Although he abandoned the pious way of life in which he grew up, Litvinovsky maintained a complex relationship with Jewish traditions. This was reflected in his work. From the end of the 1950s, the artist began to incorporate quotes from the Jewish texts into his paintings, often alongside passionate scenes which included images of body parts twisting inside each other, thus linking the passion of life to creation.
These two oil paintings are an interesting example of this trend. Here Litvinovsky wrote the words “You Must Choose Life” that appears in the book of Deuteronomy about the signing of the covenant between God and the people of Israel: “I call the heaven and earth as witnesses! Before you I have placed life and death, the blessing and the curse. You must choose life so that you and your descendants will survive.” (Deuteronomy 30:19). While the verse can be simply understood as a divine decree for the Israelites to follow the path of faith, the Torah Temimah, following the Jerusalem Talmud, sees the choice of life as the ability to exist and make a living on one’s own, which in the language of the Sages is “art” or “craft”, “work”, “manual labour”: “Rabbi Ishmael says: the verse, ‘You Must Choose Life’ zu umanut, refers to an art. From this the Sages learned that a man is obligated to teach his son an art, and if he was not taught, then he must learn it himself. What is the reason? So that you may live.” By adding this quote to the paintings, Litvinovsky appropriated its traditional interpretation and reclaimed the verse as an artist's personal midrash: “Life and art are one.” The very choice in favour of life is work of art.
The appearance of texts in Litvinovsky's work reached its peak in the later years of his life, when he created a group of unusual, conceptual pieces with meaningful quotes from the Torah and Kabbalah related to the transcendence of the soul and the world. In these works, Litvinovsky placed the words on the sheet of paper on their own, without any imagery, as a kind of an act of purification that leaves nothing to be said.
