arts & culture
‘Let There Be Light’ Finds
Meaning Between the Lines
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
Courtesy of Random House
L iana Finck’s “Let There Be Light:
The Real Story of Her Creation” is
hardly the first time a mere mor-
tal reinterpreted the story of creation.

In 2009, underground cartoonist
Robert Crumb published “The Book of
Genesis,” a tome depicting the 50 chap-
ters of Genesis in explicit detail. Crumb,
with exhaustive line work, illustrated
the men of the Bible as beefy and wooly
cavemen, the women as indecent and
full-bodied, their rudimentary clothing
torn to reveal ample flesh underneath.

On the cover alongside Adam and Eve
is another provocative image: An old,
white man clothed in a billowing white
robe, with a white beard dangling near
the ground over which he is hovering.

The graphic novel adaptation of the
first book of the Torah was meant to be
a very literal — and very Christian —
interpretation, but the depiction of God
as light-skinned and masculine persists
in popular culture.

In “Let There Be Light,” published
April 12 by Random House, that isn’t
the case.

A cartoonist duly employed by The
New Yorker and a Fulbright Fellow, Finck
opts out of meticulous drawings of a burly
man and an aged God to present her own
one-and-only God: a stick-figure woman
in a triangular dress, a single swooping
blob delineating a plain haircut, a dimin-
utive crown donning her head. Behold,
the omniscient God of our ancestors.

But really, the simple-looking girl
Finck conceived God as is just that:
Finck’s conception.

“Let There Be Light” is far from a
feminist polemic about what would
happen if God was depicted in Biblical
texts as a woman. Instead, Finck asserts
that just as humans are made in God’s
image in the story of creation, God can
be made in the image of an unassum-
ing cartoonist whose squiggly-line text
bubbles and uneven shading make it
clear she is far from perfect.

God sits on her puffy, minimalist
cloud and peeks down at her creations,
from a wobbly Adam, Eve and Lilith the
snake to Joseph, whose prophetic dreams
are, according to Finck, so boring, that
she refuses to illustrate them.

In the telling of the book of Genesis,
Finck takes some major liberties.

Ditching the desert, she draws Abram
as an art school student, assigned by
God to create a great masterpiece. He
wears a sloppy, curly pompadour and
thin, wiry glasses instead of the usual
robe and becomes more of an image of a
2014 hipster nightmare than the Jewish
forefather. Finck, in her author’s note, writes that
she isn’t particularly religiously minded.

Her skepticism of the biblical telling of
creation are clear, as are her grievances
with the way women, enslaved and vic-
tims of sexual abuses are often swept
under the storytelling rug.

Yet clearly she believes the stories of
the Torah have merit. Even if, in her
mind, they aren’t factual, they at least
contain truth.

In her sometimes simplified and
abridged telling of Genesis, Finck inter-
weaves midrashim: In the telling of the
story of Isaac, Finck describes him as
a laughing child until Abraham, asked
by God, intends to sacrifice him. Knife
brandished toward him, Isaac stops
laughing. Finck writes next to an under-
stated asterisk at the bottom of a page
that Isaac would become a totally differ-
ent person after the intended sacrifice.

Trauma changes people.

Published three days before Passover,
“Let There Be Light” is, almost painfully,
an apt telling of the events of so long ago,
but also a telling of the times today.

Though Biblical texts have long been
upsetting and alienating to some, the
minimalism and restraint of Finck’s pan-
els are a balm. When the minutiae of
Biblical time and space are gone, what
remains is the mind and soul of the
reader, who is gently invited to see them-
selves in the archetypes of characters in
a world once absurd and far away, but
now held closely in a page between their
fingertips. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com “BEAUTY
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May 1 to June 2
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