This month’s Oculus feature, titled “A Virtual Service,” is an imaginative and playful mixed-media work by Saul Rosenstreich, coordinator of the shul’s Judaism and Art group. To fully appreciate the artist’s vision, you can visit the source, which takes place every Friday evening at 7:30 p.m., on Zoom.

“In the warm light of our living room, sitting beside my wife in front of a laptop for Shabbat services on Zoom, I have often been struck with how the screen resembles a brightly lighted stage, and the keys like so many rows of seats below. I have imagined that the figures on the screen are in box seats to either side of the stage, and that the Rabbi is on the bimah in a different plane of space beyond the proscenium of the screen. The  scale of the figures is obviously too small. But in spite of all these incongruities, I have imagined a spiritual space.

How to represent this feeling? Chagall’s floating figures came to mind, but not the fixed grid of figures from a screen shot and certainly not the laptop itself. The final result in collage and acrylic paint on canvas hints of the imagined space without a trace of the laptop.”                           —Photo by the artist