Miner: Hi. I'm Brad Miner, editor in chief of American Compass and I'm here today to talk with illustrator and artist, Sam Fink about The Book of Exodus. How did this project first begin to take shape in your mind?

Fink: I belong to a conservative congregation. One day the Rabbi, for his sermon, talked about five books of Moses that were given to a young boy years ago as a gift for his Bar Mitzvah. This Rabbi, Morticai Waxman, is a book lover. He went and found the book that was given as a gift, inscribed, at a used bookstore. It hurt him. He was a little upset. He took the book that he bought and alongside him, he took another book. He said, "Now, look. Here's a book I bought in Yemen a long time ago. It was written by a man who copied the entire five books of Moses by hand. It took him a lifetime. I found it in the antique store and I bought it. It's one of my treasures". In certain times, it was a task that was put before a man to copy the entire five books by hand. Here I am, sitting there, and I'm now in my eighties, and I said, "That's a nice task. I ought to do that". So, I took it on. I have a son who is a scholar in the Jewish world and I thought it would please him that his old man was taking this on. I began. I went out and bought a fine book. It was quite large, about 12"X14," with blank pages, and I began to copy The Book of Genesis. I got up to a point where I got to the end, and I bought another book, and I finished in three volumes. A friend saw it and said, "Sam, this should be published". They had no idea how hard it is to get a book published. My wife worked for a company that Xerox owned that published reference books to the business world. Literary Marketplace. Bowker was the original name. Elizabeth Geyser was the woman who hired my wife, Adele, and we became friends. I told her about it and she said, "You need an agent" and she knows agents. The agent dragged these volumes around. No result. They gave them back to me and I've, since then, given them away. I have three older grandsons now. All three of them are married. I gave each one a copy of The Book of Genesis. So I said, "You got one done, start on The Book of Exodus". I sat and thought, and thought about illustration. I thought, 'the books should not be illustrated. Not by me' because the stories are stories for me. They should not be made hard and fast that you could see Cecil B. DeMille taking the Red Sea apart. 'You shouldn't do that', I said to myself. I kept thinking, 'when I start Exodus, I don't want to do that. What can I do'? I thought and thought. It took a couple weeks and I said, "I got the answer. The sky. The beautiful sky. It's never the same". The Book of Exodus is commented upon by Rabbis and theologians for years and years, interpreting, reinterpreting, and reinterpreting. The sky could be forever. Infinite and variety. I counted out the chapters. Forty chapters. If I painted forty skies and hid the words in the clouds, both in English and in Hebrew, that would be a fun task to see if I could do it. I don't know how long it took. It took a long time. Slowly and slowly, day by day, doing my work, I looked at the sky, night skies, dusk, dawn, electrical storms, the whole works. I concentrated and when I finished, I felt like I had done something worthy. My mother lived in a home right in Great Neck. I use to see her every day. She lived until she was 97. I think I picked up one of her genes. I'd tell her what I was doing and she felt good that I was occupying myself. Then, she became sick. She went into a coma for three days. I sat by her bedside and I had a little Book of Psalms. I don't remember the number of this particular psalm, but having finished the work, sitting at my mother's bedside, the psalm said, "The power of God is in the sky". The whole thing came together. I don't consider myself a religious man in terms of going to church or synagogue. I go just to go, to belong. When that all happened, that's sort of miraculous for me, to have this time come together.