Rabbi Mónica GOMERY: YOU ARE HUNGRY FOR MORE THAN YOU REALIZE: TOWARDS A Theology of Creativity
Rosh Hashanah 5784
September 17, 2023
View the video here.
5783 was a big year for me.
A year ago exactly, my second book of poetry was published. I found out that the copies had shipped when I arrived to 2nd day Rosh Hashanah services to find Rabbi Ari Lev holding one. My book wasn’t due for release until November, but the early orders were already landing on peoples’ doorsteps. This thing I had spent the prior four years writing, editing and line editing– agonizing over layout, scrutinizing every individual comma– was finally ready, and its birthday was the birthday of the world. Rabbi Ari Lev embarrassed me by reading a poem out of it that very morning, which was a perfect, and mortifying, way to welcome the book into the world.
Though Might Kindred is my second full-length collection, it took me nearly a decade as a young adult to lose and then find my way back to the practice of writing. That journey has a lot to do with how I ended up here, as a rabbi, so I want to take a moment to share some of it with you.
I’ve been devoted to writing since I was a child. My mom is a visual artist, and though I was never very skilled at putting a paintbrush to canvas, she would often take me to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which was near our house. She’d sit me down in front of a painting, with my notebook and pencil, and leave me there for an hour while she roamed the museum–a childcare tip I offer to all the parents in the room! I’d sit there and write stories based on the piece of art in front of me. At home I had dozens of notebooks full of these stories, and poems, observations, scripts for skits and plays, song lyrics. I loved words most of all.
But after I graduated high school, I disavowed myself from the arts, declaring that artmaking was superfluous, even though I loved it. I was in high school when the US invaded Afghanistan, and at the start of the Iraq war. As I became a young adult, I was politicized into a world of US imperialism, global warfare, and domestic xenophobia. My parents are immigrants to the US, and I was raised in a Spanish speaking home. In the wake of 9/11, when Homeland Security became ICE and began heavily militarizing the border, raiding immigrant communities and deporting people, I felt the urgency of the injustice and the ways privilege had sheltered my own immigrant family from a similar fate. By the time I was graduating and stepping into the world as an independent adult for the first time, I felt that the world needed so much from all of us in order to right its wrongs, and that the creative arts were beautiful, but selfish. So I left them behind.
I spent years as a young adult working as a community organizer, a translator and interpreter, and a social justice educator. I dropped out of college for a while to do it. Over the course of that time, I experienced some political victories, and many losses. I worked with many people in crisis, and I lost friends and coworkers to death and deportation. Movement work shaped me as a person, and it also taught me at a young age that I had no strategies for pacing myself, for resting, or for moving through trauma. In many ways it was the classic young organizer’s story, in which I hit a wall of burnout and grief that crushed both my body and spirit.
Hitting that wall led me to Shabbat observance in my adult life. It led me to Torah study, tefilah, and other spiritual practices that slowed me down, grounded me in time, and rooted my justice work in an ancestral tradition. These practices guided me to liturgy that I later learned is poetry– a siddur overflowing with ancient psalms and medieval piyyutim, lush imagery and metaphor. Making time for spiritual practice led me back to the deep, shimmering well of sacred communal language.
After years of internalizing that making art was an act of excess, I craved it so badly. I read Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, and Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” I began to see how there is no political or spiritual tradition that has survived without the resource of poetry and writing, and more broadly, of art and beauty. Lorde writes,
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action…The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” [1]
Attempting to integrate my own political and spiritual life, I eventually found my way back to the practice of writing, the bridge between olam hazeh, the world as it is, and articulating olam haba, the world we strive and long for.
In my heart of hearts, I am a poet first.
My daily routine includes waking up early to read poems, write poems, organize manuscripts of poems, send poems to editors, and edit the poems of friends and colleagues; all before starting the workday.
I am devoted to this art as a spiritual discipline, and I often put it before other spiritual practices, even davening Shaharit. I try to make contact every day with the act of writing– which could mean taking a walk listening to a poetry podcast, or talking to a friend about my creative process.
When I don’t make time to write, I start to feel terrible. Clogged, confused, frustrated, full of unrest. I write to survive, to make sense of my human experience, to feel free and embodied, present and awake.
I wonder sometimes, where does this drive to create come from? It doesn’t feel like a choice.
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ [2]
In the beginning, the Holy One created…
We are made in the image of the One Who Created, and we too are called to create.
At Kol Tzedek, we talk often about how we are a community of changemakers and healers, people who work within and outside of the system– as organizers and educators, medical and legal workers, social workers and journalists. We volunteer, we campaign, we protest, we make calls, we raise funds. We are people whose lives are dedicated to the repair of what’s broken.
Something we talk about with much less frequency, despite its ubiquitous nature, is that we are also a community of artists. So many of us in this very room, in person and on Zoom, are authors, painters, mosaicists, illustrators. The number of musicians in this community is astonishing. Don’t even get me started with the Simcha Band!We are candlemakers, jewelry makers, printmakers, ceramicists and sculptors. We are weavers, gardeners and florists.
This past Hanukkah we hosted a silent auction to fundraise for L’Chaim and KT’s new home. We solicited the artists in the community to contribute original creations to be auctioned. The sheer quantity of contributions we received from KT artists was breathtaking. The talent itself moved me literally to tears.
One of my favorite recent threads on the KT-Discuss listserve was members of our community posting about the theater and dance shows they’re directing and performing in at this year’s Philly Fringe Festival– the email just kept going and going, there were so many shows listed! It was especially awe-inspiring given that the performing arts were nearly decimated in the pandemic, and are still rebuilding.
We are a community drenched in imagination, creativity, self expression, risk taking, and that sensitive attunement that comes from an artistic orientation and a creative process.
Making art is a huge part of Kol Tzedek’s cultural and social practice, and our political praxis in the world, because we know, on an intuitive level, that what it means to usher olam haba, the world that is coming, into existence, includes imagining and crafting what that world will look like, and sound like; how it will move, the colors and textures it’ll have, its architecture, smells and flavors, its many names and uses of language. And when we make this work, when we put paintbrush to canvas, pencil to page, hand to keyboard, hammer to nail, or clay to the wheel, we are creatingolam haba in real time.
As Toni Cade Bambara, Black feminist artist, writer, and activist wrote, “the purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible.” [3] And I believe she meant for us to extend this teaching to anyone creating art or responding creatively to the world, through the lens of healing and liberation.
And I want to make the claim today that making art is also part of our religious and spiritual practice.
At this point you might be thinking– What if I’m not an artist?
First I want to say– we are an ecosystem. We are not all meant to do the same thing. On the contrary, a healthy community is one in which everyone brings their strengths and plays distinct, interconnected, and mutually supportive roles. We are a body composed of many organs. We are an orchestra of many instruments.
When I say that art is essential, I’m including all of it. All the ways we access and manifest our creativity in the world– be it coding, cooking, or crafting, or facepaint and parody songs in the Purim shpil. There are 70 faces of Torah, a stand-in number for infinite pathways of revelation and interpretation, and there are at least 70, if not 7-million-billion, faces to being an artist.
And, furthermore, in a healthy ecosystem, the roles of giver and receiver, of maker and beholder, are equally necessary. Music is essential to our community, but we’re not all composers or musicians. Healing is essential to our community, but we’re not all bodyworkers, therapists, doctors, or herbalists. A community with a vibrant commitment to the arts is also a community that relishes, enjoys and appreciates the arts, and makes time and space for artists to do their work, find support, and share their creations.
Remember that there is the bracha, the essential role of the person who says the bracha, and then there is the one who responds “amen,” the life-giving and necessary witness, who validates and uplifts the blessing itself, completes the ritual act, and gives it life in the world. There are so many ways to be part of the story.
A midrash in Masechet Yoma offers us a theology of human creativity.
In this midrash, the rabbis take us back to the desert with the ancient Israelites, who are wandering there, having fled Pharaoh’s army and crossed the Red Sea, liberated from their bondage in Mitzrayim. Now they’ve run out of food, and are hungry and thirsty in the midbar, complaining, and fearing for their future. Hashem brings them sustenance in the form of what’s called mann in Hebrew, often referred to in English as “manna,” a mysterious substance that comes from the heavens, and feeds the people in the midbar.
In the book of Numbers we read:
“The manna was like coriander seed, and in color it was like bdellium (translated as fine crystals, or perhaps tree resin). The people would go about and gather it, grind it between millstones or pound it in a mortar, cook it in a pot, and make it into cakes. It tasted like rich cream.” [4]
Not bad, for survival food. The Israelites are in a stark place, and they don’t know how long they’re going to be there. So God provides them with food.
But the Rabbis take it further. They imagine more.
Why, they ask in Masechet Yoma, does the verse tell us that the manna was pound in a mortar, or cooked in a pot? Wasn’t manna a divine substance, a celestial gift basket? Couldn’t it arrive whole, and ready to eat?
Rabbi Yehuda responds, quoting his teacher Rav [5],
“The verse teaches us that something else fell for the Israelites with the manna: tachshitei nashim, women’s cosmetics/perfumes (something akin to eye shadow or blush), because they too are a thing beaten in a mortar.”
The midrash continues: “And why does the verse state that they cooked [the manna] in a pot? Rabbi Ḥama answers: This teaches that something else fell for the Israelites people, with the manna: tzikei k’deira, cooking spices.”
But why are the rabbis asking if anything fell with the manna in the first place? The Torah simply states: “the manna fell from the heavens.” What more could the people need?
The Israelites are hungry, scared, and unsure of what’s coming next. The Holy One rains food down upon them, but also the raw materials for creating things of beauty– herbs and seeds to be ground into tachshitim– decoration andornamentation, and tzikei k’deria– things of flavor, maybe thyme or za’atar. Things we might have assumed were excessive.
Go on, God seems to say, Get done up, have a drag ball, have a bake-off, cook a stew. Smell good, do your nails, make things beautiful and delicious– even here. Even in the desert.
The midbar is a “leave no trace” environment. Anything that falls from the heavens will be used completely out in this wilderness. God is not dropping candy bars from the heavens with wrappers the people are going to leave strewn in the desert! On the contrary, we learn from another midrash [6] that the Israelites didn’t even excrete in the wilderness.
Instead, their bones absorbed every ounce of the manna, and no waste was created. Nothing in the midbar was excess. Anything raining from the heavens must have been a bare essential.
Remember, not everyone in the camp is making cosmetics or stew! But the people are, collectively, engaged in a creative process. One that includes the makers, and the benefactors.
In our starkest times, when faith and hope are elusive, we need art, as a community, to reconnect us to our humanity.
I’ve never before imagined our forty years wandering through the midbar as a feast, or a fashion show. I have imagined it as a stark and arduous camping trip, one of austerity and grit. But in the imagination of this midrash, the spicy and the beautiful become part of the definition of bare survival. Not something extra, but rather a core part of what ‘bare minimum’ means.
Beauty is a fundamental need. It is part of the human project, alongside food and drink. “You’re hungry,” Hashem seems to be saying, “you are hungry for more than you realize.”
In the words of Polish-American socialist & feminist union leader, Rose Schneriderman, a Jewish factory worker, who started working at 13 years old, and was organizing by 20:
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.” [7]
There’s no shortage of roses delivered to the people in the wilderness. The midrash doesn’t stop at cosmetics or cooking spices. It goes on to elaborate that in fact the precious stones, gems and pearls that the Israelites brought to the mishkan as donations when Moses oversaw its construction, also fell from the heavens.
The Torah tells us that these offerings were brought to the mishkan nedava, from the heart, morning after morning [8]. The rabbis draw the connection– the manna too fell morning after morning. These beautiful freewill offerings must have fallen along with the manna. Where else would they have come from?
The role of beauty and the making of art are not separate from a spiritual life. The concept, known as Hiddur Mitzvah, is the instruction to make mitzvot beautiful, to bless the fruit of a flowering tree, embroider a challah cover, or build your own Torah ark.
The Talmud elaborates,
“Make before G!d a beautiful sukka, a beautiful lulav, a beautiful shofar, beautiful tzitzit, and a beautiful Torah scroll, and write in it in G!d's name in beautiful ink, with a beautiful quill by an expert scribe, and wrap the scroll in beautiful silk fabric.”
הִתְנָאֵה לְפָנָיו בְּמִצְוֹת
the text teaches: “Beautify yourselves before God through mitzvot.” [9]
The idea here is that our ritual acts are enhanced by beauty– because we invest time and resources into beautifying them. Beautifying them in turn beauitifies us. And, beauty attractsus to mitzvot. We are more likely to light Hanukkah candles with a gorgeous menorah, or to delight in oneg Shabbatat an ornately spread table.
In two weeks we’ll gather in sukkot to pray for rain. We’ll fulfill the mitzvah to shake the lulav alongside the etrog, known in Torah as pri etz hadar - the fruit of a beautiful tree. We actually don’t exactly know what fruit the Torah is talking about, except that it is beautiful.
Hiddur Mitzvah is one possible response to the question of why we need beauty. Making the revolution irresistible is another. But what about making art for its own sake, as its own sacred and devotional act? Does art only have value if we can measure its function and utility toward creating a more just world?
In truth, beauty is neither purely expressive nor purely functional. One of the deepest teachings our tradition can offer here is that this binary doesn't exist: the urge to make the basic rhythms of our life beautiful has always been with us.
When I talk about art as our human birthright, I don't mean everyone needs to write poetry for an hour a day. I'm talking about what we learned in the desert: that art and beauty are not separate from our basic needs, but rather, a part of them.
When I say beauty, I don’t just mean the pretty, or pleasant. I’m including here our grief, our losses, our big questions, our rage. All of it can be worked into works of art. Some of the best artwork out there challenges power, challenges us, laments, eulogizes, or changes our thinking. Beauty is as full a word as joy– the full flush of the human experience.
The Holy One sent raw materials, instead of paintings in a frame, or a fully assembled mishkan. The herbs had to be transformed by human hand into perfumes. The spices too– without working them, they wouldn’t release their flavor. Precious stones and pearls had to be gathered and offered to the Mishkan, assembled into a sanctuary. In order to experience beauty, the people had to co-create, to collaborate with the Divine.
This is our role as artists in the world: to harvest the raw materials of our lives, that which we’re showered with every day, and to work them into a free-will offering, a giving back to each other and to the Source. It can look so many different ways. But when the gift is in motion, it can last forever. [10]
To the artists among us, in and beyond this kahal– thank you.
Thank you for seeking out that which is beautiful, that which has the potential to nourish, heal, challenge and transform– for foraging and harvesting the gifts. Thank you for creating of them offerings of reciprocity, and for placing your gifts on the altar. Thank you for joining with the Divine to create the world anew every day, m’chadesh bchol yom tamid maaseh bireshit. [11]
This is our year to lift up art and artists, as we prepare to move into our new mishkan. Let’s make it devastatingly beautiful - a real sanctuary built from the grit and gifts of the world, and the generosity and inspiration of our hands.
We’ve been singing a melody this season that’s new for us at Kol Tzedek. The piyyut begins,
אַנְעִים זְמִירוֹת וְשִׁירִים אֶאֱרֹג
I will sing beautiful melodies and I will weave poems,
[12] כִּי אֵלֶיךָ נַפְשִׁי תַּעֲרֹג
Because my soul longs for You.
Creativity is our human birthright. It’s how we are wired, and it is how we survive. It doesn’t come after we’ve endured something hard, or even after we’ve met our basic physiological needs. It comes during, because it’s part of what it means to be human in the first place.
We do it out of longing to fulfill our purpose and to commune with the sacred.
Out here in the wilderness of our times, may we build olam haba together– one word, one brush stroke, one seed, one spice, one lump of clay at a time. Today is the world’s birthday. May we see it renewed.
Shana tova, anyada buena i dulse, blessings for a sweet and gorgeous new year. [13]
Footnotes:
[1] Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, Toronto, 1984
[2] Genesis 1:1
[3] Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis
[4] Numbers 11:7-8
[5] Talmud Bavli, Masechet Yoma, 75a
[6] Talmud Bavli, Yoma 75b
[7] Rose Schneiderman, speech for the Ohio women's campaign for equal suffrage, Cleveland, 1912
[8] Exodus 36:3
[9] Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 133b
[10] This sentence comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s article Returning the Gift, Center for Humans and Nature, 2013
[11] Siddur, Shaharit prayers.
[12] Anim Zemirot, piyyut believed to be written by R’ Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, 12th c.
[13] With profound thanks to Jon Argaman for their incredible gifts as an editor and writing coach. Thank you to Rabbi Alex Weissman, my chevruta on this midrash, who said so many illuminating things about it, including the sentence that became the title of this d’var. Thank you to Rabbi Adina Allen, Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, brilliant colleagues and editors.
September 17, 2023
View the video here.
5783 was a big year for me.
A year ago exactly, my second book of poetry was published. I found out that the copies had shipped when I arrived to 2nd day Rosh Hashanah services to find Rabbi Ari Lev holding one. My book wasn’t due for release until November, but the early orders were already landing on peoples’ doorsteps. This thing I had spent the prior four years writing, editing and line editing– agonizing over layout, scrutinizing every individual comma– was finally ready, and its birthday was the birthday of the world. Rabbi Ari Lev embarrassed me by reading a poem out of it that very morning, which was a perfect, and mortifying, way to welcome the book into the world.
Though Might Kindred is my second full-length collection, it took me nearly a decade as a young adult to lose and then find my way back to the practice of writing. That journey has a lot to do with how I ended up here, as a rabbi, so I want to take a moment to share some of it with you.
I’ve been devoted to writing since I was a child. My mom is a visual artist, and though I was never very skilled at putting a paintbrush to canvas, she would often take me to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which was near our house. She’d sit me down in front of a painting, with my notebook and pencil, and leave me there for an hour while she roamed the museum–a childcare tip I offer to all the parents in the room! I’d sit there and write stories based on the piece of art in front of me. At home I had dozens of notebooks full of these stories, and poems, observations, scripts for skits and plays, song lyrics. I loved words most of all.
But after I graduated high school, I disavowed myself from the arts, declaring that artmaking was superfluous, even though I loved it. I was in high school when the US invaded Afghanistan, and at the start of the Iraq war. As I became a young adult, I was politicized into a world of US imperialism, global warfare, and domestic xenophobia. My parents are immigrants to the US, and I was raised in a Spanish speaking home. In the wake of 9/11, when Homeland Security became ICE and began heavily militarizing the border, raiding immigrant communities and deporting people, I felt the urgency of the injustice and the ways privilege had sheltered my own immigrant family from a similar fate. By the time I was graduating and stepping into the world as an independent adult for the first time, I felt that the world needed so much from all of us in order to right its wrongs, and that the creative arts were beautiful, but selfish. So I left them behind.
I spent years as a young adult working as a community organizer, a translator and interpreter, and a social justice educator. I dropped out of college for a while to do it. Over the course of that time, I experienced some political victories, and many losses. I worked with many people in crisis, and I lost friends and coworkers to death and deportation. Movement work shaped me as a person, and it also taught me at a young age that I had no strategies for pacing myself, for resting, or for moving through trauma. In many ways it was the classic young organizer’s story, in which I hit a wall of burnout and grief that crushed both my body and spirit.
Hitting that wall led me to Shabbat observance in my adult life. It led me to Torah study, tefilah, and other spiritual practices that slowed me down, grounded me in time, and rooted my justice work in an ancestral tradition. These practices guided me to liturgy that I later learned is poetry– a siddur overflowing with ancient psalms and medieval piyyutim, lush imagery and metaphor. Making time for spiritual practice led me back to the deep, shimmering well of sacred communal language.
After years of internalizing that making art was an act of excess, I craved it so badly. I read Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, and Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” I began to see how there is no political or spiritual tradition that has survived without the resource of poetry and writing, and more broadly, of art and beauty. Lorde writes,
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action…The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” [1]
Attempting to integrate my own political and spiritual life, I eventually found my way back to the practice of writing, the bridge between olam hazeh, the world as it is, and articulating olam haba, the world we strive and long for.
In my heart of hearts, I am a poet first.
My daily routine includes waking up early to read poems, write poems, organize manuscripts of poems, send poems to editors, and edit the poems of friends and colleagues; all before starting the workday.
I am devoted to this art as a spiritual discipline, and I often put it before other spiritual practices, even davening Shaharit. I try to make contact every day with the act of writing– which could mean taking a walk listening to a poetry podcast, or talking to a friend about my creative process.
When I don’t make time to write, I start to feel terrible. Clogged, confused, frustrated, full of unrest. I write to survive, to make sense of my human experience, to feel free and embodied, present and awake.
I wonder sometimes, where does this drive to create come from? It doesn’t feel like a choice.
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ [2]
In the beginning, the Holy One created…
We are made in the image of the One Who Created, and we too are called to create.
At Kol Tzedek, we talk often about how we are a community of changemakers and healers, people who work within and outside of the system– as organizers and educators, medical and legal workers, social workers and journalists. We volunteer, we campaign, we protest, we make calls, we raise funds. We are people whose lives are dedicated to the repair of what’s broken.
Something we talk about with much less frequency, despite its ubiquitous nature, is that we are also a community of artists. So many of us in this very room, in person and on Zoom, are authors, painters, mosaicists, illustrators. The number of musicians in this community is astonishing. Don’t even get me started with the Simcha Band!We are candlemakers, jewelry makers, printmakers, ceramicists and sculptors. We are weavers, gardeners and florists.
This past Hanukkah we hosted a silent auction to fundraise for L’Chaim and KT’s new home. We solicited the artists in the community to contribute original creations to be auctioned. The sheer quantity of contributions we received from KT artists was breathtaking. The talent itself moved me literally to tears.
One of my favorite recent threads on the KT-Discuss listserve was members of our community posting about the theater and dance shows they’re directing and performing in at this year’s Philly Fringe Festival– the email just kept going and going, there were so many shows listed! It was especially awe-inspiring given that the performing arts were nearly decimated in the pandemic, and are still rebuilding.
We are a community drenched in imagination, creativity, self expression, risk taking, and that sensitive attunement that comes from an artistic orientation and a creative process.
Making art is a huge part of Kol Tzedek’s cultural and social practice, and our political praxis in the world, because we know, on an intuitive level, that what it means to usher olam haba, the world that is coming, into existence, includes imagining and crafting what that world will look like, and sound like; how it will move, the colors and textures it’ll have, its architecture, smells and flavors, its many names and uses of language. And when we make this work, when we put paintbrush to canvas, pencil to page, hand to keyboard, hammer to nail, or clay to the wheel, we are creatingolam haba in real time.
As Toni Cade Bambara, Black feminist artist, writer, and activist wrote, “the purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible.” [3] And I believe she meant for us to extend this teaching to anyone creating art or responding creatively to the world, through the lens of healing and liberation.
And I want to make the claim today that making art is also part of our religious and spiritual practice.
At this point you might be thinking– What if I’m not an artist?
First I want to say– we are an ecosystem. We are not all meant to do the same thing. On the contrary, a healthy community is one in which everyone brings their strengths and plays distinct, interconnected, and mutually supportive roles. We are a body composed of many organs. We are an orchestra of many instruments.
When I say that art is essential, I’m including all of it. All the ways we access and manifest our creativity in the world– be it coding, cooking, or crafting, or facepaint and parody songs in the Purim shpil. There are 70 faces of Torah, a stand-in number for infinite pathways of revelation and interpretation, and there are at least 70, if not 7-million-billion, faces to being an artist.
And, furthermore, in a healthy ecosystem, the roles of giver and receiver, of maker and beholder, are equally necessary. Music is essential to our community, but we’re not all composers or musicians. Healing is essential to our community, but we’re not all bodyworkers, therapists, doctors, or herbalists. A community with a vibrant commitment to the arts is also a community that relishes, enjoys and appreciates the arts, and makes time and space for artists to do their work, find support, and share their creations.
Remember that there is the bracha, the essential role of the person who says the bracha, and then there is the one who responds “amen,” the life-giving and necessary witness, who validates and uplifts the blessing itself, completes the ritual act, and gives it life in the world. There are so many ways to be part of the story.
A midrash in Masechet Yoma offers us a theology of human creativity.
In this midrash, the rabbis take us back to the desert with the ancient Israelites, who are wandering there, having fled Pharaoh’s army and crossed the Red Sea, liberated from their bondage in Mitzrayim. Now they’ve run out of food, and are hungry and thirsty in the midbar, complaining, and fearing for their future. Hashem brings them sustenance in the form of what’s called mann in Hebrew, often referred to in English as “manna,” a mysterious substance that comes from the heavens, and feeds the people in the midbar.
In the book of Numbers we read:
“The manna was like coriander seed, and in color it was like bdellium (translated as fine crystals, or perhaps tree resin). The people would go about and gather it, grind it between millstones or pound it in a mortar, cook it in a pot, and make it into cakes. It tasted like rich cream.” [4]
Not bad, for survival food. The Israelites are in a stark place, and they don’t know how long they’re going to be there. So God provides them with food.
But the Rabbis take it further. They imagine more.
Why, they ask in Masechet Yoma, does the verse tell us that the manna was pound in a mortar, or cooked in a pot? Wasn’t manna a divine substance, a celestial gift basket? Couldn’t it arrive whole, and ready to eat?
Rabbi Yehuda responds, quoting his teacher Rav [5],
“The verse teaches us that something else fell for the Israelites with the manna: tachshitei nashim, women’s cosmetics/perfumes (something akin to eye shadow or blush), because they too are a thing beaten in a mortar.”
The midrash continues: “And why does the verse state that they cooked [the manna] in a pot? Rabbi Ḥama answers: This teaches that something else fell for the Israelites people, with the manna: tzikei k’deira, cooking spices.”
But why are the rabbis asking if anything fell with the manna in the first place? The Torah simply states: “the manna fell from the heavens.” What more could the people need?
The Israelites are hungry, scared, and unsure of what’s coming next. The Holy One rains food down upon them, but also the raw materials for creating things of beauty– herbs and seeds to be ground into tachshitim– decoration andornamentation, and tzikei k’deria– things of flavor, maybe thyme or za’atar. Things we might have assumed were excessive.
Go on, God seems to say, Get done up, have a drag ball, have a bake-off, cook a stew. Smell good, do your nails, make things beautiful and delicious– even here. Even in the desert.
The midbar is a “leave no trace” environment. Anything that falls from the heavens will be used completely out in this wilderness. God is not dropping candy bars from the heavens with wrappers the people are going to leave strewn in the desert! On the contrary, we learn from another midrash [6] that the Israelites didn’t even excrete in the wilderness.
Instead, their bones absorbed every ounce of the manna, and no waste was created. Nothing in the midbar was excess. Anything raining from the heavens must have been a bare essential.
Remember, not everyone in the camp is making cosmetics or stew! But the people are, collectively, engaged in a creative process. One that includes the makers, and the benefactors.
In our starkest times, when faith and hope are elusive, we need art, as a community, to reconnect us to our humanity.
I’ve never before imagined our forty years wandering through the midbar as a feast, or a fashion show. I have imagined it as a stark and arduous camping trip, one of austerity and grit. But in the imagination of this midrash, the spicy and the beautiful become part of the definition of bare survival. Not something extra, but rather a core part of what ‘bare minimum’ means.
Beauty is a fundamental need. It is part of the human project, alongside food and drink. “You’re hungry,” Hashem seems to be saying, “you are hungry for more than you realize.”
In the words of Polish-American socialist & feminist union leader, Rose Schneriderman, a Jewish factory worker, who started working at 13 years old, and was organizing by 20:
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.” [7]
There’s no shortage of roses delivered to the people in the wilderness. The midrash doesn’t stop at cosmetics or cooking spices. It goes on to elaborate that in fact the precious stones, gems and pearls that the Israelites brought to the mishkan as donations when Moses oversaw its construction, also fell from the heavens.
The Torah tells us that these offerings were brought to the mishkan nedava, from the heart, morning after morning [8]. The rabbis draw the connection– the manna too fell morning after morning. These beautiful freewill offerings must have fallen along with the manna. Where else would they have come from?
The role of beauty and the making of art are not separate from a spiritual life. The concept, known as Hiddur Mitzvah, is the instruction to make mitzvot beautiful, to bless the fruit of a flowering tree, embroider a challah cover, or build your own Torah ark.
The Talmud elaborates,
“Make before G!d a beautiful sukka, a beautiful lulav, a beautiful shofar, beautiful tzitzit, and a beautiful Torah scroll, and write in it in G!d's name in beautiful ink, with a beautiful quill by an expert scribe, and wrap the scroll in beautiful silk fabric.”
הִתְנָאֵה לְפָנָיו בְּמִצְוֹת
the text teaches: “Beautify yourselves before God through mitzvot.” [9]
The idea here is that our ritual acts are enhanced by beauty– because we invest time and resources into beautifying them. Beautifying them in turn beauitifies us. And, beauty attractsus to mitzvot. We are more likely to light Hanukkah candles with a gorgeous menorah, or to delight in oneg Shabbatat an ornately spread table.
In two weeks we’ll gather in sukkot to pray for rain. We’ll fulfill the mitzvah to shake the lulav alongside the etrog, known in Torah as pri etz hadar - the fruit of a beautiful tree. We actually don’t exactly know what fruit the Torah is talking about, except that it is beautiful.
Hiddur Mitzvah is one possible response to the question of why we need beauty. Making the revolution irresistible is another. But what about making art for its own sake, as its own sacred and devotional act? Does art only have value if we can measure its function and utility toward creating a more just world?
In truth, beauty is neither purely expressive nor purely functional. One of the deepest teachings our tradition can offer here is that this binary doesn't exist: the urge to make the basic rhythms of our life beautiful has always been with us.
When I talk about art as our human birthright, I don't mean everyone needs to write poetry for an hour a day. I'm talking about what we learned in the desert: that art and beauty are not separate from our basic needs, but rather, a part of them.
When I say beauty, I don’t just mean the pretty, or pleasant. I’m including here our grief, our losses, our big questions, our rage. All of it can be worked into works of art. Some of the best artwork out there challenges power, challenges us, laments, eulogizes, or changes our thinking. Beauty is as full a word as joy– the full flush of the human experience.
The Holy One sent raw materials, instead of paintings in a frame, or a fully assembled mishkan. The herbs had to be transformed by human hand into perfumes. The spices too– without working them, they wouldn’t release their flavor. Precious stones and pearls had to be gathered and offered to the Mishkan, assembled into a sanctuary. In order to experience beauty, the people had to co-create, to collaborate with the Divine.
This is our role as artists in the world: to harvest the raw materials of our lives, that which we’re showered with every day, and to work them into a free-will offering, a giving back to each other and to the Source. It can look so many different ways. But when the gift is in motion, it can last forever. [10]
To the artists among us, in and beyond this kahal– thank you.
Thank you for seeking out that which is beautiful, that which has the potential to nourish, heal, challenge and transform– for foraging and harvesting the gifts. Thank you for creating of them offerings of reciprocity, and for placing your gifts on the altar. Thank you for joining with the Divine to create the world anew every day, m’chadesh bchol yom tamid maaseh bireshit. [11]
This is our year to lift up art and artists, as we prepare to move into our new mishkan. Let’s make it devastatingly beautiful - a real sanctuary built from the grit and gifts of the world, and the generosity and inspiration of our hands.
We’ve been singing a melody this season that’s new for us at Kol Tzedek. The piyyut begins,
אַנְעִים זְמִירוֹת וְשִׁירִים אֶאֱרֹג
I will sing beautiful melodies and I will weave poems,
[12] כִּי אֵלֶיךָ נַפְשִׁי תַּעֲרֹג
Because my soul longs for You.
Creativity is our human birthright. It’s how we are wired, and it is how we survive. It doesn’t come after we’ve endured something hard, or even after we’ve met our basic physiological needs. It comes during, because it’s part of what it means to be human in the first place.
We do it out of longing to fulfill our purpose and to commune with the sacred.
Out here in the wilderness of our times, may we build olam haba together– one word, one brush stroke, one seed, one spice, one lump of clay at a time. Today is the world’s birthday. May we see it renewed.
Shana tova, anyada buena i dulse, blessings for a sweet and gorgeous new year. [13]
Footnotes:
[1] Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, Toronto, 1984
[2] Genesis 1:1
[3] Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis
[4] Numbers 11:7-8
[5] Talmud Bavli, Masechet Yoma, 75a
[6] Talmud Bavli, Yoma 75b
[7] Rose Schneiderman, speech for the Ohio women's campaign for equal suffrage, Cleveland, 1912
[8] Exodus 36:3
[9] Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 133b
[10] This sentence comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s article Returning the Gift, Center for Humans and Nature, 2013
[11] Siddur, Shaharit prayers.
[12] Anim Zemirot, piyyut believed to be written by R’ Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, 12th c.
[13] With profound thanks to Jon Argaman for their incredible gifts as an editor and writing coach. Thank you to Rabbi Alex Weissman, my chevruta on this midrash, who said so many illuminating things about it, including the sentence that became the title of this d’var. Thank you to Rabbi Adina Allen, Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, brilliant colleagues and editors.