Moshe Barrasch

8/18/2019 Moshe Barrasch

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One

_

of

ni.y

earliest encounters

with

art.was when,

as

a young and curi- .

ous child, I was

I e a ~ n g

through

the

pages

of

an old illustrated journal.

There I found a reproduction

of

Rembrandt's etching

of

1654, tepre

senting Tobit, Tobias's farher ( f i g ~ 1). The apocryphal story tells of the

old and blind Tobit whose son went on a long and dangerous journey.

The

fa

ther, preoccupied with thoughts

ab

out death, doubts whether

the son wÜl return from the journey and whether he is sti l alive. When

Anna, Tobit's wife, "espied him [the son) coming," she tells rhe good

news to the blind father. Tobit hastens to the door to meet his son. But

he

is

blind. A.nd Tobit went forth ·toward rhe door, and sturnbled,"

says the Book

ofTobit

(11:11). The Dutch Bible,

as

Julius Held has

noted, is even more explicit. It reads: ''And Tobias went to the door and

hit

himself against it."

1

When I first saw the etching, on rhat early day -

in my life, I did not know the story. Nor had 1 seen a blind person from

nearby, though sorne uncanny stories about blindness had been told to

me. Unprepared, then,

as

I

was,

the

image struck me

so

powerfuily that

I still remember that first encounter. ·

What

was

it in the engraving that

so

struck me? The etching is,

of

course, a moving representation

of

human infirmiry, the manifestation

of

an old man's pitiful weakness .

Yet

rhere was also an additional

dimension to it. Rembrandt's figure d id not appear to me only as that

of

a shaky old man,

for whom

one can feel only sorrow and compas

sion. Though he

was

stumbling, the old man struck me

as

a venerable

. figure; he was surrounded by an aura, and an inherent dignity lifted

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Moshe Barrasch