In her book Pentimento, author and playwright Lillian Hellman describes a phenomenon that often occurs when we return to a piece of art we once worked on after much time has passed: “Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.” Hellman speaks of the way the aging paint allows for older layers to show through, offering an opportunity to see, in her words, “what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”
Like the painting Hellman describes, Torah, too, is a work in process. Layers and layers of interpretation have been added to it over time, according to the needs, desires, fears, and longings of those who devoted their lives to making meaning out of these sacred words. Some layers add to the beauty and power of the overall piece, strokes and shapes that bring the picture more clearly and compellingly into focus. And some accrue like varnish, making the painting hard and impenetrable. Each one of us is invited into this process of excavation, of peeling back layers of what we have been taught or what we think we know, and seeing, as Hellman writes, what is there for us now. And each of us is called to our creativity — to bring our brush back to the canvas anew, reencountering and reworking the stories, ideas, and images that lie at the very foundation of who we are and who we could be.
Continue reading “The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Adina Allen”
Candide, ou l’Optimisme (in English, Candide, or Optimism) is a satirical, picaresque novel published in 1759 by François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, who was possibly the smartest author of the Age of Enlightenment…but he annoyed so many courtiers and public officials that he was forever traveling around Europe to get away from their threats of arrest and bodily harm. A picaresque novel is an adventure novel with a clever, 
tricky hero who somehow survives and makes us like him. Voltaire wrote his novel primarily to criticize the optimism of the German writer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who said that because God is always benevolent, everything that happens is always for the best. This presumably includes the bloody Seven Years War (Protestant vs. Catholic, fought mostly in Germany and France) and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which occurs both in Lisbon and in the novel. Even though Voltaire was accused of blasphemy and heresy, among his other sins and crimes, Candide was enormously popular throughout Europe, a popularity that continues to this day.
Feminism and Religion 