Take dancing lessons

Sometimes we need to go back to the beginning.

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

God’s story, according to the Western biblical tradition, begins with creation. There is no prologue—no scene of God cavorting in a heavenly realm with other gods, no sense of what the Creator might have been doing before deciding to make the world, or even why He decided the world needed to be created at all.

Was God lonely? Why doesn’t the text say, “In the beginning God was lonely, and so He created some company”? Or bored? Why not, “In the beginning God was bored, and since crossword puzzles required words—which had yet to be created—He decided to take on a different project to occupy His time: making a world”?

It can’t be that God needed to create the world. That would imply that creation and God exist on the same level of necessity, which theology insists cannot be. The only explanation that makes sense is that God made a decision—one whose reason we simply do not know.

In the Hebrew tradition, human beings are described as 'partners' in creation. Our purpose is to help God “repair” the world—tikkun olam. But we must be junior partners, since by definition we cannot be equal to God. That already presents a problem. And it gets worse.

Because we don’t know why God created the world, we don’t know “God’s Plan” for it either. Yet we are repeatedly told there is a plan—otherwise, why bother creating anything at all?

It’s like being asked to help build a shelter without ever seeing the blueprints. We don’t know what the shelter is meant to look like, what purpose it serves, or why the architect decided to build it in the first place. And the architect isn’t taking questions.

Conveniently, not knowing God’s Plan has given people endless excuses for the tragedies and injustices of the world. Suffering becomes part of God working in “mysterious ways.” We’re told we aren’t supposed to understand the plan, because if we did, we would be equivalent to the Creator—which we cannot be. The arguments quickly collapse into a tangle of circularity.

It would have been far simpler if scripture had said: "In the beginning God got tired of the heavenly décor and decided to add another wing, populated with animals and humans, whom He could summon to relieve His boredom." At least then we might reasonably conclude that the purpose of creation was to entertain God—a view some have argued, only half-jokingly.

But perhaps creation begins with creating because it isn’t His story at all. It’s ours.

When we interpret the creation story as God’s story, with humans as secondary bit players, life itself becomes secondary to serving God. And that framing—serving a divine plan we cannot see or question—has been used to justify some of the most heinous and inhumane acts in human history. Human life becomes expendable in service of something abstract and unknowable.

If the story of creation is not about a plan, then it may be about exactly what it describes. Creation is its own purpose. We are not meant to serve a mysterious divine blueprint; we are meant to serve creation itself—to find our place in it, to honor and respect it, and to be fully present in our own lives.

And now, the pivot to the non-biblical, technologically advanced present.

People today worry about the growing power of AI—the omniscient entity they fear will one day enslave us.

But there is a moment—if you’re lucky—when you realize that what your smartphone is doing is more than manipulating your choices or nudging your decisions. It’s trying to disempower you. It’s trying to strip you of your agency.

Once you see that, you understand that it isn’t enough to “escape” technology by turning it off, as if it were Rikers Island and freedom were just a matter of walking away. That’s not how it works.

You have to be active. You have to learn to play the guitar. Or the piano. Learn to crochet. Build furniture. Practice Tai Chi.

You have to re-empower yourself by creating. Learning and practicing skills—one, two, three—is how agency is reclaimed. That’s how you begin to break free. Because the technology has you in your head. That’s where it lives, and it follows you wherever you go. To resist it, you have to re-enter the world—much like God did when He created it.

You have to use your hands. Or your feet. Or both.

Alan Watts famously compared living to dancing. Like dance, he said, the purpose of life is not to reach a particular destination or end point, but to engage fully in the process itself. Life is musical, playful, and immediate—not a grim, goal-oriented march toward some final achievement. 

It turns out that modern technologies are designed to exploit our goal orientation to turn us into addicts seeking the next fix.  

But creation is not something that happened once. It's happening all the time, if only we can attend to it.

The only way to be present in biblical Creation is to be creative in the mundane everyday sense. So take dancing lessons.