🖼 Art window (for approval). The images of this parashah run through all of art history — and the comparison shows that every age decides anew how to tell. Dura Europos (synagogue on the Euphrates, c. 244): walls full of biblical scenes — the oldest surviving Jewish picture cycle; the question was never whether, but how. Huqoq (Galilee, 5th century): a synagogue mosaic, excavated since 2012, with the ark and the animal pairs — a Jewish Noach image 1,500 years old. The Sarajevo Haggadah (Spain, 14th century) shows the ark in the most famous Jewish manuscript art. Bruegel's "Tower of Babel" (1563): the most famous tower picture of all — Bruegel painted the tower as a Roman Colosseum of his own day; the smaller version hangs in Rotterdam (Boijmans Van Beuningen), worth a family trip. A looking task for older children: compare Bruegel's tower with our chapter picture — what did each age dress "its" tower in? Bruegel a Colosseum, we a ziggurat. Michelangelo painted the flood and Noach on the Sistine ceiling — for another tradition, with conventions that are not ours. Precisely there you see: images are never neutral; every community chooses.

👁 Why our pictures look the way they do. Clothing follows Rav Evers' code word for word: tsanua and modest; married women with full hair covering, men and boys with head covering, sleeves well over the elbows, skirts well below the knee. Faces: yes (Rav Evers' decision) — children read feelings from faces — but never at the moment of another's suffering. Nobody drowns in our pictures: the flood appears as rain, water and ark. Nimrod does not appear: Volume 3 shows his empty tower of thrones — six thrones stacked; hubris told through the object, not through a figure that might fascinate children. The animals match the text: non-kosher in pairs, kosher in a larger group — his text says "two" and "fourteen". And the rainbow: tradition knows a reticence about gazing at it (Chagigah 16a) — do we show it whole, or deliberately half behind clouds? That question rests with Rav Evers.