At first glance, the words I wrote may seem to entail the idea of deism, that is, “God as watchmaker.” This is a particularly rationalist view of God; it might be about as rationalist as theology gets. The idea is that God has fashioned the world as a clock, with the clockwork running on its own, without divine intervention, once created. It leaves room for the idea of divine creation, without impinging on any of the laws of physics, which, once created, were left to run on their own. In the West, the deist idea rose to popularity during the Enlightenment. Deism contrasts with the idea of God’s complete and immediate control over the world in that it restricts God’s involvement to the creator role, while it also contrasts with atheism in that it does posit a creative God.

A deist, therefore, would say that God is not a sculptor, and would read my drash as an endorsement of that view. A deist would be likely to agree that God created the original block of possibilities of the universe, and would say that thereafter, it is we human beings — along with the rest of the created world — whose trajectories through existence serve to chip off possibilities and sculpt creation into actualities. I think a lot of support for deism would be found within the Reform and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism, and it remains a popular idea across the Jewish world outside of Orthodoxy.

Philosophically, however, and in Jewish text, deism is not necessarily entailed by distinguishing God’s original creation from any future divine involvement in the world. There is still room for a sculptor God, and there is some support in Jewish text for that idea. One important note is that biblical Hebrew has two different words for creation: בריאה (bri’a) and יצירה (yetzira). In the Kabbalistic system of the four worlds, these become two different planes of the spiritual emanation of God. Both might be translated into English as “creation.” But bri’a is used only for the original creation of the world, and yetzira is used otherwise. In modern Hebrew, yetzira means creation in the sense of an artist making art, while bri’a is reserved for its biblical use, referring only to God’s original creation. The Hebrew language, therefore, consistently makes a distinction corresponding to that in my drash. In terms of the drash I offered, we might explain bri’a as the original creation of the universe’s complete block of possibility, while yetzira might refer, as it would in modern Hebrew, to the artist’s work chipping off unused possibilities to create a beautiful sculpture of reality.

Another way to frame the question is to ask whether prayer is efficacious: in other words, does supplicative prayer result in change to the physical world? A believer in God’s power of sculpture — of yetzira — would say yes, among the purposes of prayer is to change our reality. A deist would say no, once God has created the world it’s up to us to change it, so therefore prayer ought to be restricted to praise and thanksgiving.

Wherever you stand on the question of supplicative prayer, I think an appreciation of the beauty and the excellence of the material we have to work with is in order. With earthly materials, a mistake might doom the whole work, forcing the artist to start over. For example, when a scribe write a Torah scroll, even the smallest mistake necessitates ceremonially burying the affected parchment and starting over from the last successfully completed section. The process is quite a reminder of the irreversibility of our chipping off those possibilities. But in life, with God’s excellent material, it is possible to fashion out of an ugly mistake an even more complex, beautiful, and nuanced sculpture. We can’t undo our past deeds, but we can always make something beautiful and valuable out of the work we’ve done so far. If we don’t know how, then it’s time to pause, think about what’s most important — which in organizational life is called strategic thinking — and gain a sense of vision.