Emuna and the Creative Process

Many people can't see a connection between emuna and creativity; what does one have to do with the other? Well, psychologists have been studying creativity for decades, and they've done hundreds of studies to understand the creative process. What these researchers wanted to know is how do people come up with new ideas? How did Einstein come up with the Theory of Relativity? How did Picasso paint such beautiful pictures? The thinking was that if they could somehow understand the creative process, then they'd be able to teach other people how to access higher levels of creative thinking and innovation.

But the studies came back inconclusive, because the creative process is not something that man builds, it's something that's given to him as a gift from G-d. When they asked all the Nobel Laureates, and the other creative geniuses, how they came up with their innovative ideas, they all said the same thing – they didn't know! They were just kind of sitting there one day, or woke up one morning and poof – something new bubbled up from their creative unconscious mind.

Ok, at this point you may be wondering why I'm telling you all this; after all, you're not an aspiring Einstein, or Picasso, and you really just want to serve G-d and live a good life. So why do you need creativity? What does all this have to do with emuna anyway?

Jeremy Dean is psychologist who thoroughly reviewed the creativity research and wrote a book about it.  One of the things that he found is that when a person wants to create something new, he first has to let go of his existing knowledge base because his fixed knowledge base inhibits his creativity. 

We need creativity in our service to G-d because G-d is also beyond human knowledge and beyond the limit of what we “know” that He can do. The purpose of our lives is actually to get to know G-d, and to form some sort of connection with Him; but to have any hope of actually doing this, we have to go into the world of creativity and abstract thought, and let go of our logic and our “knowledge.” That doesn't mean that we completely discount and ignore science, but rather that we use science as a starting point, or a springboard, to help us to get to G-d.

So how does a human being perceive G-d? If we're actually looking for Him, we see him everywhere, in even the smallest details in our lives. This is the concept of Divine Providence, which states that G-d is orchestrating absolutely everything that happens in the world. That doesn't mean that we all perceive Him in the same way, even if we've witnessed the same event. Human beings are completely unique individuals, and each one of us is going to see G-d and understand Him in our own way. When we were all standing at Mount Sinai, when G-d was giving over the 10 commandments, not one of us heard those commandments in the same way. If a person was a mystic, or a great scholar, then he heard the special message that G-d tailor-made for him; if the person listening was a water carrier, then he heard a simpler message – but again, the message was tailor-made for him by G-d, and it's like that with everything.

Last summer I was walking down a street in one of the older religious neighborhoods of Jerusalem, when I noticed the tiniest little swimming pool I'd ever seen in my life, in the tiniest fenced-in terrace. I was in the middle of trying to prepare a lecture and I'd got stuck. I went for a walk to try and get some creative inspiration, when I came across that pool, and the little boy who was jumping up and down in it, experiencing total joy and elation. What was G-d trying to show me? What was the message He wanted me to get?

I asked G-d to help me out, and enlighten me, and then I got the idea, that He wants me to see how this little boy could have so much fun in that tiny space. Even though I live in Israel now, for most of my life I've lived in America, in big houses with a lot of land. Part of me still equates “happy” with “stuff”, but G-d was showing me that this little Israeli boy was still enjoying himself tremendously, despite his lack of space and stuff and that maybe he was having even more fun than his American peers, in their two acre backyards and huge built-in swimming pools…

In other words, I was being told to cheer up, and to get past the idea that I needed my own villa in Israel, to be happy. That was my particular message, but each person who would have seen that little boy would have taken away their own impression about what G-d was trying to communicate to them (if they were looking for it). If there were a hundred people, there would be a hundred different messages, each one tailor-made.

G-d is always communicating with all of us via the world we live in. He wants us to take note of what's going on around us, and to us, and to keep asking the question: “what is the message in this for me?” Is there a greater gift than being given a clue, or a piece of life's puzzle, from the Creator of the World Himself? So why aren't more people taking notice, and taking advantage of all the signs and clues and messages G-d is sending us, to encourage us, and motivate us, and help us to take our lives in the direction that they need to go?

The answer could be that it takes a certain humility to stop what we're doing, and to look to G-d for answers.  Too often, we expend so much time and energy in futility, trying to go it alone, because we aren't willing to search for, and accept, G-d's help and advice. This unwillingness to go outside of ourselves, and our own logic, for answers, not only doesn't help our creative process, it actually inhibits it.