Idols or Art: Sculpture and Artistic Creativity in Jewish Life

Rav Kook: Kevatzim mi'Ketav -Yad Kodsho pp. 40-41 in Yehudah Mirsky, "Towards Rav Kook's Theology of Culture" in The Orthodox Forum, "Developing a Jewish Perspective on Culture."

Literature, painting and sculpture aim to bring to realization all the spiritual concepts impressed deep in the human soul. And so long as even one etching secreted in the depth of the thinking and feeling soul is missing and unexpressed the work of art has an obligation to bring it forth.

Rabbi Dr. Yehudah Mirksy, ibid. pp. 134-135

Along these lines, there is almost no sense in his writings that culture is a commercial enterprise that people do it to make money. Admittedly the worlds of marketing and advertising as we know them were in their infancy in the years when was writing most intensively on these issues. Yet one can only stand slack-jawed at the gap between his idealistic portrayals of culture and the relentless, colossal, and diabolically brilliant empires of marketing and advertising which in our day increasingly colonize the imaginative and spiritual lives of the human race. These cultural forms are manipulative to their core, and thus, expressively non expressive, if by expression we mean the articulation of some genuine and meaningful truth (hopelessly archaic though those terms sound in this postmodern age).

Rabbi Shalom Carmy, "As We are Now is Not the Only Way to Be: On the Pilace of the Humanities in Contemporary Religious Culture" in The Orthodox Forum, "Developing a Jewish Perspective on Culture."

...a religious life, particularly a life lived in th face of a hostile and/or indifferent culture, never forgets that we are now is not the only way to be. Traditional religion nd Judaism especially, is countercultural; it can only flourish by forging an alternative to the culture around us. Freedom is freedom to stand part from the tyranny of the present secular consensus; it is the freedom to transform yourself into something faithful yet new, disciplined yet unprecedented; it is the freedom to realize the mysterious destiny that constitutes our dialogue with God. And so, we study history and know that the mores and forms of early-twenty-first-century Western culture are not the only way to live. We study literature and realize that there are modes of feeling and reception unimagined inky the culture in which we find ourselves. We learn to philosophize because we are not condemned to think exactly like the majority of our culture. The more we can creatively mobilize the sweep and scope of human experience in all its forms, the better we can put in perspective the attractions and faults of our society, and the better situated we are in our confrontation with the conformist present to blaze a path worth of our own transcendent destiny y and worth of the emulation and admiration of others.

Leon Wieseltier: "How Voters’ Personal Suffering Overtook Reason — and Brought us Donald Trump"

The partiality of our consciences, our inability to care about all who have a proper claim upon our care, is not the result of a constraint upon our budgets, or more generally upon our institutions of politics and government. It is the result of a constraint upon our imaginations. Ethical principles are most commonly ascribed to the operations of reason, but we need to remind ourselves of the role of the imagination in moral action. Without the imagination, we would act only against wrongs that we ourselves have endured. We would be prisoners of our experience — which is to say, the experience of people less lucky than ourselves would be incomprehensible to us. To be sure, it would be presumptuous to believe that we fully understand the agonies of people who have suffered war and famine and pandemic and extreme poverty and slavery and genocide, when we, or most of us, have suffered nothing of the sort. But it would be callous, and a dereliction of our human duty, to believe that their agonies are completely beyond our comprehension, closed off to us, so that fellow-feeling is not possible and acts of assistance and rescue are not obligated.

What brings fellow-feeling into being is the imagination. We identify with pain by picturing it. At the beginning of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Adam Smith lucidly made the point: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. . . . By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” Solidarity is created by that “as it were” and “in some measure”: The approximations of the imagination, respectful of the interiority of experience but impatient with it, are powerful enough to establish a commonality between otherwise unshared lives, and thereby the grounds of a moral understanding. Sympathy, as Smith observed, is produced “by changing places in fancy with the sufferer.”

If this is so, then the old dichotomy between art and ethics, between the beautiful and the good, is not all we need to know about the place of art in life. Art, high and low, may play an indispensable role in the formation of virtue. One of the ways in which it does so is by picturing pain. Its pictures of pain may confer pleasure, but they also confer enlightenment about human fates unfamiliar to us; and it is not the case that the aesthetic satisfaction that we feel at the quality of a representation of evil destroys its moral meanings. Novels and poems and paintings and films and songs may bring the news of distant or hidden sufferings and abuses. By creating sympathy, art lays the ground, the internal condition, for moral behavior. This does not mean that art must be, for moral reasons, didactic or pledged to a politics — though such art, tendentious art, bad art, may be socially and politically quickening, as dictators and their propagandists have long known. It was “The Deer Hunter,” and not CNN, that most vividly illuminated for me the sources of the volatility and the fury that are mutilating contemporary politics.

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, "Torah and General Culture: Confluence and Conflict

...I am neither so overweening as to contend that such understanding cannot be attained without general literary education nor naive to the point of assuming that it is invariably conferred by it. Knowledge of Paradise Lost is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the best grasp of Sefer Bereishit. But to the extent, and I believe it can be significant, that the particular fusion of knowledge and power, insight, and inspiration provided by great literature enables us to relate to ru'ah memalela and to enrich our spiritual lives, we shall often profit from grazing in foreign pastures. Where, in our treasure, shall we encounter a despondent and tragically deserted father to compare with King Lear? Of thousands who have been imprisoned, who has left a record of his experience on a par with Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae or Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prison? Do we have a paean of inspired passion to wedded love to match Spenser's Epithalamion Far from constitution mere straying in alien fields, study of general culture can become a vehicle for enhancing our Torah existence.

Rabbi Chaim Brovender, "Towards Ahavat Hashem: Art and the Religious Experience" in "Wisdom from All My Teachers"

The question of love of God in our time can be restated: Is it possible to consider another point of entry for the religious personality who seeks to achieve some degree of wonder when gazing upon the world of creation? Is it possible to circumvent the causality developed by science and reestablish a sense of wonder when looking upon God's works?

...If we have been robbed of the miraculous moment, if we do not see anything in the workings of God's world other than the causal principle, if "uncertainty" does not create the option of awe, then perhaps we have to turn to beauty - the special qualify of the creation which takes our breath away and leaves us enraptured with wonder. It may be that beauty and the aesthetic moment provide the only possible contemporary entree to discovering God's love in the creation. The beautiful sunset is really there. The snow capped mountains are really there - they inspire in us the notion that creating is perfect and appropriate for us and us alone...

...We are not simply give the gift of perceiving a beautiful landscape or moment; we are able a well to reproduce that beauty or moment in a variety of ways...

...Art is about becoming part of the wondrous experience of gazing on beauty. The wonder of the world as created is sufficient; the enterprise of the artis is to restate it and to make it his or her own, in some way. If we learn to look at the work of art in the proper manner we should be able to connect to his human vision of beauty, which originates in God's created world but insists that beauty must ultimately be seen, reflected or interpreted by the human view...

..I would like to propose that reconnecting to our human spirit, and standing in wonder at God's creation through the use of that spirit, may provide us a significant option. Not every student will find his or her way to God's love through the arts and with the understanding that the human capacity to render the created world in a special way is a gift that should be exploited; but for some it might provide the necessary spiritual moment in an essentially nonspiritual existence that would enable them to beignet consider and literate experience God's love.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, "Halakhic Man"

Halakhic man is a man who longs to create, to bring into being something new, something original. The study of Torah, by definition, means gleaning new, creative insights from the Torah (hiddushei Torah)...

The Halakhah introduced the concept of creation, in all its force and splendor, into both the commandment of repellence and the fundamental principles of providence, prophecy and choice.

Repentance, according to the halakhic view, is an act of creation - self-creation.