Visualizing the mitzvot

As you've likely discerned by now, I not only put a lot of thought into the words that I send you each week, but also into the images that go with the words. Whenever possible, I try to bring you visual treats that match the moment, that meet what I'm trying to do with language appropriately. Sometimes that's just a lil' stock illustration, but sometimes I'm able to find something that's a bit more exciting than that.

When I was working on Monday's post, I confess that I was hoping to do better than your usual "Moses holding up the two tablets" kind of image– so I was delighted when I came across all those great visual interpretations of the Ten Commandments by contemporary Jewish artists. And then, towards the very end of the process, I stumbled upon the top image, of the astronaut illustrating the first commandment by Archie Rand, and I knew that I had hit jackpot.

See, the Rand painting is part of a massive project; he took five years and painted every single one of the 613 mitzvot/ commandments in the Torah, as compiled /articulated by Maimonides in his 12th c. masterwork, the Mishneh Torah. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco displayed them all in 2017.

Rand's hardly a literalist. He combines a sensibility of both comics and pulp novel covers with humor, reverence, and an electric palette to his interpretations of each of these mitzvot– like "Marc Chagall on a bender," as the New York Times put it.

So I thought it might be fun to use these images as texts today. I've done my best with the image descriptions, knowing that it's an imperfect art and that this is one entry in a long line of entries, a long context of different media used here. And, as always:

As you look, consider: