God’s Comics

Abstract

This chapter probes the Jewish visual imagination of the sacred through a discussion of the Hebrew alphabet as “graphic narrative.” Exploring how the relation of text and image becomes deconstructed and redefined in classical rabbinic writings on the Hebrew alphabet and the forms of the letters, this chapter opens a reciprocal dialogue between “comics” and “Torah,” and between theories of graphic narrative and rabbinic interpretation. What might a “theology of graphic narrative” look like? The ultimate source of creative pleasure in all of us—artists and academics, rabbis and readers, parents and children—is that we ourselves, finally, are the letters and the letters are us. We are “God’s comics..