I first encountered the power of imagination in conversations with my grandmother, Miri (Mimi) Pfeffer, of blessed memory — a Holocaust survivor who endured the Nazi camps, immigrated to Israel, and became one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s closest students and most accomplished teachers.
My grandmother spoke endlessly about the power of imagination. For her, a profound and essential part of any process — healing, growth, or creation — was the capacity to imagine the route leading to the desired outcome. Not merely a visual imagination, but a living, dynamic, kinesthetic one — imagination as a full-bodied experience. She would often say: “The body remembers what the mind dares to imagine.”
When I asked her, “How did you do it?” she replied simply: “I imagined it. From imagination came tiny movements, from the movements came courage, and from courage came larger movements — until I was whole again.”
At an advanced age, she broke her hip. Against the advice of nearly all her doctors but one, she decided not to undergo surgery. They warned her she might never walk again. But she believed otherwise. Within a few months, she was walking normally. When I asked her, “How did you do it?” she replied simply: “I imagined it. From imagination came tiny movements, from the movements came courage, and from courage came larger movements — until I was whole again.”
From then on, I came to see imagination not merely as a human trait, but as a spiritual force — an ability to perceive something yet to materialize, which in turn empowers us to achieve it. In this essay, I wish to reflect on the place of imagination in Judaism, and especially on our responsibility to harness it for the realm of kedushah, holiness. Particularly in our times, so fraught with confusion, uncertainty, and upheaval, it seems that we must, more than ever, learn to imagine.
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Bereshit: The Perfect Connection Before the Fall
The Talmud (Niddah 30b) records in the name of Rabbi Simlai a wondrous description of the fetus in the womb: “A lamp is lit above its head, and it gazes from one end of the world to the other… and there are no days in which a person is in greater bliss than those days… and they teach it the entire Torah.” However, as soon as the fetus enters the world, all is forgotten: “An angel comes and strikes it upon its mouth, and it forgets all the Torah it had learned, as it says: ‘Sin crouches at the door.’”
The Talmud paints for us a miraculous image — a moment of existential perfection, of complete knowledge and intimacy with God. But the obvious question arises: if the newborn will forget it all, why experience this at all? And why did the Torah and our sages deem it so vital to tell us this secret of prenatal life?
From Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe zt”l I heard that this passage teaches a deep truth: that the experience of perfection is engraved within us as an inner image, a subconscious imprint of wholeness. Even if we no longer recall it consciously, it accompanies us throughout life. It defines what we long to return to: the closeness to Hashem implanted within us before birth, the knowledge of Torah that is our inner inheritance, and the clear-sighted vision of reality “from one end of the world to the other.”
This image inspires and directs us; we do not live in a void, but from the echo of a lost completeness that still pulses within us as memory and yearning.
So too, perhaps, we may understand the exalted depiction of Eden at the opening of the Torah. Scripture begins with a portrait of man’s perfect bond with his Creator — a relationship untainted by suspicion or cynicism, a state of natural trust and unmediated closeness, plainly expressed in terms of childlike innocence: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.”
Clothing — essential to our human world — is not only protection but concealment. It stands as a barrier between a person and his surroundings, sometimes even between a person and himself. Before the sin, such concealment was unnecessary; there was nothing to hide. Trust was complete, hearts were open, and the human being lived in a childlike state of total innocence, unafraid of vulnerability or betrayal.
That state ended with the sin. With the knowledge of good and evil came distance and doubt. The serpent’s cunning uprooted the simple ability to walk unguarded before God — to be exposed, yet unafraid. Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves and hid from the divine presence. Soon after, they were expelled from the Garden: “He drove out the man… and stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turned every way.”
Bereishit […] establishes an ideal of complete connection with the Divine, from which flow harmony among people and between humanity and creation
If so — if the gate is closed — why tell us the story at all? What purpose does the description of a place we cannot reenter serve? Following Rabbi Wolbe’s approach, we may suggest that the Torah gives us an image of a spiritual destination. The physical gate to Eden may be locked, but the spiritual path remains open. The way to the Tree of Life, the path to reestablishing true connection with Hashem and fellow man lies within the Torah itself: “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and those who support it are blessed” (Mishlei 3:18).
Bereishit, therefore, is not a tale of the past but a vision for the future. It establishes an ideal of complete connection with the Divine, from which flow harmony among people and between humanity and creation. We cannot simply “return” to Eden; but we can move toward it — through Torah, through mitzvot, through lives of holiness in the Land of Israel. This is the power of the Torah’s opening chapter: to offer the human being an image of divine perfection toward which reality itself may be guided.
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The Imagination of Sukkot: Reenvisioning Life
The festival of Sukkot, too, grants us a magnificent image of imagination.
In the Torah’s account of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, there is no mention of their dwelling in sukkot — neither physical booths nor clouds of glory. Only in the commandment of Sukkah does the Torah say: “For I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt.” The mitzvah itself invites us to imagine what that protection looked like. It is no wonder, then, that the verse “that your generations may know” gave rise to a famous debate: Rabbi Eliezer teaches “clouds of glory,” while Rabbi Akiva insists on “actual booths.” Each expresses a different aspect of sacred imagination, one physical and one spiritual.
Our dwelling in the Sukkah also carries a deeply imaginative character. Within its simple walls, our ordinary actions — eating, sleeping, relaxing (tiul) — become mitzvah acts. In contrast to other commandments, the mitzvah of Sukkah transforms our entire daily existence into sanctity. For one week each year, our ordinary life becomes holy. The Sukkah, in other words, asks us to reimagine life itself, turning it into a life in which even the mundane is infused with eternity.
But there is more. The Sukkah unites our private lives into a shared, national story. We all leave the boundaries of our individual homes and sit, as the Sages say, in “one sukkah” — the collective sukkah of Israel. Even the seventy nations of the world are symbolically included, reflected in the festival’s sacrifices.
It is no coincidence that Sukkot is closely bound to ultimate redemption. The haftarot we read speak of the end of days, of the nations recognizing God’s sovereignty: “And it shall be that whosoever will not come up… to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts — upon them there shall be no rain” (Zechariah 14:17).
At the height of the festival, we recite extraordinary hosha’anot, prayers in which we plead not only for ourselves but, astonishingly, for Hashem Himself:
“As You saved a people and their God, now seek salvation for their God… As You redeemed those who were sunk in the depths of the decrees, so let Your preciousness pass with them… As You declared ‘I shall bring you out,’ so let it be read, ‘I shall go out with you.’”
It is as though the Holy One, too, awaits His redemption. We sing vayosha — “He saved” — and He responds vayivasha — “He was saved.” Both of us, as it were, need salvation
It is as though the Holy One, too, awaits His redemption. We sing vayosha — “He saved” — and He responds vayivasha — “He was saved.” Both of us, as it were, need salvation: “Ani vaHu hoshi’a na” — “I and He, save us, please.”
Sukkot thus opens the year with a vision of a perfected world, in which heaven and earth, man and God, Israel and the nations, are reunited. Like the Eden of Bereshit, it offers not nostalgia but aspiration: a call to act, to translate imagination into reality.
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To Imagine Anew
“Logic will take you from A to B,” said Albert Einstein, “but imagination will take you everywhere.”
Shemini Atzeret, which concludes Sukkot, is the day we gather all the year’s images and bring them home. It unites the imagination of Eden with the imagination of the Sukkah — and invites us to begin the new year with inspiration, with a vision of what might yet be.
This message is timeless, but this year it feels more urgent than ever. We are living through a historic, almost biblical, moment. The events since Simchat Torah 5784 — the war, captivity, grief, heroism, prayer, and homecoming — compel us to reimagine ourselves as a people: not with false hopes or political fantasies, but with a faith-driven imagination — an imagination of redemption, an imagination of repair. The words of the Yom Kippur liturgy continue to echo: “Grant an end to Your people, restore the Sanctuary among us, raise the mountain of the mountains on high, reveal the end of our exile.”
Imagination is not a passive state. Jewish imagination is an engine of action. It must move us — for our people, our state, and the great Torah values still awaiting realization.
Imagination is not a passive state. Jewish imagination is an engine of action. It must move us — for our people, our state, and the great Torah values still awaiting realization. We must bring together the images of Eden and the Sukkah with the reality of our own day, working toward a society united around faith, justice, compassion, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
We stand at the threshold of a new and fateful year for the people of Israel. May we have the courage to take up the responsibility that rests upon us, to redraw and realize the great vision of the Jewish people upon its land. That was the secret of the early Zionists, and likewise of the great builders of the Torah world: they knew how to imagine — and they knew how to act.
So must we. It is up to us to imagine anew.
Yasher Koach o your decision to join the IDF!