“The root of creativity is discontent with mere being, with just being around in the world.”(Abraham Joshua Heschel)
These days, I’ve been thinking about the role of the artist in our democracy and in religious life. Science and the humanities imbue the culture with openness, diversity, insight, and the liberty to express our creative selves. And when we encounter art, we find a kind of truth that transcends language. Hopefully, Jewish education and Judaic art call upon us to inquire about the nature of creation and also draw us toward holiness, love and compassion.
Art is about both curiosity and mystery. While we may think taste is all subjective, certain qualities of beauty are ever-present. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner argues in his book Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed that beautiful things are by nature interesting, memorable and invite us to “revisit.” When we are drawn and re-drawn to knowledge and respect the search for truth, we are led by curiosity and the desire to describe. When ideas and images are beautiful and profound, we are moved beyond language, to an experience of awe and wonder. It is that very inability to fully articulate those experiences that makes them so beautiful.
These essential qualities also motivate spiritual exploration. When we study a Jewish text or concept, we are encouraged to “turn it over, and turn it over," mining the p’shat, text and the d’rash, interpretation. We continually ask new questions (Avot 5:21). But the beauty and awe lie in what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explains in his book God in Search of Man, is the sense of ineffability that is the source of religion:
"[I]n religious and artistic thinking, the disparity between that which we encounter and that which is expressed in words and symbols, no words and symbols can adequately convey. The roots of ultimate insights are found...not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable. It is the level on which the great things happen to the soul, where the unique insights of art, religion and philosophy come into being.
"[Our experience of God] is the result of wonder and radical amazement, of awe before the mystery and meaning of the totality of life beyond our rational discerning. Faith is the response to the mystery, shot through with meaning; the response to a challenge which no one can forever ignore."
For Gardner, aesthetic experience is an experience of awe. For Heschel , spiritual practice is one way to express that sense of awe. But religion doesn’t begin with intellectually trying to prove the existence of God. It doesn’t even begin with asking whether we believe in God. It begins with a moment of mystery.
Jewish education has to be linked to Jewish art in the same way that learning is suffused with mystery. So while I'm lucky to have had a Jewish education, I'm luckier to make Jewish art and share it.
Peace,
Chana