Though he didn’t consider himself religious, he told his rabbi that everything he wrote was liturgy. I found out that he drew especially from the Kabbalah—the mystical version of Judaism which teaches that all of creation was once a vessel filled with holy light. But it shattered, and now the shards of divinity are scattered everywhere, amidst the pain and ugliness. Our task is to gather up these fragments wherever we find them. This philosophy made instant and perfect sense to me.
