FEATURES Illustrated Mitzvot

By Francesca Matalon

Nine books, one interactive DVD and more than three hundred berachot; this is the monumental work of Moise Levy, a doctor and maskil from Milan who just published a boxed set of books entitled “Halachà illustrata: guida illustrata alle norme ebraiche” (Illustrated Halachà: Illustrated Guide to Jewish Law).
The eight books are the Italian translation from Hebrew of the series Itturé Halachà by rabbi Zeev Greenwald which explains in depth every aspect of the halachah in every occasion of the year and moment of the day (Seder Hayom, Berachot, Seder Yom Shabbat, The 39 Melachot, Yamim Norayim, Pesach-Shavuot-Av-Elul-Sukkot-Hanukkah-Purim, Kashrut and Hamitbach).

“I thought that these illustrations were very nice and thus some years ago I decided to translate the books into Italian. I asked the author for the rights and proceeded page by page keeping to the original layout”, Dr. Levy told Pagine Ebraiche. “However, in the Hebrew books there where some bibliographical references as well. I was not sure if I was supposed to translate them or not. I therefore checked them one by one and I started going through the Shulchan Aruch and the Mishnah Berurah. I had already studied those texts in the past, but reading them again turned out to be a real revelation: I discovered a lot of curious things, such as the customs of the time and the origins of the mitzvot. With all this precious material I felt unable to keep it all to myself. And therefore included all of it as subjects in the books”.

The ninth book of the boxed set is a list of more than 300 berachot for all circumstances, with the support of the DVD to learn how to pronounce them. The DVD also includes audio registrations of berachot, siddurim, and meghillot, ancient almanacs including a perpetual one, as well as recipes for challah, and much more.

The reason Dr. Levy started this huge work was to make the mitzvot clearer and more approachable to a younger generation through means of illustrations. At that point the challenge became bigger: “Adding all those facts and curiosities made it interesting as well for adults and those who were already experts”, he said. “Jews are the people of the mitzvot, the only ones that when God offered the Torah, said, “We will do and we will listen.” We are like children: a well-behaved child is one who does what his parents tells him, without question. We say that a good parent is the one whose child behaves well. That can be said about us as well: if we do the mitzvot, we are claiming that God is good”.

Life taught Dr. Levy the lesson that “doing mitzvot is the recipe to living happily”. He became an orphan at the age of three: “My father is Hashem”, he says. He has always been well integrated into Italian society. By showing his Jewishness (“being named Moise, it’s very hard to hide it anyway”), from the military service, through university, to his job as a doctor in a hospital, he has always gained respect from everyone he dealt with. But even when his head physician became very disrespectful, throwing him into a state of deep depression, which provoked a leave of absence; the situation improved greatly when he showed up at the hospital wearing his kippah for the first time.

But mitzvot observance also literally saved Dr. Levy’s life. He survived a serious motorcycle accident while riding his because someone from his synagogue suggested him wearing a helmet before it ever occurred to him to do so. “But also the person who crashed into me was an angel of the Lord: because of the enforced rest after the crash I started the work I have just published”, he told.

In the introduction to his work, Dr. Levy describes the mitzvot as a guide for us all to live by. And that is exactly what happened to him: “These are hard times, being in Israel this summer with all that was happening changed me. And even after World War 2, living in Milan wasn’t easy. I remember my mother telling me to respond when she called me ‘Maurizio’. I obviously didn’t. And that’s it, my whole life has been a re-conquest of my name Moise”, he recalled. “So even today, mitzvot are the only thing I am able do.”

(Artwork by Giorgio Albertini)