From Resilience to Renewal: Teaching Jewish Creativity
Published October 31, 2024
For millennia, Jews have responded creatively to their circumstances. After destruction, renewal. In the face of denial of the Jewish historical experience, insistence on memory. Moving and migrating necessitated reinventing and rebuilding. Reading, translating, reinterpreting and imagining have been strategies for preservation, adaptation, and transformation over time.
As the plates of the earth seem to be shifting beneath our feet, we feel the vibrations of millennia of quakes. We may dream of a pause, a breath of steadiness, knowing full well that the tremors will undoubtedly continue. What is the role of Jewish education in times like these? The Jewish community is living through daunting echoes of the past while we continue to enjoy the promise of vast intellectual, spiritual, and cultural resources. How can we design Jewish education that empowers and enables us to navigate the gusty winds of time and construct a hopeful future?
It is time to reclaim our history of Jewish creativity and make creativity a core habit of Jewish teaching and learning. This essay reflects a decade of research and teaching on Jewish creative education that I undertook during one of the most generative periods in Jewish history. Then October 7th shook the Jewish world, awakening many to the reality that antisemitism and threats to the State of Israel were not simply chapters of our history, but live existential concerns. A new need for creative approaches to collective coping, healing, resilience, and overcoming has emerged once again. As I write on the eve of the election and as war rages on so many fronts, we certainly need the wherewithal to imagine new strategies to rebuild and renew.
I believe the modern Jewish education enterprise must consciously induct Jewish learners into the habits of creative thinking that have sustained the Jewish people through centuries of crisis and opportunity. In the Talmud (Chagigah 3a), Rabbi Yehoshua greets his students and declares, “there is no house of study without chidush” – new ideas, interpretations, spins, understandings. Over a decade of collaboration, experimentation with Jewish teaching artists, and through some creative teaching of my own, I have observed the ways that teaching and learning through the arts and in intentionally creative environments generates chidushim and the capacity to spark and refine novel ideas and offerings.
Why Jewish Creativity?
Already a century ago, Mordecai Kaplan issued a bold charge for Jewish education in his proposal for sustaining and revitalizing Judaism, Judaism as a Civilization. He understood that world events would demand new imagination about how to live Jewishly in the modern world.
Kaplan viewed creativity as an essential Jewish disposition for the development of viable and lasting Jewish life and culture. He described creativity as "the result of whole-souled and organic reaction to life's values; and a reaction in which senses, emotions, imagination, intelligence and will are fully aroused."
Building on this spiritual foundation, contemporary discourse on creative education, such as the work of the late Sir Ken Robinson, has defined creativity as a process of generating original thinking that has value. Creative thinking solves puzzles, expresses ideas in new ways, produces novel concepts or explanations, finds patterns, and produces what does not already exist. This is not a new phenomenon or fad. This kind of creativity has been existential for the Jewish people throughout the cycles of history.
I have been awed time and again as I have witnessed the generative, soulful, sparkly kind of creative aha moments that bubble into the learning spaces created by Jewish teaching artists. Here are four facets of how that creativity manifests. The beauty is, anyone can become practiced in doing it.
Four Facets of Jewish Creativity: A Taste of the Framework
How can we teach and learn the habits of creativity? In my new essay analyzing the teaching and learning of Jewish creativity, “Jewish Creativity: An Essential Aspiration of Jewish Education,” I suggest four facets of creativity that I believe are essential for ensuring a future where Jews can continue to negotiate the conditions of their day, while pursuing the future they want to see:
Interpreting
Curating
Making
Collaborating
These facets lend themselves to improving the lives of individuals, families, communities, and society. The integrate the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional work of being human and being a Jew in the contemporary world.
Creativity as Interpreting
Interpreters can ask "What could this mean? What does this mean to me? How does this impact others?" They can pose and answer questions about meaning and impact in a variety of life's situations, using a range of lenses, tools, hermeneutics, symbols, and forms of expression.
A traditional approach begins with what is known as the p’shat, the basic, literal meaning, and then moves to various dimensions of interpretation. What other modes of interpretation are available to us, in a highly sensory, multi-media infused information society? The arts and technology provide multiple entry points and languages for consuming and expressing ideas: Through movement, visual representations, music, and various apps, we convey and connect to dimensions of the human experience. Creativity opens our imaginations to visualize and sense interpretations that might otherwise be invisible or inaccessible to us when language and canon have narrowed the traditional interpretations.
Creativity as Curating
Curators have a developed sense of aesthetics, values, and criteria that guide their choices. They are learning to prioritize and make values-based choices in a free society where autonomy reigns, authority is questioned, and influencers attract followers. Curating is an essential Jewish activity in a world where consumers get to choose their own adventures. Contemporary consumers like to customize their lives, and Jews are no exception.
We are constantly curating our stories, our identities, our daily lives. Creative curation is the practice space for discerning what we like, follow, and value. Curating also gives us some license to be playful in sampling and remixing as we learn and ideate. A creative orientation invites us to use the wide range of raw materials we have at our disposal, including the substance of Judaism: wisdom, ideas, and vocabulary. We can mold and shape Jewish time, space, and practice when we feel empowered to do so, using the varied materials of our real lives. It is precisely this kind of empowerment that gives people the confidence to create.
Creativity as Making
Creators make chidushim, which we might think of expansively beyond ideas as "new offerings," in many forms: original ideas, inventions, suggestions, solutions, art, poetry, literature, machines, tools, systems, experiences, celebrations, expressions, rituals, and more.
There are many kinds of valuable creations, using a wide range of materials and elements. Creators make poetry out of language, observation, imagination, and emotion. They create meals out of edible ingredients. They create gardens out of seeds, plants, soil, water, and sun. They create schedules out of time, space, events, and priorities. They create communities out of people, using communication tools, shared activities and values, and relationships. Creations like these are both the roots and fruits of Jewish flourishing.
Creativity in Collaboration
Collaborators are open to cooperating with others to interpret, curate, and create together. Collaboration is not only a meeting of the minds, but draws together complementary talents, perspectives, and skills. When learning and thinking leads to creating together, a vibrant culture can be produced. Collaborating is a key facet of creativity for restoring a Jewish collective.
Creative collaboration does not necessitate uniformity or a shared view. In fact, collaboration can be a means to engage in "productive conflict," where disagreement and even discomfort yields new ways of thinking and new creative products.
Imagine Jewish communities where these habits of creative collaboration are intentionally practiced and valued, talents are harnessed for shared purpose, and participants feel valued for what they contribute.
Jewish Creativity: What is possible?
The Jewish story through millennia is one of creative adaptation and transformation. Current generations are being called upon to write the next chapter of that history. Are we prepared to craft that chapter?
I offer this call to action and the four facets of creativity as a framework for the field of Jewish education to participate intentionally in galvanizing Jewish creativity in all the places where Jewish learning occurs. We need more laboratories, studios, test kitchens, outdoor spaces, sanctuaries, and classrooms where we can practice the habits of creativity, to adapt and cope in the moment, and to ready ourselves to invent in the face of the challenges and opportunities yet to come. Creativity is a means to keep Jewish history alive, live fully in the present, and create a hopeful future in the face of darkness, distress, and division.
I invite you to read the full paper, intended as a welcome mat to enter into a virtual salon of conversation. Please join me at upcoming webinars and be in touch via email to share your experiments, expertise, and ideas, so that educators who are already doing this creative work can begin to cultivate a field of practice together, and so that the creatively curious can explore what’s possible.
This monograph was developed while I was an inaugural scholar in the Mandel Senior Fellows program, an initiative of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. I am grateful to the Covenant Foundation where I am affiliated as a Scholar in Residence, to the Stanford Graduate School of Education where I was a visiting scholar, and to the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion which afforded me a sabbatical while I was completing this writing in Spring 2024. Please visit the Mandel Center’s website to download the monograph.
To hear more about this research and vision, please join me in the upcoming webinar, “Learning about Learning: Conversations with Scholars of Jewish Education,” hosted by the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, Thursday, November 7th at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.
