shkhina yet. Shlomith dipped herself, naked of course, in the milk, submerging herself in the sweet, white liquid up to her hair and greedily sucking it in. Then she moved to the hourglass. With both hands she rotated the hourglass on its axle, and the hourglass began to drizzle the sand of Jerusalem through its funnel. The sand took twenty long minutes to flow out, during which time willow-switch slender Shlomith shivered with cold, covered in milk, bones protruding cruelly through her thin skin as she stood near the axle. When the sand had all drained out, Shlomith moved to the lamb shank basin and burrowed in under the meat. She nibbled and she licked, but she was significantly more restrained than she had been slurping the milk before. This continued for six hours, which was how long Food Meditation (1976) lasted. This performance (which we’ve now ended up describing in its essentials) and a few others (which we promise not to tell about) were mostly “fumbling” by an emerging artist coming out of such obscurity that hardly anyone attended them. But of course they were recorded. Shlomith knew her value from the start and sensed, we presume, the future appreciation she would enjoy. And we agree with this principle: you should always remember to record everything. Everything! Every newspaper clipping someone has ever written, all the photographs, the letters, and the postcards must be collected and organized in a scrapbook. Diaries must be kept, feelings must be written down, because does anything else exist once all is said and done?
Shlomith-Shkhina and God’s 614th commandment
The development of Shlomith’s career was finally sealed by a performance in 1983 that dealt with the genocide of the Jews. In the performance, Shlomith read excerpts of “Jewish theorists’ post-Shoah attempts to explain the will of God”, as she summarized the event in Vanity Fair. Many saw the presentation as pure blasphemy, not so much because Shlomith-Shkhina read the texts nude (she really did prefer not to wear clothing!), but more because she wasn’t completely naked. She had decorated her body with clothes pins, hanging them from certain painful protuberances such as her nipples and labia. And that wasn’t all: she had pierced her stomach with safety pins, her back was covered in red stripes from being whipped, and to cap it off she had been beaten; the bruises on her legs and arms were genuine. So there she was reading parts of these books, which are difficult even for us to repeat now because (we’re sorry, don’t attack us, this isn’t something we invented!) they reveal a certain masochism that injected itself into Semitic culture at some point.
In her bruised hand, Shlomith first lifted a work by Eliezer Berkovits called Faith after the Holocaust, and began to read to herself in a steady, slightly monotone voice, autocratically changing “him” to “me”, standing before a live audience bruised, legs slightly spread; there Shlomith read without expression, adding emphasis to not a single word, beginning from page eighty-one, changing one pronoun on the fly. Like this: “‘I am alone—with my God. And God is silent, and God is hiding his face. God has abandoned me. Now I am truly alone. If at this moment I am able to accept my radical abandonment by God as a gift from God that enables me to love my God with all my soul . . . I have achieved the highest form of Kiddush ha-Shem.’”
The more monotonous Shlomith’s recitation became, the more clearly and slowly she articulated, the more quiet the space around her became, the less the audience dared to rustle their clothing, to shift their weight from one leg to another. “‘My radical abandonment is the great moment for which I have been waiting all my life. For no one can so completely surrender to Him as the one who is completely forsaken by Him.’” Did people really understand what Shlomith read to them? Did they understand that they had just been told that the Shoah meant the ecstatic fulfillment of a lifelong anticipation of surrender? That the greatest evil was actually the greatest good? That the deepest debasement of the soul gave birth to its highest ascension? Never again, but
