Artists are naturally curious types. We want to know about things – about the nature of art, about ourselves, about life. That’s one of the main reasons we do what we do; for most of us, creating art is a way to learn what we feel we need to learn. “I think discovering is the only thing that keeps me going,” choreographer Meredith Monk once said (1). What really strikes me about her quote, though, is how she continues it: “You feel like you’re part of something much bigger than yourself.” All this curiosity, all this exploration, seems to take artists inexorably toward the grand questions of life – about meaning, about purpose, about the source of it all.

I’ve been writing about this subject a lot lately. For the last two years or so I’ve been working on a book about creativity – actually, I’ve been slowly writing about it (in bits and scraps) for many more years than that – for the sole reason that, even though I sit down at my desk every morning and write, I still don’t understand, well, just about anything about what I do. What is creativity? Where does it come from? Who has it? How does it work? What does it do in the world? As I said, all this curiosity leads to bigger and bigger questions. In particular, as a Jewish writer, I find myself asking: What, if anything, does my religious tradition have to say about all this?

I find that my explorations circle and circle around one central emerging truth: to be an artist is to be engaged with the divine – to be like God, to become closer to God, to be led forward by God. And I’m not alone in this experience. Artists, in fact, often sound a little like amateur theologians. Eric Fischl once said, “There’s something sacred about paint”(2). In the words of composer Leonard Bernstein, “no art lover can be an agnostic when the chips are down. If you love music, you are a believer, however dialectically you try to wiggle out of it” (3). Painter Marc Chagall took it a step further by bringing the word “God” explicitly – and also uncertainly – into the conversation: “Will God, or somebody else, give me the power to breathe into my canvases my sigh, the sigh of prayer and of sadness, the prayer of salvation, or rebirth?”(4)

So I have company in seeing this connection to the divine, in wanting to talk about it. Yet – and this interests me, too – in my writing on the subject I find that I frequently dodge using the word “God,” replacing it with something like, as I just did, “the divine” or “what is meaningful,” because I know how many distracting assumptions and associations people have with the word.

As it turns out, though,you just can’t get the whole truth until you look at it directly.

In Judaism, traditionally we turn for understanding first and foremost to the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Our sages have even suggested that God read the Torah for instructions when creating the universe! Now, I should say that I personally don’t take a story like that literally, but see it instead as a kind of inspired metaphor for just how rich the Torah is as a text, how full it is of a people’s accumulated wisdom, how engaged it is with what we feel as sacred in the universe. Or, to be more to the point, how engaged it is with God.

So what can the Torah tell us about God?

And yet I continue to claim that art is an engagement with the divine – but how can we engage with something unknowable?

The truth is that most artists, religious or not, would tell you that art is very often a fumble in the dark. Painters Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, in a letter to the New York Times, wrote, “To us art is an adventure into an unknown world(7).” According to choreographer Meredith Monk, “Part of the process is hanging out in the unknown”(8). This very often means that artists don’t even know how they do what they do. Sculptor Louise Nevelson “had great difficulty talking articulately about art because her approach was essentially intuitive”(9). Chagall, a painter who knew himself well enough to write his own autobiography, nonetheless admitted that his own drive to paint is a bit mysterious, saying that it was “something I was born with and don’t really understand myself”(10).

This abundance of mystery doesn’t make things altogether easy. If artists are people who try to, in Rothko’s words, “give human beings direct contact with eternal verities through reduction of those verities to the realm of sensuality”(11) – in other words, if we are those who try to represent those truths here on earth – what do we do with the fact that the divine, the underlying meaning of the universe, is, as Shawn tells us, unrepresentable?

Shawn himself has an answer for this: “Paradoxically, another aspect of the practice of Judaism is a very real dialogue with this abstraction, the addressing of God in a very personal way” (12). Moses, after all, is in dialogue with God throughout this story, both before he asks for a definition of the divine and afterward, when Moses is still without a clear definition to hold onto. We see a more recent example of this in the poetry of Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai, which often took the form of a:

           great ongoing dialogue with God. [These poems] are always in the
           forefront and afterthought of that dialogue which, more precisely, takes
           the form of a debate over God’s presence and His absence, His caring and not
           caring. His actions and inactions(13).

We learn from Moses, and Amichai, that you can talk to God even without being able to define God. You can learn from God what you’re supposed to do with your life and what meaning can be found in that kind of life, but you will never have a God that is as concrete as a golden statue of a calf.

To put it another way, artists never have a universe that makes itself so thoroughly known as to be exhausted of all mystery. And thank God for that – what then would we paint or write or sing about? In the words of Allen Shawn, “God is only near when he is not defined”(14). Every day I go to my desk in order to explore and discover, but I am usually not fooled into believing that I’m going to figure it all out. I only believe that it’s worth it to be there at the desk. Our role, in the end, is not to solve God, or any of the other great mysteries. Our role is to hang out in that unknown, to be in dialogue with the divine – and to view our art as reports on the conversation.