Talking Pictures

Ever since Art Spiegelman's landmark Maus (1986), comics and graphic novels have established themselves as a new form of visual-cum-verbal midrash. The best of them, re-imagining texts and the events of history, point beyond themselves.

If Spiegelman paid tribute to his father, a survivor of the Holocaust, the hero of Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat is witness to the vanished Jewish culture of Algiers. Other cartoonists have tackled the text of the Bible, as eloquent as it is famously laconic.  R. Crumb (of Fritz the Cat) has recently published his take on the Book of Genesis, rendered in his trademark mix of burlesque, Blake, and Beckett. The Comic Torah, playing the text—and itself—for both pathos and laughs, depicts God as a woman endlessly disappointed in love.  Departing from the genre's self-conscious impieties, Yonah Lavery in Talmud Comics injects a note of elegiac reverence into her delicate, gray-shaded treatments of rabbinic texts and figures.   

In a class by himself is the Israeli cartoonist Shay Charka. His Hebrew Babba series (named for the hapless, bulbous-nosed protagonist whose name is also the talmudic word for "gate") offers a verbal and visual romp through the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar, Nahman of Bratzlav, and contemporary Israeli life. In another series, Over the Line, chronicling the experience of a religious West Bank settler like himself, Charka's alter ego informs an incredulous secular journalist that cartoonists are the most pious monotheists of all, since the essence of their craft is the shattering of idols.

This points to a difference between the new midrash and the old. The ancient rabbis were no slouches at kidding around, but for them the key lay finally in the text's infinite meaningfulness, rooted in its divine authorship. Even as intimations of a similar conviction, or of a desire for it, can be teased out of some contemporary midrashists, there's no denying the rip torn by modernity in the fabric of belief—or the price paid in the consequent loss of, paradoxically, creative freedom.

Memory Lane  Douglas Wolk,  Salon.  In The Rabbi's Cat, Joann Sfar "radiates affection and respect toward the ancestors he has imagined" even as his "true sympathies are with the cat's freedom to . . . dart off in any direction his whim takes him."  SAVE

Scripture Picture  Robert Alter,  New Republic.  R. Crumb's interpretations of Genesis are consistently powerful, but instead of liberating our imagination they sometimes constrain it.  SAVE

Smiling but Taking No Prisoners  Robbie Gringrass,  Forward.  On the sly, complex art of Shay Charka.  SAVE

Let Us Pray

"Rabbi Shimon said: make not your prayers a fixity, but a plea."  The inevitable tension in prayer between practice and passion, between communal structure and the lone voice, was certainly known to the biblical prophets and the rabbis of the Talmud. Yet today, the traditional prayers—profoundly communal and reflecting ancient ideas of monarchy, patriarchy, and retribution, sometimes in complicated Hebrew—seem alien to many. If the test of contemporary Judaism is whether it offers a compelling personal experience to "the Jew within," a common liturgy becomes more difficult to maintain than ever before.

And so, the project of renewing the Siddur—the Hebrew prayer book—beckons, if in different ways. Last year, Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the UK, published an affecting new edition and translation of the traditional Siddur. Just a few weeks ago, Israel's Masorti movement published a Siddur with a number of distinctly Israeli touches. The Internet's blend of the personal and the public has presented still another platform for new liturgies.

Paradoxically, today's liturgists might profit by taking a leaf from the medieval composers of liturgical verse (piyyut) who brought traditional prayer into dialogue with the poetics, and the events, of their time, honoring the ancient texts even as they re-imagined them.

Prayer has always come in many forms. The Talmud suggests at least three different ways of picturing the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15). Hannah's whispered entreaty (I Samuel 1) became a model for the Amidah, the centerpiece of the three daily prayer services. Moses' supplication for his sister—"Oh God, please heal her" (Numbers 12)—offers an enduringly eloquent standard of brevity and pathos. Recent scholarship into ancient prayer has begun to emphasize the physical as well as the textual—a useful hint to moderns that even the most elegant and updated liturgies will come to nothing without flesh-and-blood people at prayer, together and alone.

How We Pray  Amy Scheinerman, Louis Rieser,  NuViewTalmud.  The Song at the Sea: litany, repetition, antiphonal chanting, or individual prayer?  SAVE

The Sacks Siddur  Elli Fischer,  Seforim.  An elegant and handsome challenge to the regnant bilingual prayer book in the Orthodox world.  SAVE

The Siddur Reconfigured  Andrew Sacks,  Masorti Matters.  A new Hebrew prayer book, proudly introduced by a leader of the movement that sponsored it.  SAVE

Taking Prayer into Their Own Hands  Steve Lipman,  Jewish Week.  Several new siddurim are taking shape through the Internet; is this good for the Jews?  SAVE

Jewish Soul Music  Basmat Hazan Arnoff,  Zeek.  Medieval piyyut finds surprising new audiences.  SAVE