by Rabbi Dovid Hordiner
The COLlive article “Why the Arts Matter in Yiddishkeit” highlights the importance of the arts – how creative work bridges spirituality and physicality to create a Dirah b’Tachtonim.
By providing a space for a deeper connection with Yiddishkeit through visual art, music, writing, dance, drama, and film, Tzohar Seminary has fulfilled a critical need for close to 300 young women (visit www.tzoharseminary.com to learn more). Tzohar’s approach is in line with the maimer Yom Tov Shel Rosh Hashanah 5659, where the Rebbe Rashab clarifies how creative expression impacts us beyond what we would have imagined.
In the scheme of creation we are called “medaber” — the speaker. Speech is a product of thought. In addition, because thought is more internal than speech, ideas and feelings are more revealed in thought than they are in speech. And yet we know from experience that putting a thought or feeling into words actually deepens our understanding and emotional experience beyond what pure thought achieves alone. Speech is creative. Putting thoughts and feelings into words forces something deeper to rise up and reveal itself to us.
Putting love into words makes us feel more love, yelling at someone about how angry we are makes us feel much more angry, writing down a thought deepens our comprehension and causes novelty to emerge. How does this work? Speech just receives from our thoughts, so how can it give rise to something new that wasn’t there before? If you have $1,000 dollars and I ask you for $1,000,000, the act of giving me the $1,000 doesn’t make you discover that you had $1,000,000 in some hidden pocket that you were not aware of! So why does expression enable us to give something new that we didn’t have previously?
The Rebbe Rashab explains that because speech is rooted in a deeper place in the soul than thought or feeling, it has the capacity to reveal new thoughts and feelings and amplify and deepen existing ones. This is why Torah study is meant to be spoken. And this is why we build close relationships through conversation and emotional expression.
The arts, like speech, function as a “levush” – as unique languages of understanding and communication. Someone who paints or writes a poem to express what she feels during davening is not depicting an emotion she already fully possesses. Someone who choreographs a dance or play to convey a Torah concept comes to understand the concept more completely because she has externalized it in words. The act of creating itself brings the ideas and emotions into fuller existence than had they remained unexpressed.
This is why the arts hold such a critical role in building a deep connection with Yiddishkeit. Not just because they can inspire someone else in their fulfillment of Torah and Mitzvos, but just as important, the arts transform us. Creative expression enables us to have a more profound comprehension in our Torah learning and causes us to bring more emotional depth into our performance of Mitzvos. The arts are a gift given by Hashem. Let’s use this gift to transform the world and ourselves.
