Creating Meaning

How Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman views the process:

[T]he problem with psychics, hucksters, and religious fundamentalists is that they try to prevent the reader from creating their own interpretations. They encourage a top-down approach to meaning, and lead people to say, "This is what God/the universe/the Bible means." But a bottom-up approach of creating meaning may be able to prevent that system from going haywire, since we can later edit or revise our interpretations.

We will always be looking for patterns and meaning—but I think there’s a big difference between thinking we "discover" meaning and realizing that we "create" meaning, since one implies an eternal, unchanging truth, and the other implies an ability to rewrite as need be.