we are to loosen our minds “ad delo yada,” until we enter into a state of not knowing.

another kind of teaching helps us better understand ourselves — our own innate wisdom and deep knowing. In this sense, Torah can be a teacher the same way we might imagine a Rorschach inkblot to be a “teacher”: we come to it with what we have, and we see in it what we need. Perhaps a particular word jumps out at us with a spark of inspiration, or

Engaging in the creative process is a practice of attuning our system to be better able to hear that call when it comes, and to have the courage to answer it when it does.

The Hasidic masters, who understood all of Torah as a teaching about how to traverse our inner landscape, understand lekha slightly differently.

we might ask, what beauty, what blessing, what unimagined creations might emerge when we go our own way?

“The earth was chaos and void (tohu vavohu), with darkness on the face of the deep, and a breath of God fluttering upon the face of the waters.”1 In the beginning, there was this cosmic womb of the world: darkness and depth, chaos and void, water, wind, and the breath of the Divine. The world began from the swirling depths, full of creative energy,

God beholds what is, the glimmers that are appearing on their own, and in a dance of call and response, welcomes them to come more fully into existence: “Vayehi — let it be.”

Rabbi Yosef Hershman, “Parshat Lech Lecha: Go It Alone,” Ohr Somayach website, November 9, 2019.

see it all as raw material for our own creative process of becoming.