Dr. Mel Alexenberg

 

Author of:

The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).

Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass) in Hebrew.

 

 

Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises by itself and one cannot impede it on its course…. The creative individual brings vital, new light from the higher source where originality emanates to the place where it has not previously been manifest, from the place that “no bird of prey knows, nor has the falcon’s eye seen.” (Job 28:7), “that no man has passed, nor has any person dwelt” (Jeremiah 2:6).                                   Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook

 

If a man wishes to attain the rank of holiness, he must become a creator of worlds.  If a man never creates, never brings into being anything new, anything original, then he cannot be holy unto his God.  That passive type who is derelict in fulfilling his task of creation cannot become holy.  Creation is the lowering of transcendence into the midst of our turbid, coarse, material world…. “For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp” (Deuteronomy 23:15).                                              Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik