by Arielle Tonkin

Asking questions, engaging in creative practices, and immersing in stories stoke the spiritual imagination and support connection to self, God, and all beings in unexpected ways. Artists and healers engage these modalities to move our viewers and build new neural pathways for our patients. In her “Work that Reconnects,” scholar-poet-climate-activist Joanna Macy weaves an imagination-based web of scenes and stories in which the Earth still exists thousands of years hence, and she implores weary readers to open. This kind of imagination-based reading becomes calisthenics for (re)building the imagination and the soul. If reading, here, is a pathway towards the possibility of the persistence of life against destructive odds, Macy asks her reader to actively practice and play out that possibility through imagining with/in the text.

In my work in creative-expressive learning to foster multicultural and interfaith connection, I, too, seek ‘wondering questions’ that have the potential to transport learners beyond the horizons of the currently-possible. I try to listen for quiet questions that arise through creative inquiry; questions that break the predictable (sometimes intractable) thought loops and foregone conclusions and open (both subject and object) up in new ways.

Here’s the productive paradox: it is only within constraining structure that imaginative freedom is possible. In Patañjali’s yoga-sūtras, this balance of structure and sweetness, of steadiness and ease, is encapsulated in the mantra ‘Sthira Sukham Asanam.’ In Rabbi Benay Lappe’s SVARA beit midrash, the Talmud student is encouraged to balance development toward becoming both a  gamirna (technically-skilled) and savirna (morally-intuitive and imaginatively-free) learner. Learning that is structured and specific allows the learner to feel safe enough to move beyond the limit of the known. This kind of tugging-yet-balanced learning, when undergirded by a commitment to open-hearted curiosity and willingness to listen and be changed, builds empathy and manifests new possibilities within us and beyond us. The text happens to us, and we happen to the text.

For these reasons and more, I was delighted to read Why Rain Comes from Above: Explorations in Religious Imagination (Hadar Press, 2024), by Devora Steinmetz. In this a book of essays, Dr. Steinmetz, a faculty member of Hebrew College and of the Mandel Institute for Nonprofit Leadership, braids Biblical and Rabbinic texts, inviting the reader into what she terms “a thick experience of reading and of imagining themselves into our stories, prayers, and practices.” A central commitment of this book is the practice of imagination within Torah learning towards a more just world and more widely empathetic worldview. However, unlike Macy’s “Work that Reconnects,” Dr. Steinmetz purposely “brackets the question of belief” and focuses on growing imagination to cultivate “as if” possibilities within Torah and ourselves. 

This book is different from Macy’s spiritual practice manual as a tool for transformation, and from my creative expressive beit midrash for relational healing approach: this book offers an experience of reading more like a studio visit with a skilled craftsperson, and we learn both alongside and by watching the pathway of an advanced imaginative learner. I experienced the book as an unusually generous and detailed revelation of the author-learner’s creative process. 

The question that motivates the title essay in the collection came years ago from one of Dr. Steinmetz’s students: “what happens if we allow ourselves to imagine rain being sent by God, a God who is intimately involved in and responsive to the behavior of human beings?” Through a reading as close as a second skin, Dr. Steinmetz takes us through and then beyond the midrash that seeded her student’s question towards a broader one: I wonder what it would be like to “imagine a dynamic world animated by God’s call to justice”? 

Wondering questions, the engagement of a possibility through questioning and reading without having to attach to a fixity or to prove belief, is a tool of world-building for artists and learners alike. We maker-thinkers often start with prototypes. We get off the screen or off the daf and we pick up a pencil and paper, or anything we’ve got. We let our bodies respond intuitively and we think with our whole bodies. We let the clay or the paint or our dancing bodies show us what our thinking brains might not yet know that we know. We ask questions without an attachment to the final form: what world might be possible to make with this combination of possibilities and materials, at this time, in this place? Bayamim ha’hem, ba’zman ha’zeh, so ends the Al Ha’nissim (lit. ‘upon the miracles’ – of Chanukah and Purim) prayer. Creative play is a miraculous and wondrous human capability.

Imaginative reading, as modeled by Dr. Steinmetz, is a pathway “…to create a felt sense of God’s presence in [our] lives” (Steinmentz, after anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann).imetz, is more like apprenticing thamn it is like reading a how-to manual. The reader journeys through rigorous literal readings of Torah and intertexts, zooming into the micro-details of words and zooming back out to the macro immersive experience of the stories. The invitation: space and time travel, between the reader’s world, the author’s world, and the world of the text. Like a Proustian cookie that insinuates beyond the reader’s intellect and invites them, through sensation, to pitch forward out of their chair and into the world of the story, Dr. Steinmetz teaches through generously sharing her learning process as an experienced student. 

We, the readers, observe how structure frees Steinmetz to fly through the imaginative possibilities in the stories and make new connections. Original stirrings emerge, between the texts, within Dr. Steinmetz, and rippling out back into the world. Sticking with the literal reading rather than jumping off into metaphor promotes a staying-with-the-text; a being with the story. There is a clear entrance and a clear exit back into the world outside of the daf, an oscillation between the learner’s world and the world of the text. This back and forth is necessary for the reader to feel safe probing the limits of the known.

A beloved painting teacher of mine would often talk about completing a painting in related terms. Pour your heart into your subject. Address the canvas with your full attention. The limits of the canvas will anchor you, there is a safe way in and a clear way out, the boundaries are clear, the materials are present and limited, so let your body and let your imagination fly freely and press up against the limits of the possible within these constraints. And once you have explored the full set of possibilities within the space and time and material constraints, put down your brush. A painting is never ‘finished’ in the absolute sense of the word. But it becomes extant. And we transition from creation to completion because that is the only way that the painting can have a life in the world, beyond us.

While this book is not a practice manual, there are some structural rules of the road, methodological offerings, just like in art pedagogy: Read carefully. Pay close (and I will add, sensate) attention. Notice the cadence of the speech of a text. Notice what has been left ambiguous. Here are our imaginative openings.

One essay in the collection, “Work and Its Purposes,” plumbs the depths of Exodus 5:8-9 and the midrash in Shemot Rabbah 5:18 to wonder about the nature of labor. The essay outlines three aspects of labor: avodah b’pharekh, or oppressive labor that is Sisyphean by nature and involves nafotzu (divide and conquer); avodat haShem (lit. work/in-service-of The Name) or “va’yachulu” (inherently completable) labor, dignified work that often unites laborers around a common goal; and shabbat, the cessation from labor. 

“…Work cannot be its own end” (71), writes Steinmetz, in keeping with the system of categorization she discovers and imagines as she reads. As a reader reading alongside Dr. Steinmetz, my felt-sense of work and rest deepens. In this imaginative reading (and let’s be clear: imaginative does not mean embellished, rather, we have a 360-degree-view of the room of each word, so to speak), the signposts avodah b’pharekh and avodat HaShem open up into pathways for possible action, or the limitations of possible action. For example, in an avodah b’pharekh or oppressive labor situation, I cannot ever experience shabbat–which requires the active cessation from labor–as commanded by HaShem. I cannot expect to cease working in a system in which labor is by definition incompletable. And relatedly, if there is a “va’yachulu” mechanism, a way for me to declare that evening though this painting will never reach an end point unless I declare it so, I have the courage to declare the end. To complete it. To stop. To rest, and to release it into the world.

I am aware that in this brief review, I have not done justice to this book’s meticulousness and rigor. The advanced treatment of each text and intertext makes this book easy to recommend to the seasoned Torah scholar, as well as to a beginning Torah learning practice by unlocking root-words and following their transformation across passages. The book’s insistence that imaginative practice allows us to bracket the question of belief and try on immersive experience in stories and possibilities is freeing; I hope it finds a wide audience.