The Place of All Possibility
Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom
By Rabbi Adina Allen
Forthcoming from Ayin Press in Summer, 2024
What happens when the Torah becomes a contemporary guidebook for creativity—and a force of transformation?
We are thrilled to announce the publication of JSP Co-Founder and Creative Director Rabbi Adina Allen’s first book, The Place of All Possibility.
Pairing spiritual wisdom with art therapy, liberation theology, and creativity research, The Place of All Possibility is for anyone—from any tradition or none—who is ready to seed a world of imagination, abundance, and joy.
We are all created creative. Find your possibilities. Order the book today.
Read excerpts from The Place of All Possibility
“Through continuously asking, “What else could this be?”— of ourselves, of others, of our creations, and of the complex and challenging situations we encounter in our personal and communal life—we cultivate an appreciation for multiplicity.”
“Each of us is called to our creativity — to bring our brush back to the canvas anew, reencountering and reworking the stories, ideas, and images that lie at the very foundation of who we are and who we could be.”
“To say that God created the world “with beginner’s mind” is to lift up an image of a playful, curious God who creates as a process of growth, discovery, and delight — thereby inviting us to do the same.
Praise for The Place of All Possibility
Through a clever mix of artistic exercises and rabbinic wisdom, Allen encourages readers to ‘peel back layers of what we think we know’ to construct new understandings of their faith and themselves. It’s a unique and invigorating lens on Judaism.
Summer’s the perfect time to jumpstart your creativity and I love the frame that this book provides and its belief that we can all pursue art as a way to make sense of the world.
Kveller, The Jewish Books We’re Reading This Summer
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
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
Give the gift of The Place of All Possibility to your team, organization, or community. Inquire about bulk orders of the book by contacting: tom@ayinpress.org
For all media inquiries, please contact Emily Willette from Smith Publicity at emily.willette@smithpublicity.com