I am a digital camera

What is to be done with the hundreds, possibly thousands of photos now accumulating on digital cameras and smartphones everywhere, waiting to ambush and dazzle admiring friends and relatives? Surely the glut of electronic images marking our passage through life, including dozens of cute photos of the family dog sleeping peacefully on its back, baby Matthew gurgling over a bottle of milk, and Aunt Jessica, caught unawares looking up suspiciously at the camera from the confines of her armchair, must engender sensations of excruciating boredom after no fewer than a dozen viewings.

Compare these with the rare sepia-tinted cardboard photos taken in a photographer’s studio in Pashvetin of Great-Uncle Max, his wife Ethel, and their three stony-faced little children, Bella, Michel, and the one whose name I can never remember. Or the nameless, heavily bearded grandfather figure, his hand resting on a prayer book, or my great-grandmother, Sora Beila, wearing her finest sheytel, all staring solemnly at the camera following an injunction to keep very still for at least three minutes while their images filter slowly through a lens to be absorbed onto a light-sensitive strip of silver-coated film.

Having one’s photo taken a hundred years ago was a grand occasion for which one dressed in one’s best outfit and adopted a carefully arranged pose, no doubt holding in mind the instruction to keep a straight face while the photographer crouched beneath a blanket doing God-knows-what to his machine. These photos are to be treasured, provided the descendant has been thoughtful enough to record the names of the subjects. Otherwise, they might as well be consigned to a pictorial encyclopedia of a Jewish history, if they are to avoid ending up in the dustbin.

Today, if you are lucky enough to be forewarned by your amateur photographer, aged at least 7, you might hear the cheesy instruction to say the word “cheese” before the button is pressed, in the mistaken belief that in mouthing that word, your lips will arrange themselves into a spontaneous grin, thereby wiping the misery from your natural expression so that you can be remembered by posterity as a happy, smiling person.

A genuine laugh can sometimes be elicited by asking the subject to utter another ridiculous word, like “sausages.” Then, in less time than it takes to notice the empty whisky bottle and the residue of the evening meal on the table obscuring your foot, your image will be captured at least a dozen times by a lightning rearrangement of electronic circuits in someone’s tiny camera.

Don’t get me wrong. I am as sentimental as the next person, but I am also unduly prone to boredom. Once is enough to be treated to the image of a soon-to-be-forgotten moment of family fun. A multiplicity of variations on the same theme work as a kind of hypnotic.

A photo of a person is at least more engaging than the thousands of digitalized holiday images of exotic locations minus the people: a stone pillar in Mauritius, for example, commemorating a 15th-century naval battle, a market stall in Madeira, or the empty bar of a luxury hotel on the Costa del Sol.

With the invention of the digital camera, our intrepid photographer is also quite capable of switching to video, in training to become another Coppola. This allows bewildering scenes to spring to life for between one to two minutes, enabling the viewer to anxiously scan the backs of passersby in the hope of catching a glimpse of a familiar person.

Many years ago, on a visit to Jerusalem, I innocently tried to photograph a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys gathered in scholarly disputation on a street corner in the Mea Shearim district of the city and was challenged with angry cries of “Asur! Asur!” (“Forbidden! Forbidden!”). I respectfully desisted and learned from that experience that I was being rescued from the sin of idolatry involved in the copying of God’s image onto film.

I now believe that these youngsters had a point and that the present generation is guilty of committing that particular sin a thousand times over, a sin which is registered as highly as number two among the Ten Commandments, enshrined in the injunction, “Thou shalt not make any graven images of the Lord, nor worship them with thy digital camera.” I paraphrase.