The Place of All Possibility

The Place of All Possibility underscores the transformative power of creativity as a means of self-discovery, healing, and connection to a deeper spiritual dimension. This book encourages readers to embrace creativity as a means of self-discovery, personal growth, and contributing to the collective construction of a more meaningful and connected world.

Susan Magsamen, author of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

For most of human history, art-making was viewed as a way of honoring and dialoguing with the divine. But in a secular age, we often forget that our creative vision is not an individual possession. It is a verb that ties us into divine communion with our ecologies. Rabbi Adina Allen offers us an answer to this desaturated world-view.

Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand and The Madonna Secret 

A teacher once told me “God is in the details” and that’s what I see and feel this book aims to teach us. Accessing creativity to find answers within us and finding our flow is a powerful method disclosed in this midrashic and visionary book. 

Siona Benjamin, artist

Adina Allen’s embrace of the Torah offers ways of reading and responding that align with the sacred book’s embodiment of the eternal creative process, forever made anew through imaginative responses. What better way to demonstrate the imaginative basis of creation than engaging the hallowed text, not with authoritative fixity, but as a living and moving presence inviting ‘wild’ artistic and unique interpretations, embedding its voice in our lives.

Shaun McNiff, author of Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, Art as Medicine, Art Heals, Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression, and other books

In this book, The Place of All Possibility, you are likely to encounter words. However, if you lean in closer and bend your ears toward the pages, you might come to touch something else lurking between and behind every font: a stirring sermon in turbulent times; a song, offered with such delicate dexterity, reminding us that the world is never finished, never still, and that creation is still happening now. Every morsel of Rabbi Allen's disarmingly affecting invitation will spirit you away through ruptures and fissures to more wondrous delights than we can name. More than words can capture.

Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D., author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter to Humanity's Search for Home  

How blessed we are to find a sacred path that fuses creativity, wisdom, and connection across the ages. And how blessed among the blessed that we now have a master teacher, Rabbi Adina Allen, to translate that wisdom into nuggets to nurture our souls, to open our artistic possibilities, and with her guidance, to fuse the personal and the communal with the spiritual and the artistic.

Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson, Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean’s Chair / Professor of Philosophy

The Place of All Possibility expands the field of the arts from a discipline for some to a spiritual practice for anyone. Adina Allen is making explicit what has always been true in Jewish culture: that imagination is part of the process of understanding Torah, and that creativity itself is regarded as sacred. Allen’s founding of Jewish Studio Project and its methodology of bringing people together with sacred story, and then offering a frame for artistic response, is an important innovation in contemporary Jewish life. This book now passionately shares that innovation with us all, inviting us to find the sacred flow.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams