Most people know that there are 10 commandments, enumerated in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and given on tablets to Moses — even if we do not necessarily know what those commandments are. (In a 2007 poll commissioned to promote an animated Christian movie, more respondents knew that “two all-beef patties” were in Big Macs than knew that “Thou shalt not kill” was a commandment.) But there are more: From Genesis through Deuteronomy, there are a total of 613 commandments, as counted by medieval sages.

Many of the 613 are obsolete. Christians believe Jesus released them from observing most of them, and hundreds pertain to practices in the Jerusalem temples, which were destroyed, the second in A.D. 70. But the list nevertheless seems like a theological dare. For his book “The Year of Living Biblically,” the humorist A. J. Jacobs spent a year obeying as many of the 613 as he could. If you have the right kind of perverse ambition, the list eggs you on.

Which seems to be what happened to Mr. Rand. A secular Jew whose work was shown by the prestigious Tibor de Nagy Gallery when he was only 18, Mr. Rand has won praise for abstract paintings, figurative paintings and prints made with color-stained potato chunks. But he did not seriously work with religious subjects until the 1970s, when he made a series of now-famous murals in the B’nai Yosef Synagogue in Brooklyn.

Since then, Mr. Rand, 66, has done other synagogue murals, a series on the 19 sections of the daily Amidah prayer and, in 1989, the 54 paintings on the divisions of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis to Deuteronomy.

But when Mr. Rand does work with a Jewish theme, he sometimes attracts ridicule, hate, or worse, indifference — not in the synagogues across the country that he has decorated with his beloved murals, but in the aggressively secular art world. In 1972, for instance, he did a gallery show “with 10 paintings named after the 10 rabbis of the Yom Kippur martyrology,” he recalled.