Trusting In God’s Word & Providence

In 1933, as Hitler’s Nazi party rose to power in Germany, the Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted Solitude. In the foreground, a seated man sits wrapped in a tallit, or prayer shawl. His right hand supports his head in an attitude of contemplation, and his left arm embraces a large Torah scroll. At his side, a heifer seems to be playing a violin. In the background the city of Vitebsk—where Chagall was born and raised—is shrouded in darkness and watched over by an angel.

At the time he painted this, Chagall was working “obsessively” on a commission to illustrate the Old Testament while…