In the Cave of Lascaux

Friday August 5, 2022                                                                                       

Marian and I were having dinner on a patio in the French countryside, with my two college roommates and their spouses, and it seemed like a good moment to look back on our lives. 

The three of us first met forty-seven years ago, in September of 1975, when we were put together by the college housing office, and placed in Wigglesworth H-32.  We have remained life-long friends.  One couple lives in Jerusalem, one lives outside of New York City and Marian and I have been out here in Santa Barbara since 1986, but we have managed to stay close. We’ve told each other our secrets and shared with each other our successes and disappointments. These are two of my closest friends in the entire world, and luckily all six of us enjoy being together.  Five years ago, we arranged to spend a week together in the English Lake District and to renew our bond.  This year we went to the Dordogne region in southwestern France.

            On our third night together, after good food and wine and pleasant conversation, I told them that I was worried about the Jewish future, about assimilation and our collective loss of Jewish memory.  I wanted to know whether I had devoted my life to a lost cause.  The table erupted in protest.  “You’ve been a successful rabbi!” “You’ve touched so many people’s lives!” I said “I know.  But my life’s purpose has been to transmit Torah to the next generation.  And I have tried hard, but I don’t know if I see it continuing.” 

Marian turned to them and said “Do you see what I have to live with?”  One of them quoted to me from Pirke Avot:  “Lo alecha ham’lacha ligmor!  It is not up to you to complete the work!!”  Another quoted to me from the Passover haggada:  “dayenu…..”it is enough….enough to take one step forward, one step out of Egypt, one step toward Sinai….at each step, we have to say dayenu.  It is enough.”  I thanked my friends, and told them that they had helped me, but that I was still sad about the fading of the Torah.  To which Danny’s wife Rachel said “You think that’s sad?  Let me tell you about my life…”. At which we all roared with laughter and tucked into one of the best desserts I have ever had in my life.  A French apple tart which we had to order at the beginning of the meal.  Maybe that is all I really need to die happy.

The entire next day we toured the prehistoric archeological sites of the Dordogne, birthplace of modern homo sapiens.

We met our guide Martin at 8:00 am who drove us to the quiet village of Les Eyzies, where we got out of our car and stood by a massive, slanting wall of bedrock.  For thousands and thousands and thousands of years, during the last ice age, that slanting wall of bedrock gave shelter to our earliest human ancestors.  For 20,000 years human beings took shelter there.  20,000 years.  A plaque marked the location where in March 1868 five partial human skeletons were discovered by railway workmen.  Four adults and one infant.  The owner of the property was a man by the name of Magnon, and so site was dubbed “Magnon’s hole”….or in the local vernacular “Cro-Magnon.”  Those five human beings became known as Cro-Magnon man, the earliest remains of people anatomically just like us.  Their remains were found together with necklaces made of shells, and tools made from ivory, and antlers.  These were human beings, just like us, who had been buried by people that loved them.  From radiocarbon dating, we know the time frame: 27,680 years ago…plus or minus 270 years. 

All day long, I kept trying to access the reality of 28,000 years.  To feel the passage of all that time in my body.  I walked my mind back in time.  Four hundred years ago Shakespeare lived.  One thousand years ago Rashi lived and taught in France. Two thousand years ago Herod built the Western Wall…the holiest physical site of our religion.  The oldest stones of the Wall were carved and set in place about 2,000 years ago.  Standing before the Kotel, I have attempted to comprehend the passage of all the centuries of Jewish history, lives, communities, journeys.  Feeling the passage of two thousand years is almost impossible.  Standing in the physical presence of human dwellings reaching back in time, not two thousand years, but twenty thousand years perhaps thirty thousand years, aroused in me a deep religious emotion. Yirah.  Sacred fear. 

Martin took us to the Cave of Rouffigniac.  Actually a system of caves, totaling more than 8 kilometres of underground tunnels and chambers, which were carved out by an ancient underground river 2 to 3 million years ago.  A small train took us down one of the tunnels, down and down into the pitch black, where the guide pointed out to us with a flashlight scratchings on the walls, made by cave bears wintering in the tunnels for thousands of years….we traveled a mile or more into the mountain when the train finally stopped and we found ourselves in a chamber and the guide turned his flashlight to the ceiling, where we gazed in wonder at complex, graceful, and extraordinarily accurate renderings of mammoths, bisons, horses, ibex, and woolly rhinoceroses. The guide reminded us that the work was done by the light of prehistoric grease lamps lighting up the pitch dark…a mile into the earth.  Obviously, down there a mile under the ground, those prehistoric artists were working completely from memory…from the images of those animals imprinted on their minds. After making certain that we saw the artwork, and that we understood at least a little bit of the mindboggling process by which it was produced, the guide paused and said: of course, we don’t know why they did this.  More yirah.  More sacred fear, in the presence of something unspeakably beautiful and utterly mysterious.

We came out of the cave, had lunch in the village and then went to spend the afternoon at Lascaux, which has been called the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric humanity.  The Lascaux Cave itself was discovered by four teenagers on September 12, 1940.  In 1963, the cave was closed to the general public because the human presence in the cave, after over twenty thousand years of no human breath, was causing bacterial growth and also a process of calcification.  Over the years several replicas have been created and in 2016, the latest replica was created.  Lascaux IV, which in our experience was magnificent.

Our guide, a young woman with tattoos and excellent English led us through the replica.  She brought us through the various chambers of the cave, pointing out the skill and sophistication of the artists, the techniques they used to convey depth and perspective and movement.  The use of the natural irregularities in the rock walls of the cave to create the feeling of three dimensions.  

She bombarded us with mysteries.  Lascaux contains over 2,000 paintings, which were painted over the course of 1,000 years…and they are all in the same style.  Was there a school of painting, in which the secrets of the Lascaux style were transmitted from generation to generation?  Nowhere in the entire cave system is there any evidence of any painting being corrected or changed.  How could they work and make no errors?  Of the 2,000 images, including hundreds of horses and bulls and ibexes, there is only one human being.  And while the animals are all rendered in striking detail and grace and vitality, the human is a stick figure…that a four-year might draw.  Why did they not paint human beings?  Our guide pointed out that in addition to the animals, there are geometric signs, and lines and dots whose meaning is completely unknown.  She was very firm.  Yes, there have been many theories about what they mean.  But it was so very long ago.  We cannot know.”

At the end of the tour, our young tour guide gave us her final speech.  “Perhaps you are leaving here not with answers, but with more questions.  If so, then I have done my job.”

At dinner as we were attempting to process everything we had seen and heard and learned, one of our group, Julie, turned to me and asked “Did what we saw today make you feel differently about your questions about Judaism, and how it is changing?”  I said “Well I’m definitely going to give a sermon about it…but I don’t know what it will be yet.”

I lay in bed that night going back into the cave, in my mind.  Remembering those animals, which felt so alive, and trying to picture the artists there in the dark, with their grease lamps, bringing those animals to life. The mouth of that cave collapsed around the end of the ice age, about 10,000 BCE.  No human beings have been in there for the 12,000 years.  We are irrevocably cut off from those artists. 

Early in the morning, I woke up long before everyone else and went outside into the French countryside to daven at sunrise.  While I was davening I was still thinking about the cave and those artists, who had transmitted their traditions of painting, from one generation to the next, for one thousand years.  I thought “What if there were still a group of descendants of those prehistoric artists alive today?  A group who had faithfully transmitted the tradition.  A tribe who still went into the cave, once a year, once a week, once a day, to sit with those paintings, in the flickering light of the grease lamps, and to tell stories and sing the songs that went with the paintings. Even to go in and to add, with reverence, skill and creativity, a new painting to the old walls. What if the 20,000 year old tradition of Lascaux caves were still alive today?” 

Then I thought, “We Jews are that tribe.  That is exactly what we do.”

The Torah is our Lascaux tradition, and we are still transmitting it. 

A child begins to read Hebrew.  The ancient grease lamp is illuminated. We tell the old stories with love and imagination, and the animals on the wall of our cave come to life.  We go into that cave on Shabbat and the Festivals.  We take up the ancient religious tools of shofar, lulav and etrog, menorah, tallis, mezuzah and the Torah scroll itself.  We say a blessing thanking God for the gift of this tradition, and we sound the ancient horn.  We shake the lulav, prehistoric rainstick and hear the sound of the wind and the rain in the branches.  We wrap ourselves in the woven sheep’s wool tallis.  We open the torah scroll and we begin to read.

We have not forgotten the entrance to the cave.

We remember how to go in and to bring that cave to life.

Deep in the caves of Lascaux, I discovered that our Jewish tradition is not a lost cause.

To me, that is even better than the best French pastry.

Shabbat shalom.

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