The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom

To pause and appreciate the creative process is itself a creative act, foundational to the formation of the world.

It is to shift the meaning of “good” from “perfect,” or “complete,” to “what’s here for me now in this moment.”

Similarly, the act of seeing, witnessing, beholding, and appreciating our creative process is essential and nourishing. In fact, God’s creative process is bookended by this act of pausing and appreciating the good, as it says at the end of the creation story, “God saw all that God had made and it was very good.”2

God does not wait until the entire cosmos has been formed, or even until an entire ecosystem has been shaped, before beholding and proclaiming the goodness of creation. Instead, God takes the first opportunity possible to praise even this first, formative step.

After each day of creation, Torah teaches that God pauses, and notices and appreciates what has come forth.

As a species and as a society we’ve successfully cultivated our capacity for certainty and control, for separation and subjugation. Now, for our own sanity and the planet’s survival, we need to cultivate our capacity for uncertainty, for openness, for connection to each other and all that unites us. We need to reclaim our inherent creativity as the

we face a crisis of imagination. We need new pathways to possibility.

This instruction to “turn it and turn it” can be broadened as an invitation for how we might approach people we interact with, media we consume, and even how we see ourselves. Just as Torah is complex and many-layered, so too do each of us contain multitudes.

“Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it” (Pirkei Avot 5:22). Written with regards to our relationship to Torah, this verse from the Mishnah teaches that we are meant to be continually shifting our vantage point, seeing things from new angles, and allowing our perspective to change.