A question I received: I often think of my thoughts and feelings as an audience with different desires. One large group of desires are the “foes” of Kabbalah, who say, “We can’t imagine life without a wide array of feelings, including pain, suffering, and negative emotions! What will happen to art, music, theater, and cinema?”

Our existence is founded on comparison, critique and competition. What could be better than this? Peace, eternity and bliss are so dull! We only want a small piece of this “happiness,” but we don’t want it for everyone or forever. How will people be able to live without tears and drama?

My Answer: You envision spirituality as motionless and paradise as dull. However, the real drama happens only when our nature clashes with the Creator. Anything else, preceding this, is just “child’s play,” because for now we cannot even comprehend where we are.

We are like newborns, crying from small offenses and giggling from small pleasures. We will outgrow this phase and will come to understand how limited our presents forms of art are, expressing only our minuscule earthy egoism and its “dramas.” These “dramas” are fake, and you only hold on to them because you still have not outgrown them, or because you were taught “to suffer” through them.

Art is in crisis just as much as everything else. You will have to find a new means to express humanity’s modern pain; the old classics cannot help with this. Art portrays the inner world of each generation and therefore, it will change.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Art In the New World

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