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

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

“God, in God’s wisdom, formed the earth,” Beresheit Rabbah, a collection of midrashim on the book of Genesis, reads “wisdom” not as a quality but as a character in the creation story.11 And

In Pirkei Avot, a collection of ethical teachings and maxims, we find the following teaching, given in the name of Ben Bag Bag,

we are process.

acting from this place of inspiration and aliveness, we can feel something beyond, and paradoxically deep within, coming through us. It

Torah is relational. We bring who we are to the text and the text offers back something of meaning to us.

Jewish tradition teaches adam olam katan, olam adam gadol: the human being is a microcosm of the world, the world is a macrocosm of the human being.4 We are not only of the earth — we are each a tiny world in and of ourselves, reflecting and effecting the broader whole.

Across time, a core aspect of Judaism has been its iterative capacity: its invitation to return over and over to the same materials but with new questions and understandings, lending our texts a limitless ability to shift and change as circumstances demand. This is, in part, what has allowed the textual

Using the creative process as a form of inquiry into sacred text brings together the art studio and the beit midrash to create something new: