The creative process utilizes whatever materials we have at our disposal to keep our hands busy so that challenging ideas and emotions have a chance to burn, churn, and turn into something else — clarity, new conceptions, or compassionate action.

One reaction to something confusing or complex is to try to simplify it.

frameworks through which to ask my own questions.

It is in the wilderness, in the aliveness of the world, that Torah comes alive.

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

Not alone, but rather in partnership with Wisdom, the proverb suggests, God created the world. Even before the divine creative process began,

The invitation now is to look for the spark of curiosity, inspiration, or strong emotion that is calling you to be explored more fully and use this as a springboard to create an intention. This second stage of intention-setting functions as a bridge from the inquiry stage to the exploration stage that follows.

“Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.”1 As a pathway to the place of all possibility, hafokh bah calls us to acknowledge, seek out, and engage the multiple truths contained within any one verse, story, image, person, experience, or idea.

Not only does this provide us with a wider and more diverse range of ideas to turn to as we, and the world, continue to change, it also maintains the value and power of holding many things to be true at once. Rather than attempting to remove the “undesirable,” or discarded, interpretations from the record, instead we are all invited to add ever-new