Holy Imagination

A few months ago, I spent some time in Italy. More specifically, Florence’s Uffizi gallery. I wandered its rooms, appreciated its art.

Come to think of it, this must have been March, in the weeks in which I was obsessively not touching my phone in between shopping at the store and washing my hands at home. Which is why, when the Rick Steves Uffizi Gallery tour came up on iTunes shuffle, I could not click through to the next track. Instead, I listened.

I listened, and I traveled. From the familiar blocks of Connecticut Avenue, I went somewhere else - feet here, body here, mind and spirit very much there. In some ways, hearing descriptions of piazzas and towers, while meandering from Porter to Tilden, felt like a mockery of this series that has accompanied me through so much real life exploration. But in other ways, it felt like kinda the point.

A few weeks later, a reporter would interview Rick Steves, and reflect to him: “One of the pleasures you provide is the fun of traveling vicariously. You get letters from prisoners saying that [they] watch your show and feel like they’re out in the world. I wonder how that teaching is powerful now.” To which Steves answered: “this virus can stop our travel plans, but not our travel dreams.” And so, the message was, keep listening. Keep dreaming. Keep imagining.

And so I have. I have imagined beaches and mountains. I have mentally traveled to places familiar and new, have drifted through my past and wandered into potential futures. As my physical world has narrowed to the eight walls of my apartment’s two rooms, my imaginative world has expanded out, giving me refuge from the here and now. Giving me places to go, all while staying home.

Now - imagination, as a concept, seems to have a bad rap, reserved for children (or worse, dreamers). But imagination - I could and will argue - is not only an essential tool in our spiritual toolbox, but moreover is fundamental to what the high holidays entail.

And this year, the timing couldn’t be better. For me, and so many of you, the now familiar “coronacoaster” of emotions that we cycle through so constantly - from overwhelmed by how endless this feels to grateful for my health and home to sad about missing this place, you people, and on and on - compounded by that bubbling anxiety and despair about society’s entrenched diseases, racism and climate change, fires and failed leadership - all of this is rattling constantly in my consciousness. And so it is against this backdrop - against all of us so desperately craving a break from this world - that our calendar gives us this gift of ten imagination-rich days of awe. Because as part of their central practices, the high holidays ask us - obligate us - to utilize, and to cultivate, holy imagination.

Two examples. Two anchors of these upcoming days that - through the proper lens, we notice - engage with imagination at their core.

First: prayer. When thinking about what we do on these holidays, we likely think of liturgy - machzor in hand, prayer in heart. Yet this very act - taking ancient words from a two dimensional page meant, ostensibly, to describe the Indescribable - this act basically only works if we understand it as an exercise in imagination.

Because the machzor’s descriptions of God can be hard to connect with. In these pages, we encounter God as shepherd, judge, artisan, as “avinu malkeinu,” our “father our king” - images that feel, on the one hand, too pedestrian to describe the Holy Blessed One (God’s a potter? Like with a wheel and a kiln?) but also too out of touch to feel resonant or real. I don’t believe that a Divine Judge decrees, today, whether I live or die. And this is all the more true of language that is so gendered or ableist - so of its historical moment in any number of antiquated ways - that it becomes not only inaccessible, but sometimes outright offensive. My God is just not a King.

This is where imagination comes to play.

Now, a non-imagination-based mode of davening might claim that we need to intellectually believe these words in order to say them authentically.

Enter the imagination-based mode. In this mode, prayer is not about needing to pigeonhole ancient words into a palatable version of literal truth. Instead, our liturgy becomes, in Rabbi Larry Hoffman’s words, a “conceptual roadmap that we have to take us beyond ourselves.”

The mechanism, the tool, of imaginative prayer is metaphor - recognizing liturgical text as evoking, pointing toward, rather than ordering or dictating. In the words of poet Marcia Falk, “the way to avoid verbal idolatry is to remind ourselves that theological naming...has an ‘as if’ embedded in it. When we recognize naming divinity as the act of metaphor making, we remember that [what] we are speaking [is] not literal truth and not fiction. When metaphor is treated as literal truth, [that is when] it becomes a lie.”

This inviting of imagination into prayer can be transformative. Has been, for me. As I opened myself up in recent years to this perspective, it felt as though I liberated my prayer life. Because now, rather than get stuck in literal belief, I can travel to that place “beyond.” I can admit - I don’t believe in a God in the sky examining a list of my deeds. And I can recognize that this image holds emotional power; can appreciate how it moves me to feel urgency, responsibility, humility, honor. Or God as potter - the otherwise inaccessible or even laughable metaphor now invites me to ask, “who has shaped me?” Now invites me to conjure the feeling of being cradled in loving hands. When I let in imagination - give myself permission to experience prayer through this lens of poetry and metaphor - I can let the liturgy wash through me, pour into me, pierce and open me, in a much more powerful way.

So that’s prayer - a slice of our holiday experience that feels dependent on probing imagination. The second anchor is our soulful accounting work - teshuva. Because teshuva, too, necessitates a submission to imagination.

Maimonides famously asks “אֵיזוֹ הִיא תְּשׁוּבָה גְּמוּרָה” - what is complete repentance? His answer: “a person who confronts the same situation, could sin again, yet nevertheless abstains.”

The work of teshuva is here and now - the chest-beating, promising, apologizing. But teshuva is only completed in a future that is yet to be. In its wholeness, teshuva asks us to conceptualize, live in relation to, and move toward an imagined self. Teshuva thus has as its crux a process of recognizing, and feeling kinship with, an “us” that has yet to exist anywhere except for the corners of our imaginations.

Through these anchors, then, we can now understand the days of awe as exercises in both training and flexing - developing and actualizing - the depths of our imaginative potential.

But why? Why spend this time engaged in what may effectively be an elaborate game of pretend? What is the religious value - the sacred purpose - of a life rich with imagination?

To answer, we have to first recognize that while it originates in our minds, imagination generates real change in the physical world. Neurologically, we know that imagining has tangible anatomical effects on the self. Professor Jim Davies describes how in imagined movement, the motor part of the brain is still activated, in much the same way as it would have been in movement itself. Such that surgeons who mentally practice beforehand outperform those who don’t. Athletes too. Davies even cites a study in which imagined training was used to increase real muscle strength.

This works emotionally as well. Artificially generating feelings such as gratitude, hope, or forgiveness can impact our physiology.

The link between our minds and bodies, it seems, is paved with intentional imagination because imagination is neurologically real. If you imagine a jar of jam (you can try it), you do not create a physical jar of jam. But you do create a neuron firing pattern that has now forever altered the contours of your brain. So too when we imagine love. Or change. If speech is God’s creative process, imagination is ours - through our minds, and in our minds, we create something new.

And - imagination can also prompt change in the world beyond our mental borders. The prophets - our spiritual ancestors - knew this. They shook people out of despair and complacency by offering visions of a world that did not yet exist - by using the power of imagination.

Walter Brueggemann - a Christian theologian, and teacher of the prophets - distills their purpose to one task: to “evoke a consciousness alternative to the consciousness of the dominant culture around” them. Prophets’ success is not in what people do, not at first. It is in what they allow us to believe. The prophet urges us (quote) “to ask not whether something is realistic..., but whether it is imaginable...Questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined.”

The stakes here are high. Brueggemann posits: totalitarian autocrats know that “imagination is a danger. It is the prophet’s vocation to keep alive this ministry, keep conjuring and proposing alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. Imagination is [often] the last way left to challenge the dominant reality.”

We imagine a better world not as an exercise in futile fantasy, but as a necessary precursor for building that world. This is not dreaming about how to simply return to an imperfect “before” - in our case, the pre-COVID / racial reckoning / climate emergency consciousness “normal.” This is not an imagination of turning back, but rather of going forward into something different, something alternative.

Which brings me to imagination’s other purpose. Imagination is what allows us to live both rooted in our current moment, and also in an improved future - the bridge between the world as is and the world that could be.

Scientifically, one of imagination’s glitches is that even at its wildest, it remains fundamentally limited. Picture the most fantastical world you can create. Now - in this world, if the sun shines, does your skin warm? If an apple comes loose from a tree, does it still fall to the ground?

While imagination is crucially divorced from a present moment, it is also anchored in recognizable realities. And I tend to think that this is its feature, not its bug.

In Midrash Tanhuma, the rabbis describe “חלומות הצדיקים” - “dreams of the righteous.” They teach: “dreams of the righteous are both in the heavens and on earth. Like Jacob, whose ‘ladder was מֻצָּ֣ב אַ֔רְצָה, standing on the ground, its head מַגִּ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמָ֑יְמָה, reaching the heavens.”

Imagination is not just in the cosmos, untethered to our experience. It is the ladder - connecting where we are now to where we want to be, where we hope to go.

We are in a moment that desperately needs imagination. Confined to our homes, living in a world that is so hard, so dark, so filled with pain and injustice - we need this call to dream. And to do so in a way that is real, grounded in the now, and that reaches into a different future. That draws a straight line between now and then - between now and a vaccine, between now and reduced carbon emissions, between now and racial equity. That can provide a path, and build a way out.

We finally notice, then, that perhaps paradoxically, or likely perfectly intuitively, imagination seems to thrive just when it is needed most. When our senses and spirits are depleted, when the world we see is so far from the world for which we yearn, this is when we need somewhere to go. And imagination lets us go there - while not letting go of what it means to be here.

For me, this has meant that from physical confinement, I have planned the next vacation I’ll take (it will be to Hawaii). From this period of political nastiness and ineptitude, I have dreamt about what it would be like to listen to our leaders and feel inspired, hopeful, called to a sense of care and collective responsibility. And in the moments in which I have felt most alone, I sit at home and imagine that first hug I will give to my friends who I now cannot see, to my parents who are so many thousands of miles away, to those I love the most who I have been so distant from for so long.

And when I do this - when I step into these dreams - I am walking in the footsteps of our spiritual predecessors.

Think of the great imaginers in our collective history - the enslaved Israelite women who birthed children in Egypt. The prophets living under authoritarian regimes. The concentration camp prisoners who held Pesach seders. These are our ancestors: people who - in unthinkable times - imagined something different. Something better. People who dreamed the blessings of our world into existence.

So today, I say to us: let us assume this lineage. Let us take on this heritage. Let us imagine.

Imagine looking at our streets, institutions, leaders and governments, and seeing justice, equity, compassion. Imagine entering this sanctuary and encountering impassioned prayer, joyful song. Imagine sharing space, sharing meals, sharing touch, endlessly and effortlessly with those you love. Imagine it. Imagine it. And - thus, bring it closer to being so.

Shana Tova.

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