creativity is the root of religion

it gets buried by ritual, but everything withers without it

There’s an old joke about a revered rabbi who needs to move a glass of water on a table. Knowing that his followers watch his every move, he declares, “Listen, I’m not creating a new custom. I’m just moving this glass.”

Lo and behold, his followers follow him: they move the glass, all the while intoning, “Listen, I’m not creating a new custom…”

You get the idea. Religions gravitate towards repetition, regularity, ritual. Recurring practices make up a huge portion of what it means to live a religious life: to pray words that have been prayed for thousands of years, to read ancient books, to continue tradition. We associate religion with fidelity to the past, because most of the time that’s what it entails.

But you can’t have repetition unless you have something to repeat; in other words, religious rituals and customs and study sessions need to start with something that is not rote, that is not fixed. They need to start with creative acts.

But if religion relies on creative acts, why is creativity the last thing people associate with religion? Why do we think about religion in terms of regularity, even see creativity as a threat to religious order?

I think there’s basically one reason, which is that creativity implies imperfection, and that can be very scary.

Let me unpack this by talking about the Bible. The Bible is a creative document, and we imply this every time we discover something new in it, every time we revel in its beauty, every time Jews assert that “the Torah speaks in the language of people” (a creative choice if there ever was one!), every time we explain a commandment as God’s attempt to achieve a certain outcome.

We imply it, but we don’t say it, because creative acts can’t be timeless or perfect; they’re always deeply linked to their contexts, always tied to a specific need and a specific audience. Sure, you may think that a certain movie or book is flawless, but that belief will only ever be held by a small number of people. So the cost of calling the Bible a creative act is that you make it vulnerable to the idea that the Bible is imperfect.

And you know what? This is clearly correct! The idea that a perfect document could exist in an imperfect world is ridiculous, which is why Jews have spent the better part of the last two thousand years supplementing and critiquing revelation. You don’t need to be a heretic to assert that an imperfect world cannot possibly contain a perfect item any more than a two dimensional plane can contain a sphere. The world is not a place where creative perfection can exist.

But it’s because of the world’s imperfections that religious creative acts are so powerful. Take the Mishnah, for example. The Mishnah was the rabbis’ first major legal work (yes, this is big oversimplification). Medieval philosophers debated about how exactly the Mishnah’s creators came up with its rulings—but the debate buries the fact that the Mishnah is a wildly creative work, both in form (easy to memorize, organized in a weird but useful way) and in its painstaking attempts to extend Biblical law to the nitty gritty details of an entirely new world. When the rabbis created a list of 39 categories of forbidden Shabbat labor in order to set rules for the day, they made creative choices. When they chose specific stories to sprinkle into a work that is mostly rules, they’re making a choice about how to communicate the complexity of the world.

This is true of almost every successful piece of religious life. Mystical works, liturgical poetry, commentaries—we treat these like the solutions to math problems and ignore the originality it took to generate such masterpieces, and then we bury the original creative act in so many layers of repetition and rote memorization and blind reverence that we can’t imagine a world in which someone had to make these things. The creative act is there—it is the origin—but it is treated as almost as an afterthought, as a given, as an inscrutable product of a holy production process. We respect the makers of these traditions for their piety, for their fidelity to tradition, completely ignoring that generating powerful texts requires ingenuity, not just the ability to follow some sacred content algorithm.

Why do I care about this? Because if people actually forget that religion requires creativity, if they forget what lies underneath the ritual, then religion will quickly lose relevance, just as surely as television would lose relevance if people spent all of their time watching them and forgot that you need to keep making shows.

I’m not advocating for religion to stop being ritualistic. Ritual is important and always will be. But I am asking that we never forget the thing that lies at the heart of those rituals, the one thing that can never be remixed or copied or inferred through a logical process. Religion requires creative acts, the kinds of acts out of which the daily grinds of life can grow.

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In future weeks I’ll talk about what I imagine are the most promising places for creativity growth. For the moment, I will leave you with two versions of the same idea, my very favorite way of thinking about the Tower of Babel, a story which appears in this week’s Torah reading.

One version is popular:

The other is experimental:

See you soon.