By Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

Like most people, I have never been able to draw more than stick figures. And so, each time the need has arisen to draw something I have been frustrated by that limitation, the inability of the hand to illustrate what the eye can see beyond the most primitive results.

But recently I have found a certain consolation in the discovery that there is more to stick figures than I thought. The urge to capture images of the natural world by hand is preserved among the very oldest human artifacts. Stick figures of animals and humans figure importantly in ancient cave paintings, though some are manifestly more sophisticated than anything I can produce.

Whether the purpose of the artwork was religious or merely decorative is a matter of speculation, but the impulse was undeniably universal. Paintings of deer, elephants, bulls, horses and other ubiquitous life forms have been found on cave walls in various parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. That all of these pictures are unsigned presumably reflects the lack of stress on individual expression in earlier times. Or it could be that, like me, they were embarrassed by their inability in many cases to advance beyond the simplest renderings.

Stick figures weren’t limited to cave walls. They were used in the linguistic systems of ancient Egypt and China. The Hebrew letters that continue to this day to be found on ancient coins and stamps in Israel are also stick-like.

In modern times, stick figures have been used commercially, and in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. The U.S. Department of Transportation developed the DOT pictograms — 50 public domain symbols for use at transportation hubs, large events, and other contexts all over the world today. Like those male and female outlines signifying rest rooms, and other urgent messages.

The maker of stick figures need not stop at that primitive technique. You don’t have to draw at the level of Cro-Magnon Man forever. There are techniques by which you can work your way up from the simplest strokes showing just the basic elements of head, torso, arms and legs to complex human and animal action forms.

What really caught my eye is that humans and animals do have these in common. The head sits atop—or hangs at the fore—of a trunk, and from the trunk, the main body, protrude limbs for similar purposes of walking, standing, grasping, striking, and so on.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Trees and plants, when you think about it, also share this basic body outline. The very word trunk, that main part of a tree, also refers to the main part of the human body, excluding the head and limbs. In insects, it’s the thorax. Flowers, too, have their stems for the main part, petals extending outward from them.

Internally, as well, there are clear resemblances. The internal organs of man and animal are so close that during those centuries when human corpses were unavailable to anatomy students for dissection, animals were used instead. But even plants have an internal system within the trunk or stem to carry sap through the organism, sustaining life. The resemblances hold true for the largest and the smallest creatures. Just as an elephant has a mouth and stomach, so too the humblest—and hungriest—fly.

This chain of resemblances is posited by Rabbi Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, the 11th century Jewish philosopher and ethicist, as evidence that the world is the work of a single Creator who stamped his unforgettable signature onto life in all its variety.

To be sure, this is not a proof of the existence of God. Philosophers have spent centuries debating that question to a standoff. Indeed, according to Judaism, there can be no definitive proof by philosophical or scientific inquiry concerning God’s existence. For if there were, and we were compelled to accept it as fact, our free will to accept or deny God’s existence—a basic Jewish principle—would be foreclosed.

What, then, is it? Let us call it an indication, sketched out in the simplest terms, that God does indeed exist. Even a mere maker of stick figures can see it.

Sources: Commentary of Pas Lechem to Duties of the Heart, Gate of Unity, Chapter 7; Elfwood’s Fantasy Art Resource Project.

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