Shabbat Gathering: Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation.
Dear Chevra, as is our custom, we will gather tonight at 5.45p to welcome Shabbat. These are the coordinates:
Zoom
Meeting ID: 963 5113 1550
Password: 1989
Phone: +1 312 626 6799
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Here we go.
We mostly pay respect to the idea of Shekinah, the feminine aspect of Hashem, but author Liana Finck has decided to go all in on the notion of a feminine Divine in her graphic novel, Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation. In her retelling of Genesis, Hashem is a conflicted modern woman with depression and anxiety issues and problems with self confidence. Despite that description, it’s a super fun and insightful book destined to become part of our contemporary midrash.
Finck is a cartoonist you might have seen before in The New Yorker or perhaps her previous books, Passing for Human and Excuse Me. But if you’re unfamiliar with her work, and have even a passing interest in midrash, then it’s high time you get to know her.
Where she comes from.
Finck was raised in a Conservative home in Orange County, New York and attended Jewish day school. But, in a recent podcast from the New York Times, she claims never to have felt religious even though she loved religion. She says that she just never felt any attraction to practicing it.
An ego combined with self doubt.
Like G-d in her book, Finck says she has a super big ego but plagued by crippling self doubt. “I am not a confident atheist. It isn’t in my bones to believe in G-d but I love G-d. Working on the book helped my reclaim my religion and culture.”
According to Finck, G-d wears a little crown, a diaphanous smock, and has a magic wand complete with a star at the end of it. She also looks very comfortable lounging around on the clouds.
Let There Be Light is divided into three parts: The Past (creation to the tower of Babel), The Present (Abram’s departure from his homeland to Isaac meeting Rebekah), and The Future (Jacob and Esau to Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers). In one of my favorite episodes in the book, readers get to find out what happened during Abram’s “lost years” as a struggling artist in New York.
In her own words.
I could speculate on the author’s motive or intention, but I’ll let Finck speak for herself from her author’s note.
Studying the Torah at Hebrew day school, I thought of it mostly as a portrait of one childlike (and therefore relatable) character full of feelings and desires: God. I’ve never really asked myself if I believe in God, but I’ve always been enchanted by Her, the way I am by my favorite characters in stories. This book is an attempt to draw out that character as I saw Her (since I started writing this book, it hurts to call God “Him”) When I was young giving God a new gender — my own — was my first step toward reclaiming this work of literature for myself.
I hope the God I’ve created in this book is relatable in some ways to some people, or that She’s at least a fun character to read about. But my real aim in making this book is to demonstrate that each of us is allowed to create God (or gods) in our own image. And that we must reshape the larger stories that are handed down to us — family stories, religious and cultural stories, our individual and collective pasts — and tell them in a way that feels honest to us. Stories need to be told and retold in different voices. That is how they breathe.
What’s next for Finck? On the NYTimes podcast, she says she has Exodus queued up on Audible. I can’t wait. I highly recommend Let There Be Light. It's in hardcover for now. Probably in a year it will be available in paperback. Enjoy!
And may it be for all of us a blessing. See you tonight!
All my love,
brian.
