I’d like to share with you a story about the ability of art to amaze. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Adventure Card. After all, it was me who created it. Three paths zig-zagging up Mount Fuji–I recall the day I painted it because I was tucked away in a farming hamlet behind Mount Fuji. I wasn’t particularly thinking about my Jewish roots. In fact, Judaism had become a back burner part of my life. The year was 1996. And I had no idea that 31 years later I would uproot to Israel. It just wasn’t — as the expression goes–in the cards.
But here I am in Jerusalem, struggling to speak and read yet another difficult language. I see the Hebrew letters everywhere I go now. They’re etched in my mind. So much so that I see them where they never existed before–in this Genesis Card.
Life is mysterious. Art is mysterious. We have this opportunity to connect the dots and make sense of the randomness of life’s events by bringing our own story to the way we literally “see” the world. Until my story contained the letter Shin I couldn’t see it.
When I retold this story, thinking that it was complete in itself, I was challenged again. Perhaps there are more Hebrew letters in the 44 Genesis Cards that I don’t even know about.
If you spot them, please let me know!