The Art of Conversation

Rabbi's Notes - April 2005

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I'm just back from New York, where -- among oodles of pleasures-- I saw an exhibit called "Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation" at the Jewish Museum. More on Jewish women and their salons in a second, but it's got me thinking about the "power of conversation." I've been more and more aware lately of the distance between feeling and thinking. How often I will have a strong feeling about an issue, a problem, a topic. But until I have the opportunity to talk (or write) about it, I often don't even know what I really think. In fact, I'll confess: as often as not, when I sit down at my computer to write my "Rabbi's Notes," I have a spark of fascination about something. But I may be well into the writing before I actually discover the content of my own thoughts. It is almost as if verbalizing causes thought to come to be. Feeling can be non-verbal, but thinking takes words.

Now and then I am so desperate to think something through that I'll actually drive around in my car, talking out loud. This is okay in the breach, but there is nothing like talking (or, again, writing) in conversation with someone else. Thoughts come to life. And, like most anything coming to life, thoughts can be fragile and half-formed at first expression. If you pick the right talking partners, the newborn thought can be examined thoroughly and with care. Through response the newborn thought takes on form and detail. In interaction with the thoughts of others it matures. It may change shape, take on some characteristics of other people's thoughts, lose its flabby and awkward edges. It may gain intensity or it may recede as it is explored.

Like many of us, I have been carrying on conversations in installments with a few treasured friends almost my whole life. And I also occasionally have the sublime experience at a party or on a train of having a nearly-perfect conversation with a total stranger. Sometimes I read a book or hear a talk and, even though the author never hears my comments, my experience reading or listening is so intense and interactive that it is almost as though we have spoken.

At risk of making it so that none of you will ever want to talk to me again, I will say that I can be a bit fussy about conversations. Every once in awhile I'll find myself thinking that I really like the people I'm visiting with, but we're not talking about anything that any of us really cares about. Or that someone (maybe me???) is dominating or overly critical or not really paying attention or whatever. Not every conversation is perfect. It is an art, after all.

I really knew nothing about the salon tradition. I guess I remember something about Gertrude Stein holding court, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. I learned in the "Jewish Women and their Salons" exhibit of about fifteen or twenty women -- mostly European, but a few in this country as well -- who regularly (usually weekly) hosted conversations that had some important common features. Most of these "salonieres" were wealthy and educated women. Most had strong views on politics, the arts and philosophy. All knew "important" and interesting people. And all lived and hosted at times and in places of great social change.

Russian-born Anna Kuliscioff held her salon during her years of exile in various European cities during the years surrounding the Russian Revolution. A political radical and feminist, she was known for a "virile" speaking style and for making a point of hosting workers along with upper-class politicos. During World War One, Mussolini courted her favor, but she wrote him off as "a cheap poet who has read a bit of Nietzsche." She and her husband were separated for long periods of time, either on account of travels or imprisonments, and she grew increasingly incapacitated with a degenerative illness. Still she kept up her hosting, arguing and holding forth, until her death in 1925.

I was charmed to read about the nearly all-female world of the three Stettheimer sisters and their mother in post World War I New York. They came from money, but the mother and daughters were abandoned by their father. They lived together all their lives and held an "airy and ornamental" salon which was particularly known for offering a comfortable setting for prominent people of complicated sexual identity. The sisters decorated a bedroom in which to host their guests. Several of Florine Stettheimer's oil paintings of their salon and its habitués were on display, and I fell in love with them all. With the charm of Chagall or Ben Shahn, they depict a lavish, festive, half-magic world.

Most of the salonieres were in some way exiles. Few were religious (in fact, I was intrigued to read that many of these women converted to an expedient Christianity when they faced social pressure to do so. If this happened, it was noted in a single line late in the biography, as though such conversion was barely worth mention.) Many held avant-garde views and associated with others on the cutting edge of their times. All had the grace, intelligence and tenacity to nurture conversations in challenging times, week after week over many years.

It's interesting that this whole phenomenon is known as the "salon," the "room," and that the hostesses are "salonieres." These salons were held in the margins of history, in the places and times where things were changing, by people on the edge themselves. Walking through the exhibit (which was unfortunately a bit sterile for such a juicy topic) and reading the (wonderful, rich, complete) catalogue later, I started to think of these salons as safe places, refuges where feeling could turn into thought without being aborted because of its potential danger to the status quo. Thoughts could be expressed, held up to investigation and challenge, and allowed to mature. The speakers who gave birth to them could then take their thoughts out into the world to do what good, strong, mature thoughts do.

I saw the exhibit with my and our community's great friend, story-cultivator Lisa Lipkin. Lisa and I were mad with yearning afterwards for a salon life of our own! After all, we too live in a time of change, a time when a strong thought-life birthed in the margins would be of great help. We love conversation. We know such brilliant and astonishing people. And all this led me to thinking about Passover.

Whatever else the seder is, and it is many things, it is a chance to gather -- over food and drink, in a lavish setting -- with the people you most love to talk with and to have an extended conversation about themes of importance. Near the beginning of the haggadah, we remember the five rabbis who were gathered in B'nei Brak, discussing the Exodus from Egypt until their students came and called them to say the morning Shema. Nearly every haggadah has a footnote telling us that these five were political revolutionaries who might well have been planning to over throw the Roman occupation. I think I've always assumed that this all-night conversation was some kind of a one-time emergency meeting, with the students' call to prayer a warning to disperse. But maybe instead this was one installment of a longer and slower conversation. Maybe it took place in a kind of salon in B'nei Brak, where our wisest teachers gathered regularly and talked at length about themes of slavery and liberation, birthing some of the ideas which have sustained us all ever since.

Whether you are left, right or center, whether your passion is politics or the arts or timeless questions of philosophy, I hope that your seder table is one that takes up the largest questions of the world in which we live. I hope that the salon in which you meet this year is a place where ideas are born and given the attention they need to thrive. And I hope that, whether formally or informally, whether in a salon or a shul or a train, you find the opportunity to enjoy sublime conversation at this season. Happy Pesach, my dear community!

© 2005 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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