Creative Power!

B"H

Aviel and I went out to see The Incredibles this afternoon. Amazingly -- if you consider that Aviel thrives on visual stimulus and loves cinema deeply, or that I used to consume art film and classic westerns like candy -- this is the first time we have gone out to see a movie since our chupah. We both left on a palpable high from the experience. (Enough so that we had to wind down by scoping out exotic kosher foodstuffs on Commercial Drive for a couple hours.)

The Incredibles is a very fine film (less bold than Brad Bird's first film, but as wonderfully and imaginatively executed), but I don't think my high was from the quality of this film, per se. It reminded me, with lovely force, just how powerful and enchanting a well-made animated film can be. The breadth of artistry focused into a single work inspires me. The medium is the opera of our day, in the sense that it can contain nearly any form of creative output you care to throw at it; and, indeed, it requires great, and greatly diverse, creative resources.

For much of my youth my highest aspiration was to produce animated films. The thing is, they are by nature so labor-intensive, it is easy (if not inevitable) to become stretched too thin, and ultimately exhausted, by the process. I scaled back. Over many years, I trained my focus down from film to just orchestral music, to just small ensemble music, to just the simple folk music and niggunim I write today. What I was training, in fact, by this (necessary) process, is my Voice -- my own unique way of tickling some truth out of the shadows. So I am grateful, so deeply grateful, to have zeroed in this far upon my Voice, by following the heat of its breath; but now I recognize that I'm not done. I was drawn to animated film for a reason: it has that power, to train together the creative energies of a legion, to a degree that my folk songs do not.

Dear though it is to my heart, I suspect that animation is not the real answer to my longing. The kinds of forces that draw together the vast creative energies behind a film are not, generally, the same kinds of forces I am most called to serve. For one thing, these are market forces -- expression and consumption -- oriented to product. My interest is more in process. Not the magic of a Sunday at the cinema, but the whole workaday week lived to magical consequence. Mishkaneering. Mishkaneering is my animation, and the analogy is rich.

So, if a cinematic project like The Incredibles pulls together vast creative resources -- to the extent that those scores (hundreds?) scrolling by in the credits really lived the process, as a community, from day to day -- for the unified work of illuminating and celebrating a certain vision of American cultural values (one with heavy Jewish influence, though secular American-Jewish), and expressing the contemporary middle-class experience; then what would a project look like, that pulls together vast creative resources, which are certainly available in the Jewish world, for some unified work that illuminates and celebrates Torah? That animates Torah, so to speak? It is a significant start that we now have a regular "coffeehouse melava malka" at the shul, and gallery space is coming soon to the beyt midrash, B"H, but this creative empowerment of individuals among us is only one step. Imagine if we could focus that creative power together into common work?

We have done it before. We have produced Rambams and Einsteins, AriZals and Freuds, Marc Chagalls, Bob Dylans, and Shlomo Carlebachs, and their creative power didn't come from a vacuum. But, as Thomas Friedman is fond of repeating, it seems that the present age is marked by a disproportionate possession of imagination by destructive, rather than constructive, interests in the world. With some patience, b'ezrat haShem, may we see the turning of that tide in our lifetimes.