During my childhood, my parents made Jewish art. Papercuts were their main medium. After many years of exposure I learned to read the images in their compositions: running water (sometimes) for Torah; olive shoots (sometimes) for the enduring people of Israel; grapes for wealth or Judah or royalty. Midrashic symbols clutter my mind. And not just Midrashic symbols: the Torah is none too shy about creating its own language of imagery. Both Moses and Jacob blessed the tribes with blessings made of metaphor.

Nothing is more beautiful.

My following in this literary tradition therefore seems completely straightforward. What would you bother about if you wanted to be a poet? That which is closest to you. As Richard Hugo writes in his wonderful book The Triggering Town,

Don't be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don't love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

Tanakh (the Bible, from Genesis through Chronicles) and Midrash make up my internal lexicon. So many of the nouns in the Torah reverberate with associations. Every word contains and conjures up a world of stories, compels me to remember the instances and appearances of that image or symbol. Tents, for example, can signify readiness, for Abraham sat in the mouth of his tent when he saw three angels approach; or love, for Rebecca comforted Jacob for the loss of his mother in her tent. Even propriety and modesty may be suggested by the image of a tent, for according to Midrash, in the wilderness, the Children of Israel's tents faced different directions to ensure everyone's privacy. Not to mention the Tent of Meeting filled by God's presence; each of us can decide what significance that has.

In Karl Kroeber's Short Fiction class, I remember his expanding on Solzhenitsyn's idea that art allows us to learn from experience that is not our own. The nightly news tells us what happened in the world today, but art attempts to allow us to experience what happened in the world today despite the fact that it did not happen to us. It's not just that I tell you how much I loved my grandmother; it's that you feel how I loved her. Inside the experience of art, you, too, love the grandmother. So for me, commentary alone is not the point. Instead, my goal is to create a world for each word, each story, each character (major or seemingly minor), and to make it available to my reader.

So what stops me? I have a partial list of ideas and ideologies that I think may prevent us from producing the art that we might otherwise find inside ourselves, some of the things I face, fear, and fight in order to continue to make what I want to make.

I. The Community

I think there are many stumbling blocks tripping up modern-Orthodox would-be artists. We are a rich community, and, simply, we do not support the arts. We do not value them; do not encourage our children to pursue art as a way of life or livelihood. Everyone is expected to make money, to be practical and successful in the "real" economic, world. If anyone considers suspending the pursuit of cash in favor of other values, those other values had better be "Torah-values": S'micha (ordination) and/or Chinukh (Jewish education). Art is not a Torah value.

We are stilted, as a community. We do not produce artistic records of our current experiences or of our imaginations. I have a friend who suggests that this may be caused by the sixteenth century codification of Jewish law in the Shulkhan Arukh. He says that since then our experience of the possibility of Halakhic change has altered beyond recognition. He claims that we have lost our flexibility, lost the ability to exert any power or authority in the system that purports to be located on the ground. And that therefore, we are afraid of innovating in any area of our lives. Including, or maybe especially, art, which is a risky and creative business.

II. Nitkatnu HaDorot.

Nitkatnu HaDorot is the idea that as we get further and further from revelation at Sinai, each generation is less great than the one preceding it. The idea suggests that we have little or no right to innovate, much as my friend suggested with his argument about the Shulkhan Aruch. It means that no matter how smart we are, no matter how special our ideas or our ability to execute them might be, we are unworthy and our work is meaningless in the face of that which has come before.

Deep down, I must believe that what I see, and what I have to say, is crucially important. Which either means I must have a tremendous ego, or I must believe that the creative impulse is a reflection of whatever spark, whatever tzelem Elohim, image of God, I have inside. Mid-composition, an artist (or at least the few religious artists I know) may perceive a partnership with God, a privilege to bring something new to the world. Saying that the outcome is relatively insignificant denies and rejects the experience of the artist. It derails the process that leads to art.

III. Bitul Z'man

Each moment of one's day is supposed to be dedicated to the service of God. Bitul Z'man is the idea that any time not focused on serving God, through studying Torah or performing other religious duties, is wasted. Well, art is not necessarily going to be directly connected to Torah. Not even Jewish art. And it may not involve the acquisition of new learning. At least not Torah learning (depending, I suppose, on how narrow or broad one's concept of Torah is.). Furthermore, if you are going to be an artist, it's going to take a lot of Bitul Z'man; you have to work. It takes time and effort to generate anything worthwhile.

To be fair, most movements of Judaism generally encourage us to study secular subjects. But Torah always remains paramount. Depending on who you ask, the dispensation to study other subjects may exist only for the sake of acquiring those skills necessary to provide one with livelihood. Alternatively, it may exist in order to provide us other areas in which to hone our skills so that we can come back to Torah with a deeper understanding of the world around us. We don't really have permission to make art for the sake of art. I am afraid that art for its own sake falls into the category of Bitul Z'man, a sinful waste of time.

IV. Artscroll, or, Making it Easy.

In recent years, a series of books, ranging from prayerbooks to Psalms, has been published by Artscroll in an attempt to make texts easily accessible. The series has become very popular, as numerous synagogues have adopted Artscroll texts as their standard editions. The Artscroll series seem representative of many other books in recent years which have attempted to simplify the complexities into easy-to-read books. These books try to concentrate Judaism, and consequently dilute it so that all its ambiguities, complexities, contradictions, flaws and formulas fall into an sensible system, immediately grasped.

In some ways, these books are tremendously useful and helpful. The little commentaries on the bottom of the page and the fact that everything appears in English bring parts of Judaism to a population that might otherwise find the texts difficult to understand. For this I am grateful.

My problem is that in trying to simplify, in trying to deliver one, convenient, correct, easily comprehensible Judaism, sometimes we lose things. People, wise, brilliant, thoughtful people have spent lifetimes examining Judaism's complexities, and while some have maintained that it all comes together to form a holy and meaningful Gestalt, they did not say it was simple. So when anyone tries to make it accessible by making it simple, I have a problem.

Besides making Judaism flat and moralistic, or fluffy and idealistic (depending on your movement), making Judaism simple puts me out of a job. Art integrates contradictory information into a whole. It doesn't have to explain away contradictions. Complexity, and all the riches and confusion that it entails, can be included in art without compromising our ability to appreciate it. Of course, art is unnecessary if its subject is so clearly defined. A neat package sealed safely up. No further call for creativity.

Maybe we are not a visual people. I don't know. And because I am not a visual artist, I can only speak about visual art from the outside. I know that Jewish art can be a great form of praising God, images and all, for it serves to beautify life, to beautify Judaism. We have an idiom for that idea, too: hidur mitzvah, making the commandments beautiful. It is a value to have beautiful ritual objects: a perfect, sweet smelling, blemish free Etrog (citron), polished candlesticks to light for Shabbat, decorated bags for talitot (prayer shawls), not to mention the talit itself. Ideally, everything we use to engage with Judaism, to engage with Torah, to engage with God ought to be beautiful. Maybe we take for granted that the ritual objects are special (think of Kiddush cups, seder plates, menorahs, the very letters of the Torah), without considering where the value comes from, and what it might extend to mean.

Any bias against art is cultural. It has to do with the way we read our texts, the ideologies that we embrace and take on as givens. We can find values that support art. Those who worked on the tabernacle, men and women alike, from B'tzalel the master-craftsman and visionary to the women who spun the wool for the curtains, are described as Chacham Lev, having wise hearts. That's what God says about artists.