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(J. Jewish News of Northern California, via JTA)-A forest fire rushed up a mountain. The tortoise in the depths of the earth. A dark sea, rough on the surface, but still below the surface.

These images carved and printed on wooden blocks by artist Ava Sayaka Rosen are part of a deck of cards. It is not only a work of art, but also a spiritual tool, and a call to connect with nature.

Rosen said: "I have been looking for a way to educate people about ecology, but also to establish a connection between taking care of the earth and taking care of yourself and interpersonal relationships." "I think the tarot card is a good way to bridge all these things. ."

The 33-year-old Rosen created the Tarot as a researcher at LABA East Bay in 2021, a one-year Jewish Artist Scholarship hosted by JCC East Bay in Berkeley, California. This is a project that merges her passion for nature and text-based art with her Jewish roots.

"My Jewish upbringing, coupled with my parents' love for nature, really instilled a deep sense of belonging and connection to nature," said the mixed race (her mother is Japanese and her father is an Ashkenazi Jew) . "This is really the inspiration for making this deck."

Rosen lives in Oakland, grew up in San Francisco, and holds a master's degree in creative writing and book art from Mills College. Her first art job was as a youth assistant in the art room at Congregation Emanu-El, helping art teachers. Now, she is an artist and an art teacher at the San Francisco Synagogue—and her own Jewish high school assistant.

"That was my first job, and I really liked it," she said. "For me, I am a complete circle, which is very interesting for me. I went back there as an art teacher and youth assistant."

Although her art studies are conducted in a school environment, her tarot background is personal.

"I was initially attracted by these images. I don't know anything about the meaning of these cards or its history," she said. "When I started to learn more about it, I really got into tarot reading practice to investigate myself and my interpersonal relationship."

Tarot cards can be traced back to Italy in the 15th century. In France in the 18th century, they were used for mysterious purposes, including as a fortune-telling tool, and social media brought new interest to this practice. In the process of tarot card reading, cards with evocative images are drawn from a deck of cards and interpreted through a specific lens. Some people have borrowed from Kabbalah in their reading; other modern Jewish artists have also combined tarot cards with Jewish mysticism.

As an artist, Rosen said that creating his own deck was a natural step. The deck she designed as a LABA researcher is not a particularly Jewish artwork, although it contains some Jewish texts to help deepen the understanding of each image. But the LABA scholarship allowed her to accept an existing concept and develop it. This also gave her a deadline to meet.

"This is a very ambitious project to create original concepts and sculpt them, print them, write them-write descriptions for them-so I know I need some accountability help, to a large extent," she said .

Among the 78 cards that make up the Tarot, Rosen has completed 39, most of them during the LABA scholarship period. She plans to find a publisher after the deck is completed.

"This LABA scholarship really ignited my ass and gave me a deadline. I really worked very, very hard, and now I have made about half of the deck," she said.

Rosen took her most famous tarot card (first published in 1909, known for its esoteric imagery, which is what most people think of when they think of tarot cards). She made it a guide for the inspiration and explanation needed to make her own version.

She said that by thinking about the traditional interpretation of each card, she would find a related natural concept and create a description with "writing prompts for self-reflection questions".

For the moon card, it shows a glowing full moon gently shrouded in clouds. Questions include: what do you know? What are you being pulled towards? The compost card’s guide shows bright mushrooms sprouting from logs. There is a famous chapter in Genesis: "You are the dust, and you will return to the dust."

"The collaboration with other Jewish artists really gave me a new understanding of what Jewish art is," Rosen said.

She called the project "TARO::TORA", taken from two pictures on the traditional Rider-Waite deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. "The connection between the Tarot card and the Torah in the title is mysterious, but it is very present in the traditional card prototype," she said.

Rosen witnessed the power of "TARO::TORA" at the LABA live event held in JCC East Bay on November 7th. In her corner, she used her deck to read, more popular than she expected.

"I didn't expect a big line to be formed," Rosen said with a smile.

Musician David Israel Katz is one of them. He said that he was attracted by this project because it combines "free and playful visual language on the one hand, and aesthetic cohesion and in-depth exploration on the other."

He told J. in an email, "Although there are few forms of reading, it has a close inner inspiration." "The cards I drew had an immediate impact on me. Ava was able to accurately and concisely describe the images contained in them. Different aspects of it."

Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud, director of JCC East Bay Public Projects, said that JCC is eager to let Rosen join the scholarship not only because of her talent and her connections in the art and Jewish world, but also because of her experience in teaching children. JCC plans to include artists Introducing pre-kindergarten and after-school projects to expand LABA, Wolfman-Robichaud said Rosen is also an obvious choice.

For Rosen, LABA is a unique opportunity. She can join a group with people like her: Jewish artists, who can explore the concepts of Jewishness, art, and Jewish art together.

"The combination of textual research and artistic creation is really attractive to me, and it feels very unique," she said. "This really allows us to have an in-depth conversation around these ideas and really form a community."

This story originally appeared in the Jewish News of J. Northern California and was reprinted with permission.

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