Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Spirituality and Imagination

By Tsvi Blanchard

Do you have an active imagination? If so, how does this effect your spirituality? Psychological research suggests that you are likely to be both more creative and more effective than people who lack such an imagination. A dynamic imagination does not daydream. Instead, it creates realistic possibilities for practical action. Dynamic imagination shapes our lives by continually expanding the range and scope of our individual experience and activity.

In traditional Jewish terms, the human imagination, our yetzer, good or bad, is our human self--creating alternative possibilities for responding to our personal situation. And, like it or not, we create our world in terms of our interests and purposes as well as our ideals and aspirations. In the Hasidic tradition, this means that we have to live constantly with the tension between a constricted, self-interested awareness of our world and a more expansive, self-transcending consciousness. As human beings, we are, as Rashi reminds us in his commentary on the creation story, formed of equal parts of "the upper realms" and "the lower realms." We are an alloy of heaven and earth, where each part is made stronger by the presence of the other.

Where does "spirituality" enter the picture? Of course, as with all things Jewish, there are multiple approaches to this question, each differing from the others. One very popular Jewish view holds that we become more spiritual the more we leave behind our "lower," earthly, material limits and enter an elevated, "heavenly" realm of disembodied experience. A second view suggests that spirituality resides in the human striving to bring our presently imperfect world closer to an imagined ideal world, an always-in-the-future "kingdom of heaven." Yet a third view presents spirituality as the use of an otherwise base material world for "higher purposes." In all three of these views, the "here and now of our actual, lived human existence is experienced negatively as something to rise above, to be left behind or made into something of "real value."

There is an important insight in all of these views. We do need to transcend the limits of our present situation. As corny as it sounds, we really ought to make the world a better place. And, in truth, we should be careful about how we use our world. But all this said, if we do not wish to experience our present embodied lives as fundamentally flawed, we will have to imagine a view of spirituality that has faith in our tangible life experience as we live it here and now.

I suggest that we understand the spiritual life as one that, right here and now, expands our sphere of both thought and action. Spiritual experience widens our consciousness of our relationships--past, present and future--with other people, our natural environment, even with the cosmos as a whole. And it is the active, intense imagination of the sheer interconnectedness of creation that heightens our sense of living in a world with real possibilities beyond our present limitations. As spiritual imagination enters our lives, we actually feel ourselves expanding toward the more moral, loving, even elevated worlds dreamed of in the first three views of spirituality. And we experience this not in some other place or time, but in the here and now. Spirituality lives in the moment when imagination reveals to us a world suffused with creative power and expanded possibilities.

Where is the holiness, the kedusha, of human spirituality to be found? The "realm of the Holy Spirit" is found wherever there is an intense, imaginative blending of the "lower and upper realms." Human spirituality, then, is really a verb, something we do. Spirituality lives in the here and now experience of transcending our limits and the limits of our situation. It lives in the here and now expanding of our vision and sphere of action. The holiness of imaginative spirituality cherishes both our life and our world. It is the spirituality that sees deeper into the world and our experience of it. And, in doing so, makes possible the achievement of the goals of the other three views of spirituality: the experience of what is higher, the perfection of the world, and the dedication of ourselves and our world to our most profoundly religious and moral purposes.

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