Van Gogh, R Nahman and Imagination

In Honor of the Yahrzeit of R Nahman of Breslav

This summer we had the privilege of taking the kids to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was wonderful to stand with them, taking time to let individual paintings sink in, allowing the artist to change the way we see, and marvel at the intimacy with his actual brush strokes.

Van Gogh offers a profound way of seeing the world, identifying the imaginary within what is and allowing both to exist within the painting. This merging of what he saw and imagined, and doing his best to be loyal to both, was a significant part of his craft, as he described in a letter to a younger friend:

My dear old Bernard, ...I sometimes regret that I can’t decide to work more at home and from the imagination. Certainly—imagination is a capacity that must be developed, and only that enables us to create a more exalting and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality (which we perceive changing, passing quickly like lightning) allows us to perceive.

A starry sky, for example, well—it’s a thing that I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I’ll try to paint a green meadow studded with dandelions.

But how to arrive at that unless I decide to work at home and from the imagination? This, then, to criticize myself and to praise you.

At present I am busy with the fruit trees in blossom: pink peach trees, yellow-white pear trees.

Van Gogh to Emile Bernard, June 7, 1888

One of the walls of the exhibition had the painting “A Ravine” alongside a photograph of the location and a quote from another letter to Bernard:

The Ravine

I mercilessly destroyed an important canvas—a Christ with the angel in Gethsemane—as well as another one depicting the poet with a starry sky—because the form hadn’t been studied from the model beforehand, necessary in such cases—despite the fact that the color was right....

I’m not saying that I don’t flatly turn my back on reality to turn a study into a painting—by arranging the color, by enlarging, by simplifying—but I have such a fear of separating myself from what’s possible and what’s right as far as form is concerned....

I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary, I find it readymade—but to be untangled—in the real world.

Van Gogh to Emile Bernard, 5 October 1888

Looking at the painting, the photograph and the words, I thought to myself, this is how a religious person sees the world, with “a fear of separating myself from what’s possible” on one hand, “and what’s right” on the other. This is how God is visible in nature, “readymade—but to be untangled—in the real world”. It is only through developing the imagination that God can be seen.

Tonight (Thursday, 10/9/2025) is the yahrzeit of one of the great masters of imagination in our tradition – R Nahman of Breslav, who died on the second day of Hol-HaMoed Sukkot, 1810. Just a couple weeks before, on Rosh HaShanah, he offered his last public teaching, of which a significant part was dedicated to the practice of imagination (Likutei Moharan 2, 8:7-9). I offer here just one paragraph:

(This paragraph and a couple more in Hebrew with translation can be seen here)

When prophecy proliferates

The power of imagination is refined and established.

Thus: “I am imagined by the prophets”, because imagination is refined and established when it is in the hands of the prophets.

What is immediately striking about this statement is the connection between prophecy and imagination. The prophets in R Nahman’s telling are practitioners of imagination, a tool which they refine and anchor so that through it God becomes accessible. In order to understand this statement we have to let go of our own cultural bias, which is to see “imaginary” as the opposite of “real”. As will become even clearer in the next paragraph, both the intellect and the imagination modes through which humans seek and reach out to God and Truth – all that is real.

The establishment of imagination facilitates the establishment of trust in what is true and holy, as opposed to relying on falsehoods.

At its core, trust depends on imagination.

Trust does not apply to matters that you can comprehend intellectually.

Trust is needed when the intellect reaches its limits. It is when intellect is inadequate that you need trust.

When you can no longer encompass a matter with your intellect, all that is left to you is imagination, and that is where you need trust.

The essence of trust is imagination.

Imagination and intellect cover different territory in the search for what is real. According to R Nahman, the intellect is useful as long as details can be ascertained, measured and replicated. Such things I can know intellectually. Yet many aspects of life, essential to its real nature are not covered by such intellectual knowledge. The real experience of emotion, hope, inspiration, art and creativity for example, cannot be contained in intellectual categories, even if it is possible to analyze certain structural elements of these experiences. The most brilliant analysis of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, for example, does not in itself contain the experience of standing before the painting and looking at it.

The seeker needs the tools of what R’ Nahman calls imagination when she runs up against the limitations of intellectual analysis.

And, the seeker must recognize that imagination does not deal in certainty in the way the intellect does. Without the measurements and logical boundaries of the intellect, the territory of imagination necessarily engages in trust. Trust itself, R Nahman asserts at the end of this paragraph is an act of imagination. In another part of this teaching R Nahman points out the possibility for imagination and trust to be corrupted, leading to the dark sides of humanity rather than opening gateways to the divine. This is why the role of the prophets is so crucial. As master practitioners of imagination, it is their role to practice and share the ways of practicing imagination that lead away from our dark sides and towards divinity. He goes as far as to say (later in this teaching) that Moshe, being the greatest of prophets, was also the greatest teacher of imagination, and was able to bring the entire people to a real experience of hearing the divine voice at Sinai.

That is why the proliferation of prophecy, which involves the refinement and establishment of the faculty of imagination, establishes trust in what is true and holy.

*

R Nahman himself took on story-telling during the last 2 years of his life, and left a legacy of stories preserved and studied by his hasidim. His disciple, R Natan, remembers the transition as follows:

When our master, of blessed memory, began engaging in story-telling what he said explicitly was – “So, I will begin telling you stories”. What he meant was, since my teaching and talking is not helping you turn back to God (and all the tremendous efforts he had invested for his entire life in the attempt to truly bring us back to God, since none of this had helped) I will start telling you stories…

(R Natan of Nemirov, Introduction to Sipurei Ma’asiyot – stories of R Nahman)

May the blessing of his teaching and stories continue to flow through our lives.

At the exit from the exhibit were tables with colored pencils and pages with an outline of one of the paintings. So we all sat down to “draw a Van Gogh” together…