Erica Frankel, Office of Innovation (OOI)
Sometimes an artist must break the boundaries of her preferred mode of production. She must sin, as it were, against the very medium she works in. Can this be done in religious life or communal life? In what ways do we sometimes “sin” for the sake of the greater medium we are working in? In this session, we will look to both contemporary artists and also rabbinic voices who sought to advance their medium (art or Torah, respectively) by violating it. We’ll look at the rules they broke, what enabled them to be rule breakers, and ask ourselves what ‘rules’ may be worth breaking in Jewish life today.