Whose Soul Can Magnify the Lord?

So already, it's hot out there. In light of this, you may be wanting to set aside more active, physically demanding pursuits for the cerebral, sedentary one of reading.

Light Streaming Through Vessels, Magnified Perhaps

Vessel Talk

If that's your decision, and this blog is your choice of reading matter, be forewarned that it meanders even more than my usual wandering posts, ranging from ancient biblical sources to the Bach Magnificat to my kitchen renovation. So you may want to pour a cold beverage into your favorite drinking vessel before settling into your preferred reading spot and putting your feet up on the nearest coffee table or porch rail. Before you do even that, though, please note the array of multi-colored glass vessels through which light gleams in the adjacent photo*--and be forewarned: I am deliberately using the word "vessel" at the start of this paragraph.

 

Ah, vessels! Among the various kinds, there are sea-going ones; blood-carrying ones; shattered ones once filled with Divine light, according to Jewish mystical tradition; and human ones, courtesy of the figurative language employed in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.  

 

Summer 2024

But wait: let's turn aside briefly from these ancient vessels for a moment for a quick look at the here-and-now. It's been a politically unsettling summer for many of us. And a personally unsettling one for my husband Scott and me since our kitchen is being renovated. Most of our drinking vessels are currently packed in cardboard boxes stashed in our bedroom and closets; other boxes have briefly filled other spaces. Not surprisingly, the project has pretty much swallowed our physical space and disrupted our living patterns.

 

Even before we began this project, I understood that disruption is a prerequisite for major change of any kind. What I hadn't fully understood, though, was that disruption actually creates unforeseen seize-able opportunities when it re-configures time and space.

 

Knowing the first two months of summer would be marked by disruptions of time and place, I decided to use the weirdly placed parcels of time I would have to rediscover, rescue, and jump-start my stalled creativity. The excuses I had all spring for not tackling the questions of "what should I write" and "should I be writing at all" were gone: the Celtics championship season was over, my singing lesson "school year" had concluded, my poetry group had just begun its "summer off," and my periodic deep-cleaning impulses were a complete mismatch with the reality of the renovation moment.

Back to Julia Cameron

As I anticipated having to spend time in my office-kitchen while the power saw wailed and the electric screwdriver revved and punched in the other room, I thought back to the satisfying experience of completing Julia Cameron's twelve-week The Artist's Way course during the summer of 2015. It had provided just enough gentle structure and worthwhile provocation to help me get out of my own creative way.

 

With that in mind, I purchased Cameron's Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity. "Further Steps Along the Artist's Way" the banner at the top of its cover proclaimed, reassuring me that I wasn't the only one who needed a Cameron refresher. I loved that the book's subtitle described creativity as an art, as opposed to describing the book as a practical guide to creativity.

My plan was to start the Walking in This World course right after participating in a vocal recital along with the other students of my voice teacher, Karin Foley. In retrospect, I realize how useful it was to do something artistic, collective, and demanding right before embarking on the next Cameron challenge. For all of us, "serious" solo singing is a stretch that permits us to experience ourselves in new musical ways, creating in each of us a different sense of performance possibility. And we're excellent cheerleaders for one another!

Preparing to Walk in This World

During the week before the recital, I took the time to reread and think about the four poems I'd managed to get published in the past year. When I realized that the two of which I was proudest drew from Jewish sources, I immediately committed to one action step to stimulate my creativity: reading cover-to-cover Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life in Judaism by Sarah Hurwitz, a former chief speechwriter for Michelle Obama.

 

When I'd delved into the book before, I'd marveled at the similarity between Hurwitz's Hebrew School experiences and my own, and at Hurwitz's ability to summarize and distill complex narratives and arguments while making sure that her readers never forget that another Jewish writer might highlight different Jewish ideas as particularly central and transformative.

So the last week of June, serenaded by the sounds of the lower kitchen cabinets' being power-screwed into place, I began reading Hurwitz's book from the very beginning. In the first chapter--in which Hurwitz summarizes Judaism's most sacred text, the Torah (or the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses), in just six pages--I came across an important Jewish idea that, like Hurwitz, I hadn't known originated in the Torah, specifically in Genesis 1:27, in which God creates humans in His own divine image.

 

Made in God's Image

To share it with you, I will quote from Hurwitz, who herself quotes from Rabbi Yitz Greenberg:

The belief that every single one of us is created in the image of God has been cited as the defining Jewish idea, the beating heart of the entire Jewish enterprise. And you don't have to believe in any kind of deity or higher power to appreciate its implications. Drawing on an ancient Jewish teaching, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg argues that this idea is shorthand for three fundamental truths, which he deems the 'three in-alienable dignities':

1. We are each of infinite worth--no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.
2. We are fundamentally equal--no human being  is any more important than any other human being.
3. We are each totally unique--there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anyone else. (15-16) **

The first two of the dignities I totally appreciated as rooted in the Creation story. But that third one surprised me. Had it arisen from the language of "His image" and "male and female He created them," I wondered. God's image--the one God's image, His image--was inherently differentiated, made up of two different kinds at least, and by extension many others. 

 

Sparks of Divinity and Individual Difference

And all those different kinds of people so made, according to mystical Judaism, contain sparks of Divinity. Practically speaking, it made sense: if you're going to renovate a kitchen, let alone repair a world, you need people who can do different things: contractors, cabinet-makers, plumbers, appliance-haulers, electricians, inspectors, to name a few. You also need people who want to renovate a kitchen or repair the world. Who want to do a good job of it.

 

David Brook Illustration Accompanying Chabad Reply

As a Jew who believes that everyone contains a spark of the Divine, I had struggled for years to understand the relationship of my individuality to that spark of God within me. How much, I wondered, could and should I cultivate my individuality, my difference from others, which, for reasons that elude me, I believed existed in opposition to this "equal" spark? Eventually I resolved my conflict, in part because I recognized that Stepford Jews was neither the reality I saw nor the goal of the "Jewish enterprise," as Hurwitz called it. 

 

But I might have resolved it sooner had I come across Tzvi Freeman's reply to a question on the Chabad website: "Why do you assume that the divine spark expresses itself identically in all people? Perhaps the opposite is true: It is that divine spark that makes each of us unique and gives us purpose."***

 

"Different" is therefore natural--and intended for the good of a world in need of repair, or tikkun olam. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, "Each person contains sparks that they must elevate. The sparks wait for him to come and elevate them."**** Based on these two teachings, divine sparks give rise to different people, who are bidden, no doubt in their different ways, to lift up those sparks, for world's sake.

Chosen Ones: Moses and Mary

Of course, to read the Torah or anything about it is to encounter Moses, and his sister Miriam and brother Aaron, each of whom was made in God's image, made different from the other two, made important, and made equal to the other two. When Moses--who, like Joe Biden, stuttered--recommended that his brother Aaron lead the Israelites instead of himself, God wasn't having it. That got me thinking about Moses' uniqueness and the whole question of who among all of us equal and important ones is most suited to do a particular job or play a particular role. 

 

And that got me thinking about Mary, Jesus's mother--not surprisingly, given that I had taught "The Bible as Literature" for years and had sung, as choral singer, all kinds of music related to the Annunciation and the Crucifixion. Mary's an amazing figure and character: as a young woman, she takes it relatively in stride when the angel Gabriel informs her that she's the "highly favored one" who will bear God's child, accepting his extraordinary news only after questioning him. 

 

The Magnificat

When not much later Elizabeth recognizes Mary's situation, Mary expresses her joy and understanding, and also reveals her considerable skill as a poet, in her praise poem often called The Magnificat. In it, she employs the multiple kinds of poetic parallelism found typically in the Psalms and other writings in the Jewish Bible. She also borrows themes and motifs from the books of Isaiah and Amos to suggest the urgent need for social transformations that will end oppression and inequality. In other words, Mary, a Jewish girl, expresses herself very Jewishly.

 

She also speaks more personally, acknowledging that she's at once the lowly handmaiden--no more important than you and me--and the favored one chosen to bear and then raise God's child, and then rejoicing in that honor. In this context, courtesy of her good character, faithfulness and spiritual depth, Mary is a vessel "for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work" (2 Timothy 2:21). "A virgin unspotted," as she is called in William Billings' "Judea," she, unlike many other candidates for "vesseldom," hasn't needed to undergo a spiritual cleansing in order to merit the role and honor conferred on her.

 

So what does it mean that her soul "magnifies" the Lord--and please know that not every translator of the Greek in which The Magnificat was recorded chose "magnifies" as the translation of whatever word Mary would have spoken in Aramaic. Still, since connotations matter, "magnifies" is worth paying attention to. 

 

Magnifying God: How and Who?

Can God--who is often conceived as vast and limitless--become larger through the actions of a human soul? Maybe. If so, the lesson to be learned is that people are really powerful.

 

Or is Mary's choice of verb more figurative: is it intended to reflect how deeply and intensely she appreciates and feels compelled to convey God's boundless reach and eternal commitment to his Creation? When I think of the intent of "magnify" in this way, it suddenly makes sense to me why J.S. Bach's setting of The Magnificat, replete with its trumpet fanfares, its many movements of varying moods and levels of intimacy, and its momentous, multi-voiced Gloria, can succeed at representing a humble young woman's personal and nuanced outpouring of gratitude, thought, and feeling.

So does this mean that anyone's soul can magnify the Lord? Well, potentially, yes. But there would have to be caveats. No doubt magnification would require a forceful, confident, enlightened spiritual effort. I could be very wrong about that, though.

 

A magnified section of a Scott Ketcham painting

There's also a related question: would every soul want to magnify the Lord? I can imagine every soul's wanting to magnify something--to assert, announce, or push something meaningful, valuable, and expressive of itself out into the world. But the connection between this intent and God might be far less explicit and central in the world views of some individuals. And for some, it might not exist at all.

 

Magnification and Walking in This World

So with those two questions hanging out in the air, let me digress even further to explain what got me thinking about the word "magnify" last week. In the second session of the Walking in This World course, entitled "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," Cameron talks about the challenge of--and the frequent necessity of--imagining ourselves as "larger" than we're accustomed to. 

 

What holds us back from seeing a magnified and magnifying version of ourselves? Explains Cameron, "Frightened of being big-headed and egotistical, we seldom ask 'Am I being too limited, too small for who I really am?' Expansion can be frightening."***** (41-2). And when we do feel ready to spread our wings and be public about our expanding wingspan, some friends may continue to see us as smaller for any number of reasons, which doesn't help us. "The tricky part about changing sizes creatively is that we want to keep our old friends but not our old identity," says Cameron (43). 

 

"Hidden Anger #1" by Bob Hunt *(6)

As we begin to change, we can become angry at ourselves and at others. But as Cameron explains in third week of the course, "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," "Anger is a call to action. It is challenging and important to let our light shine. It is important to name ourselves [acknowledge our creative selves] rather than wait for someone else to do it, or pretend that we can bear it when we can't." (67).

Light, Hidden Light, and Names

Light, hidden light, and names: all very Jewish stuff. If you'll bear with me further, I'll say more about each, and then try to make all of them relate to this question of whose soul can magnify.

1. First, Cameron concurs with the Jewish mystical belief that all of us, equally important and unique, contain sparks of Divine light, and she would probably concur that we're bidden to lift them out of their hiding places and manifest them in the world. Cameron also recognizes that for various ones of us, our interior light has become so well hidden for completely understandable reasons that it requires special techniques to be liberated. Our interior light can need help to expose itself to the light of the exterior world.
   
2. Second, in Jewish mystical teaching, "a name is an intermediary between heaven and earth . . . which defines and shapes the light."*(7) So when, as Cameron says, we name ourselves by calling ourselves artists, we channel our interior Divine light so it can manifest itself in the world in a/the way most expressive of our authentic selves and souls. For those for whom making art is akin to being expressive of God--as it is for Cameron--this idea and Cameron's embrace of it may particularly resonate.
   
3. Third, as I learned today in my pursuit of better understanding magnification, telescopes need light in order to make visible distant objects, which often appear dim as well as small. Telescopes both "Gather light (make things appear brighter than they do with the naked eye)" and "Magnify the image (make things appear larger than they do with the naked eye)."*(8) Light, perhaps, might help us perceive light, even light hidden in the remote recesses of our selves.
   

So what does all of this signify? In my estimation, magnification is essentially a ratcheting up of praise to its highest level--praise on steroids. So the question of whose soul can magnify the Lord--or the artistic impulse, or anything else--has everything to do with the effort, insight and understanding, and intention behind it. Names and praise can exist simply as words in our mouths. Or, fueled by the light within us, they can be drivers and bullhorns respectively, forces that, after registering their presence in the world, influence it, or even transform it.

Liberating the LIght Within

Of course, there's plenty that can bury, obscure, or downright snuff out light. Biblical books of prophecy talk about the refiner's fire that burns away the impurities, the clogging dross that taints our souls and thus dims our inner light. The annual Jewish rite of teshuvah, undertaken before and during the Jewish High Holy days, is essentially a process of removing all that worldly build-up that stands between God and ourselves collectively and individually. Though Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak did not use the word "vessel," he may as well have when he compared the work of teshuvah--deliberate, reflective, and focused-- "to cleaning, repairing and rebuilding a soiled or broken container" (Jacobson, 17).

Similarly, the literature written to guide, inspire, and reassure blocked creatives, emerging artists, or artists in recovery emphasizes the necessity of removing or blocking impediments to our creativity, and cultivating methods for doing so. Like The Artist's Way, Walking in this World prescribes the daily routine of writing "morning pages"--three pages of anything designed primarily as "the daily broom that clears my consciousness and readies it for the day's inflow of fresh thought" (8). Only just now as I was searching for this quotation did I realize that the book's cover drawing depicts a man sweeping next to a vigorously flowing stream.

 

In addition, morning pages can give rise to writing ideas. They served up the idea for this blog post, and when they did, heeding a question and answer in and the Week #1 session--"Do I want to make this? If that answer is yes, then begin" (19)--I got writing. No second-guessing, no putting off. And if you're still reading, please understand that as a way of clearing away all of my usual "'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'"*(10) self-sabotaging, dross-producing techniques, I determined to write everything I wanted to say, even if this blog got far too long, far too geeky and rarefied, and so wide-ranging in its content that its center would not hold. Thank you, T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats!

And all this because of a kitchen renovation project that created limitations and possibilities, plus a desire to get back on track creatively? You never know what's going to give you the opportunity to get busy cleansing your vessel. If you've read to this point, thank you for your indulgence: I've enjoyed feeling entitled to write lengthily about topics and questions that intrigue me. This blog and I myself have not magnified the Lord today. But I am feeling larger and braver, and that was my goal. A good feeling and a good goal.

* Photograph on Pinterest, chosen by me because I see the light as streaming through vessels, perhaps magnified: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f6/5a/34/f65a34bbcd7f0116388506c5358e0c87.jpg

** Hurwitz, S. (2019). Here all along: Finding meaning, spirituality, and a deeper connection to life--in Judaism (after finally choosing to look there). Spiegel & Grau. 

*** Freeman, T. (n.d.). Individuality and the Divine Spark. Chabad. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/676238/jewish/Individuality-and-the-Divine-Spark.htm

*** Photograph found on prettyblog.com: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/e8/ef/87e8ef5460f999887cf60892be47ff9d.jpg

**** Sparks (Nitzotzot). (2024). SPARKS (Nitzotzot). Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.nitsotsot.com/t-en-us/

***** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

*(6) Painting: Hunt, B. (2022) Hidden Anger #1. Artspur. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.artsper.com/ae/contemporary-artworks/painting/1875171/hidden-anger-1*

*(7) Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 days: A spiritual guide to the high holidays. New York: Kiyum Press.  

*(8) Magnification. (2024). Stellarvue. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.stellarvue.com/magnification/ 

 *(9) from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

*(10) Photograph of image fround on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/516154807269545929/