Havdalah

by Mesorah Birnbaum-Cohen, David Birnbaum (Editor), Martin S. Cohen (Editor)

In its famous opening chapter, the Hebrew Bible describes creation as consisting of twin acts of making and God creates light on the first day and then separates it from the darkness, just as on the next day God creates the firmament and then sets it in place to separate the waters above from the waters below. And so it follows, at least in theory, that when human beings seek to create through the medium of their own artistry, creativity, or industry—and are obviously unable to mimic the uniquely divine act of creation ex nihilo—they seek to do so through the one part of the process they can separation. Indeed, the famous quip that the correct way to make a statue of a horse is to take a huge block of marble and then to chip away the parts that don’t look like a horse is just an amusing way of suggesting the same namely, that the human creative process involves the perception of something embedded within something else and then the subsequent liberation of that thing from its former setting so that it may exist on its own and in its own right.

391 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2017