Creation Is an Act of Faith (Rosh HaShanah 5787)

Creation Is an Act of Faith
Rosh HaShanah 5787
Rabbi Rachael Houser

I want to tell you about my favorite things I’ve ever made.

To do that, let me take a step back. My parents taught me to believe in the forces for good in the universe, in guardians of nature and innocence. Put simply—my parents taught me to believe in fairies. When I was five, they took me to an exhibit in a botanical garden featuring the work of artist Cicely Mary Barker. Spellbound by Barker’s illustrations of flower fairies, I listened to my parents explain the worth of every living thing, how even a dandelion deserves the protection of a fairy. This idea exists in our Jewish tradition, too: the sage Rabbi Simon taught that every blade of grass has a heavenly guardian urging it, “Grow, grow!”

Inspired, I wanted to make something for these fairies, something like the tiny houses and villages in the exhibit. So, at age five, I officially became a fairy house architect. I took out library books on fairy folklore and designed fairy houses in the hollows of trees by a nearby creek. My tools? Bark, leaves, twigs, shells, feathers, and rocks. By third grade, my projects were more ambitious: bungalows for mermaids and hotels for visiting leprechauns. My entire Girl Scout troop became collaborators. My parents got a lot of confused phone calls that year.

Looking back at these memories, I can see two Jewish concepts at work: omanut and emunah. Omanut is the Hebrew word for art. Emunah is the Hebrew word for faith. What’s special about these two words is that they come from the same root. That root means, ‘to believe,’ ‘to be true,’ ‘to be authentic.’ It’s where we get the word “amen” from. When we say, “Amen,” we’re saying, “I believe this to be true.”

In Hebrew, faith and creation come from the same place. From a place of truth.

My emunah, my faith in my parents’ stories, inspired my omanut, the fairy houses I built. We create because we’re inspired by what we believe.

But art is difficult. If we want to write or sculpt or paint, we have to build time for it in our already-stacked schedules. Then we have to hone a skill to get better at it. Then we come up with an idea, try to execute it. The process could take dozens or hundreds of drafts, years and years of effort that still might not feel like success. I mean, this is the ninth draft of this sermon, and I’m not sure it’s ready!

We might not consider ourselves ‘artsy types,’ but there are so many things that require thoughtful design—art hiding in plain sight. How we set a table for a dinner party. How we plan a wedding. What goes in an email. These endeavors all take time and human creativity to figure out.

But for the first time in human history, we now have a shortcut: generative artificial intelligence. With a few keyboard strokes, fully-fledged art–indeed, every possible project—is at our fingertips. Why learn to draw when AI can do it for us? Who has time to experiment in the kitchen when AI has a recipe ready for us in seconds?

Before you write this off as a predictable anti-AI sermon, hear me out, because Judaism isn’t anti-progress. It’s pro-creativity, the kind that comes from you.

We learn from Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of Our Fathers, “Uvmakom she’ein anashim, hishtadel lihyot ish”—in a place where there are no humans, strive to be human. Certainly, doing our own human work in a fast-moving digital marketplace takes increasing effort. The pressure to use AI to streamline our lives is becoming intense. AI can get our work done faster, perhaps even with more polish. With enough prompts, there lies the possibility of a perfect product.

But art isn’t something to simplify or perfect. Creation is the realm in which we are most like God. And doing our own creative work honors the gift of being made in God’s image.

This is especially clear today, on Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is called ‘hayom harat olam,’ the birthday of the world. Our tradition tells us that God began the process of creating the universe today, on the first of the month of Tishrei. We read about the very first Rosh Hashanah in the opening chapters of the Torah itself. Light and darkness, sky and land, seas and plants, the sun, moon, and stars, all living creatures—God’s artistic masterpieces dazzle, one after another. And for the grand finale, there’s us. God creates humankind b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God? The first chapter of Genesis teaches us that God is an artist, a creator. Made in God’s image, we share that same creative spark. We express the divine within us when we do what God does—make things.

The Torah tells us that not only are we made in God’s image, but we have been given access to the same tools that God used in creating the world. In the book of Exodus, we learn about Betzalel. He’s a craftsman appointed by God to design and build the portable sanctuary that the Israelites will carry through the wilderness. To be able to accomplish this highly creative task, God gives Betzalel three gifts: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.

God used the very same tools to fashion the universe, our tradition teaches: “God founded the earth by wisdom and established the heavens by understanding; by God’s knowledge the depths burst apart.” These gifts, wisdom, understanding, and knowledge aren’t just attributes. They’re the glitter glue, tissue paper, and pipe cleaners of the universe! They’re the materials and the methods God used to form the world. And by giving them to Betzalel, and giving them to us, God entrusted us with the very tools that could create entire universes. Humans have limitless creative potential. Why would we squander it? Why should we abandon the gifts that connect us to the divine?

We know that art is time-consuming. Frustrating. Labor-intensive. Yet we’re not alone in that creative struggle. God had to put the work in, too. We know this because Genesis gives us the picture of a thoughtful God, one who engages in an artistic process. It takes time for God to make the world, to experiment with different kinds of light. God separates the creative process into steps and develops ideas. You can’t have a sun until you have a sky to hang it in. You can’t have a sea monster without a sea.

Perhaps God models for us what it means to brainstorm and execute ideas. How it takes thought, reflection, even rest. Art isn’t about creating something quickly and efficiently. The Talmud teaches: “If [someone] says to you: I have not labored but nevertheless I have found success, do not believe him. If, however, he says to you: I have labored and I have found success, believe him.” Success without labor will never be true success. Prompting AI to generate something for us so we don’t have to put in the work ourselves might produce an image, a story, or a song, but it takes away our uniquely human gift, the opportunity to make something from nothing. To be like God.

Now, why can’t we use AI to help us in the creative process? Can’t we use it as a tool? AI can be our brainstorming partner, our research assistant, our collaborator. You wouldn’t say a pencil is responsible for writing a novel just because the author used one. Can’t the same be said, in some cases, for AI? Of course. And I know many of you in this congregation are doing remarkable things using—or even creating—that technology interestingly and effectively, even expanding the new AI frontier. I’m sure even those who are maximizing its value would caution against our over-dependence and what can happen when we stop being the creators, the artists, the drivers of the idea.

Maybe we think that because AI is trained on so much data, it can generate more imagination than we can. But studies find the opposite to be true. Two separate studies from Georgetown University found that while pieces written by artificial intelligence tend to use more varied language, the content of the essays tends to be the same. Another study discovered that human writing samples were up to eight times more conceptually diverse than AI writing samples.

This is because AI is trained to scan existing data and present a consensus. Something crowd-sourced. The simplest, most direct solution to a prompt. This has its uses, but AI can only pull from what exists. It can’t do what God can do, and by extension, what we can do—make something new. AI can’t believe in anything, so it can’t be inspired to assert an inner truth through art. It can’t have an epiphany. We can.

These inner truths can range in size. They can be masterpieces as grand as a symphony, a feature film, even a child. Or they can be smaller in scale, transient expressions of our humanity. A home-cooked meal. A handwritten note. A doodle on a work memo.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of our greatest modern theologians, wrote, “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization but in attaining some degree of independence from it.” I know that the world only spins forward. Artificial intelligence, like it or not, is integrating into our lives. The solution will not be to renounce it entirely. We must attain a degree of independence from it. This is how we start. By claiming ownership of our creativity. By resisting the urge to give over all our labor to technologies of convenience, so we can discover what only we can make. By supporting the work of designers and artists so we can cheerlead original ideas, not just recycled material.

It is an act of faith to create. Maybe even a leap. You have to be willing to put yourself out there, at the risk of being less than perfect, and claim that you believe something that wasn’t there before should now exist, and you will be the one to bring it into the world.

We are all holy enough to do this. I believe that.

Your work is worthy because you are the only one who can make it. I believe that.

Today is the birthday of the world. It is the anniversary of the greatest creative process of all time. The creation after which all creative processes are modeled. It is the day God gifted us the ability to make worlds of our own. We don’t honor that gift unless we use it, even to make something as temporary and childlike as a fairy house alongside a creek. We honor it by having the belief, the emunah, that we each have something authentic and distinct to express, enacting that belief through omanut—artwork.

What we make teaches us the depth of our gratitude for being alive, the surprise of what truly lies inside us, how like God we actually are. That’s a gift no technology can match. That’s a gift worth believing in.

Amen.