This episode explores Aimee Orkin’s Judaic Prayer Wall, a luminous work shaped by grief, faith, and the practice of visual prayer. Walk with us through each blessing in this piece, inviting the art to deepen your conversation with God.

The Hashkiveinu

Aimee Orkin’s Judaic Prayer Wall is a work born from deep faith, grief, renewal, and a lifetime shaped by creativity. In this conversation, Aimee shares how the loss of her husband at a young age became a turning point in her vocation and her spiritual life. Teaching art within her Jewish community opened a new path for her—one that intertwined creativity with prayer in ways that helped her make meaning in the wake of loss. Her art became not only expression but practice, a way of staying connected to God and to the loved one she lost.

As Aimee explains her understanding of “visual prayer,” she invites us to consider prayer not only as words spoken but as something we can touch, color, shape, and hold. For her, visual prayer begins with sitting with the words—letting them evoke emotion, memory, longing—and then allowing color, line, and shape to emerge from that inner grounding. In her classrooms and congregations, she has watched people of all ages discover how art can open the heart to God in ways that text alone sometimes cannot. Visual prayer becomes an embodied spiritual practice, where the senses, imagination, and Spirit meet.

Her Judaic Prayer Wall, created while on sabbatical in Jerusalem, rises out of this blend of study and devotion. Each panel reflects a particular prayer—morning blessings, supplications for health, gratitude for the body, hope for children, words for travelers, comfort for mourners, and the central prayer of Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Aimee studied each prayer with a different scholar, letting their teachings shape her designs. The result is a work that resembles a stained-glass window—rich in symbolism and color, yet deeply personal, made to be given as individual meditations or gathered as a unified whole.

In this episode, viewers are invited to move prayerfully through each section of the Prayer Wall while hearing Aimee describe its meaning. Alongside these blessings, we return to the Hashkiveinu—a prayer asking God to shelter us in peace, guard our comings and goings, and cradle us beneath the shadow of the Divine wings. It is a fitting frame for a piece that centers on the rhythms of life: waking, healing, traveling, celebrating, grieving, and ultimately finding rest in God’s care.

This episode gently encourages viewers to linger with the artwork, perhaps even returning to individual blessings through the chapter markers. Aimee’s art invites us all—regardless of tradition—to experience prayer in a new way: not simply as words spoken aloud, but as a creative offering that allows sacred truth to take root in the soul.