B’reshit bara elohim, the Torah starts. “In the beginning, G-d created…” Three Hebrew words that carry immense meaning for Rabbi Adina Allen.

“The first thing we learn about G-d is that G-d is the creative force of the universe,” she said in her Thursday, Dec. 4 conversation with Alicia Jo Rabins at the Eastside Jewish Commons. “A few verses later, we’re told that we are all created B’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image. So I take that to mean each and every one of us are created creative and created to create, and when we’re in touch with our creativity, we are in touch with whatever we think of as G-d.

Rabbi Allen, the co-founder of the Jewish Studio Project, is the author of “The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom.” As the daughter of a renowned art therapist, art has always been a part of Rabbi Allen’s life – when she experienced difficulties as a young person, her mother had a habit of asking “have you made art about it yet,” she explained. Following her rabbinic education at Hebrew College in Boston, where she was a Wexner Graduate Felow, she began integrating her Torah learning and her artistic instincts into something that Jews, and Judaism, could benefit from.

“I started playing with what would it be like... to engage in this art making practice as a way of elongating our relationship with the text, so the text has a chance to work on us, rather than us so actively working on it,” Rabbi Allen said. “I think [we] have become very bifurcated and separated, where we do our intellectual thing here and we do our ‘woo’ thing over here, maybe, but the two shall never meet. What would it be like to actually reweave those parts of self, and what new insights might surface once the text was able to mix with the cells of who we are that wasn’t already available to the intellectual surface?”

That led to the Jewish Studio Process, and from that the Jewish Studio Project that Allen leads in Berkeley, Calif. Her book goes over the journey of the project and delves into ideas and practices that readers can use to engage art and spirituality – whether Jewish or not.

“I really believe that each one of us are a channel or a vessel for what needs to come into the world now, and we each, given our life experiences and lineages and affinities and all of those things, have a unique wisdom that can come through each one of us and that we are all needed in that project.”

Learn more about the Jewish Studio Project and order a copy of “The Place of All Possibility” at jewishstudioproject.org. The book can also be found at major booksellers, including Powell’s Books.