"What Are You Waiting For?" The Overriding Moral and Political Imperative of Imagination

Part Two of a Two-Part Series on the Eros of Imagination in Response to the Meta-Crisis

Sep 10, 2024

HOMO IMAGINUS

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was right when he wrote of imagination, “More than any other power it is what distinguishes the human psyche.”[1] Or listen to Norman O. Brown, the twentieth-century prophet of Eros: “Man makes himself, his own body, in the symbolic freedom of the imagination. The eternal body of man is the imagination.” We turn to the Hebrew mystical master Nachman of Bratslav: “It is for this reason that man was called Adam: He is formed of adamah, the dust of the physical, yet he can ascend above the material world through the use of his imagination and reach the level of prophecy. The Hebrew word for ‘I will imagine’ is adameh.”

For Nachman, the core human movement that gives birth to our spirit is the evolution (within the same root structure) from adamah to adameh. Adamah is ground, earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, “I will imagine.” Man emerges from nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik called “a fantasy-aroused existence.”

Imagination is neither a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves as thinking animals, Homo sapiens. French philosopher René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet biblical myth offers an alternative understanding of the concept of humanness. The closest Hebrew word to “human,” or the Latin homo, is adam. The word adam derives from the Hebrew root meaning “imagination” (de’mayon). The stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily Homo sapiens but what we will call Homo imaginus.

Man is described as being created in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. Instead, God is the possibility of possibility. We saw how the biblical opposition to graven images was grounded in the refusal to limit God to the confines of an image. Consequently, the statement that human beings were created in the divine image should be understood in two ways. First, humankind is not so much “made in God’s image” as we are “made in God’s imagination”—we are a product of the divine fantasy. Second, human beings actually participate in the divine imagination—we are Homo imaginus.

How different this understanding is from the bleak depression of modern existential thinking! Our longing for the good is dismissed by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as a “useless passion.” Human imagining, writes Albert Camus, yet another existentialist philosopher, condemns us to misery, for it is absurd. To him, we long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by evil, ugliness, and injustice.

But for the biblical mystic, our erotic imaginings of a world of justice and peace are the immanence of God in our lives. Our creative discontent, which drives us to imagine an alternative reality, is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful flights of fancy. The Eros of imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe.

Imagination is powerful. Very powerful. “Think good and it will be good,” wrote Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last master of Chabad mysticism. This is true not merely because of the psychological power of positive thinking, but also because every imagining gives birth to something real that eventually manifests itself in the universe.

Imagination is transformative not only on the human plane; it has a powerful effect on the divine scale as well. Kabbalists teach that each dimension of divinity, known as a sefira in Kabbalah, has a color that incarnates it. By ecstatically imagining the colors of the sefirot and combining them according to the appropriate mystical instructions, one can actually have an impact on the inner workings of the divine force. The Zohar is even more audacious, portraying man creating God in his image—that is to say, in man’s imagination. Unlike for the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who called human imaginings of God mere projection, for the Zohar such imagination simply reinforces the substantive reality of God. While there is a limited truth in saying that God is a figment of human imagination, we need to remember that imagination is a figment of God.

For the Kabbalist, imagination is not childish. It is the spiritual real-ity called forth by the sacred child within. The God we do not create doesn’t exist. Yes, there is a divine force that exists beyond us. Yet there is also a powerfully manifest current of divinity that is nourished by our being. The act of nourishing, sustaining, and even creating divinity is called “theurgy” by scholars of mysticism. The term expresses the human ability to dramatically impact and even grow God. One of the great tools of theurgy is imagination. In fact, theurgic imagination is the medium and message of a Kabbalistic rereading of “In the beginning . . .” This first string of letters in the Bible, bereshit bara Elohim, can be reread as b’roshit bara Elohim—“in my mind God is created.”

A PILGRIMAGE BEYOND ROUTINE

If imagination can change God, then it is certainly a sacred path and vital tool in our everyday lives. Remember that the path of imagination is the path of the prophet. “By my prophets I am imagined.”[2] The prophet symbolizes the divine energy of transformation that reminds us that the status quo is not holy. What is, is not necessarily what needs to be.

One wisdom text from the Hebrew Passover Seder reads: “Had God not taken us out from there, we, our children, and grandchildren would still be slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” Clearly this is not a reasonable claim to make for the descendant of a Hebrew slave. After all, the Pharaohs are long gone, leaving behind only their pyramids to be remembered by. Rather, it is a statement about the tyranny of inertia, the idolatry of the status quo: “This is the way things have always been, son . . . don’t rock the boat.” It is divine imagination that breaks the status quo, freeing us from our Egypts.

The prophetic imagination, with which we are all potentially gifted, insists that things can be different and better. Three times a year, taught the biblical myth masters, at least one member of every Hebrew family should make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The purpose of the pilgrimage was to access the temple energy of Eros, in which imagination played an essential part. In the ecstasy of the temple service, particularly during the autumn Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), nearly all of the participants flirted with their prophet selves. The Hebrew word for these triannual temple pilgrimages is aliyah le’regel. This means something close to “going up, ascending, by foot.” Walking—going by foot—is our most automatic activity. Hence the Hebrew word for “routine,” a virtual synonym for the status quo, is hergel—deriving from the Hebrew root regel, which also means “foot.” Just so, our English word regular is a direct and obvious descendant of regel. And so a better translation of the Hebrew term for temple pilgrimage—aliyah le’regel—might be “transcending routine, going beyond the regular, the status quo.” How? By accessing the prophet archetype within, and with that prophetic strength reimagining life beyond its ruts and routines.

In the areas surrounding the temple, there were imagination cham-bers designated for prayer, meditation, and visualization. There the temple mystics would chart their journeys into the depths of imagination and soul, where God is found. Yet we are beyond the days when the spirit of imagination was reserved for spiritual elites. In our divine core, we are all prophets, architects of our own temples. Remember that Bezalel, artisan of the mini-temple in the desert, was a master of imagination. The very word bezal-el is a play on an earlier biblical phrase, b’tzelem Elohim, meaning “in the image of God.”

In our interpretation, human beings participate in divine imagination and are thus invited to be the artisans of their lives. The raw materials, colors, and dimensions of your life’s canvas are a given. How you mix the colors, weave the material, even choose the picture to draw on the canvas, is your artistic privilege and obligation. To be the artist of our own life—to be our own creator—is both the highest level of the sacred and the most profound expression of our glorious, our wondrous, humanity.

In a paradoxical set of mystical texts, Bezalel, the master craftsman of the book of Exodus, receives no clear blueprint from God or Moses on how to build the tabernacle. And yet he builds it in accordance with “God’s will.” For the Kabbalists, this is a hidden allusion to the power of holy imagination to intuit cosmic truth. When the mystics suggest that Bezalel is “taught by God,” they speak in code. The artist is “wise of heart,” “filled with the spirit of wisdom, intuition, and intimate understanding.” All of these draw their inspiration from the breath of divine imagination.

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TEMPLES OF IMAGINATION

In the mystical tradition, God shows Bezalel a vision of a tabernacle of flames. This apparition fires Bezalel’s imagination and guides him in erecting the desert temple. The careful reader of the Exodus story cannot help but notice the other image of gold that emerges from the fire, namely the golden calf.

The golden calf emerges from the fire of uncertainty. The tradition tells us that Moses is to come down the mountain toward evening on an appointed day. He has scheduled a rendezvous with the people. Moses is the parent figure. He is security and comfort for the newly freed slaves. But Moses is late. The biblical commentators tell us there has been a miscommunication. Moses thought they had set the time for one evening; the people thought it was for the previous evening. They enter a twenty-four-hour limbo. What happens in this crisis of uncertainty? Can the slaves reimagine themselves as free people without Moses?

Their anxiety as they wait for Moses to come down the mountain is a test of their freedom. Will they be able to hold the center in the emptiness of their uncertainty? The answer is no. The people are not yet free. They are overwhelmed by the prospect of being free, yet responsible, actors in their own drama.

So they build an idol, the golden calf. An idol, you recall, is a “graven image.” An engraved fixed image is a false certainty, a failure of imagination. In the language of the mystic Tzadok—the priest who expresses a theme that runs throughout Hebrew mysticism—they fixate on the face of the ox. The ox is only one of four images that, according to the prophet Ezekiel, are engraved on the cosmic vehicle, God’s chariot. The others are the faces of an eagle, a lion, and a man. The chariot is the ultimate Hebrew mandala image. It is the locus of mystical meditation on the Divine.

Tradition has it that during the theophany of mystical encounter at Mount Sinai, the people were gifted with this precise vision of the Divine. They actually saw the four faces on the chariot. The only problem is that later they chose to focus on only one of the images—the face of the ox. The golden calf is a manifestation of the ox face. It is precisely such exclusive focus on only one image that short-circuits the imagination. “Getting stuck” is often caused not by imagination’s absence but by the overbearing presence of one image. The Zohar teaches that the sin of the golden calf was that the people became so transfixed by one image that all other possibilities were blocked. This narrowness of vision is the unifying theme in the story. Initially the Hebrews’ fixation was on Moses; they could not imagine life without him. When Moses disappeared, they were unable to wait for his return and transposed their Moses fixation onto the calf.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

There is much in our lives that evokes images of waiting. We are not fully realized—we await some future that we believe holds the secrets of our transformation and healing. But that future is fully available to us in the present. The secret is in how we wait.

One image of nonerotic waiting was given to us by playwright Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot. The play captures the all-pervading sense of ennui, despair, and hopelessness that comes when one loses all sense of present and presence, waiting instead for a fantasy messiah. This is the shadow of imagination: the inability to heal and repair the world because we are paralyzed by imaginary redeemers upon whom we wait, hoping they will finally make everything all right.

It is easy to get stuck in imagination. I am reminded of the story of a meditation teacher who gave an assignment to his students to sit in isolation and imagine themselves as something radically different from what they had ever imagined themselves to be. When the time came for the students to emerge from their meditation, one student didn’t appear. Hours passed. The ashram was searched. Finally, finding the young initiate in a broom closet, they invited him to come out and join the group. He said he could not emerge, for he had imagined himself as a bull. His horns were simply too wide to fit through the door, and so he sat. Every facet of Eros has its own shadow. We must be careful not to get lost in imagination. On the contrary, imagination needs to be the place where we “get found.”

An alternative image of waiting is supplied by the biblical mystics. This is not the passive and resigned waiting for Godot, but waiting for the Messiah, not as some future event that will make it all better, but as a reality, available in the full presence of the present. Messiah waiting is a process of active imagination that brings in its wake the social and spiritual activism of tikkun, the healing and transformation of the planet. In “waiting for the Messiah,” we give birth to the first level of the existence of a better world. This is erotic waiting, as opposed to nonerotic waiting.

The act of imagination is transformative. For as the contemporary biblical mystic Abraham Isaac Kook wrote in the early twentieth century,

“Whatever you imagine exists.” Your imagination discloses the way things could be and, on an inner level, the way they already are.

IN-FANCY

Little Jane comes to us in tears. “I wished Tommy would get hurt, and he did. But I didn’t mean it.” We comfort little Jane, wanting her to know that she is not responsible for the accident that happened to Tommy. And we are partially right, but only partially. The essential intuition of the child needs to be validated and not explained away. Our kids need to know that they are powerful. They can reimagine the world—for good or for evil, to hurt or to heal. Imagination is an essential part of responsibility.

We intuitively look for our children to create a better tomorrow for all of us. Hebrew tradition interprets the word banim to mean both “children” and “builders.” Children are always building imaginary realms and constructing fortresses and castles with such exquisite aptitude. Children are always dashing around as superheroes, saving banks from robbers, and creating elaborate family scenarios with a few dolls. We need to nurture infancy, in-fancy, to encourage its power rather than undermine it with scoffing and ridicule.

We have long since forgotten our true nature as agents of transformation. We have forgotten that we are superheroes. At the backs of our closets and eaten away by moths, our magical capes are long neglected. Birds don’t fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly. We are what we imagine ourselves to be. The wings always come in good time. We need to reclaim our capes of holy imagination and heal our fear of flying.

THE CAPACITY TO BE

One favorite—if occasionally frightening—television show of kids in the 1960s was The Twilight Zone. Once there was an episode about a boxer who loses a fight as his young son watches the contest at home on television. The son believes what the father does not, namely, that Dad really can win. So with his passion, his conviction, and the great love of a son for his father, he summons up all his inner concentration and tries to reimagine the fight. Lo and behold, we see the fight being replayed on the TV screen, and this time Dad wins.

When Dad comes home a few hours later, the son tells him what happened. Dad, of course, thinks this is sweet but childish nonsense. “No!” his son says desperately. “You’ve got to believe. You’ve got to believe.” The father ultimately cannot bring himself to believe—in himself, in his son, or in the power of imagination. For the third time we see the fight replayed on the screen before the father and son. The father loses as his son cries.

When raising a child, the parent often has to teach the distinction between the real and the illusory. And yet the child also must raise the parent, reminding him that imagination is real and possibility is infinite. Such is the deep wisdom of the following wonderful story told by the mystical master Nachman of Bratslav:

The king’s young son seemed to have gone mad. He sat, stark naked, underneath the king’s table, claiming he was a turkey. There he sat making soft gobbles, taking his meals, and sleeping. He sat stark naked because, as he explained, nobody ever saw a turkey in human clothes. All the king’s analysts and all the king’s therapists couldn’t put his son back together again.
Finally, a wise old man, who was very young in spirit, came and offered to heal the prince. No one had heard of this old man, but the king, being rather desperate, consented to his offer. The old man promptly went and, much to everyone’s consternation, sat under the table, stark naked, with the boy.
“What are you doing here?” asked the very confused and surprised prince.
“Why, I am a turkey,” responded the old man.
“Well . . . I guess that’s okay.”
And the two became friends, as only turkeys can. Some days went by and the old man put on a shirt.
“What are you doing?” cried out the boy. “I thought you were a turkey.”
“Why, I am,” said the man, “but is there any reason a turkey cannot wear a shirt?”
The boy thought, and truthfully, although it did seem a bit improper, he could think of no substantive reason why a turkey could not wear a shirt. And if a turkey could wear a shirt, well, it was a bit chilly, so he put on a shirt as well. And so the process continued to pants, shoes, and eventually to sitting at a table, until the prince was fully healed.

Often a child seeks to compensate for the pathologies of society. The kingdom suffers from a lack of imagination. A lack of imagination is a lack of soul. So the child rebels and seeks healing through an increase of imagination. Yet it does not always hold that an increase of imagination is an increase of soul. Sometimes we overdose and lose ourselves in the very imaginings that were to be our healing. Often such overdosing is the key to the psychological reality maps of children. The child can be made whole only if we enter with her into the world of imagination. Our healing can flow only from that inner place. The underlying therapeutic principle can be summed up in two words: empathetic imagination, which is essential not only to psychological healing but also to all authentic relationships.

Next time you are in an argument with someone you love, step out of the circle of conflict and imagine yourself as that person. Try to experience the argument through his or her psyche. The Kabbalists say God is radically empathetic to the suffering of every individual. To be a lover is to be like God—to enter into the space of your beloved so you can receive the full depth of her story, including her loves and triumphs, but especially her hurts, fears, and vulnerabilities. For the mystic, this is the essence of our relationship to the Divine, both within and beyond. To feel the pain of the Shechinah in exile is to exercise imagination; it is to enter divine space and feel what God feels.

Whenever they see their beloved children arguing, parents are greatly pained. Imagine through your parenting experience how God must feel when his children kill each other. In doing so, we participate in the pain of the Shechinah in exile.

Just so in joy. When our children love each other, we are delighted beyond words. Imagine how God must feel when we are good to one another. In kindness, we touch ecstasy. We participate in the rapture of the Shechinah redeemed.

Footnotes

[1] Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 2011).

[2] Hosea 12:11.

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