God's Superhero Costume Design

As I was reading our rabbi's weekly online torah commentary this morning, where he pondered the meaning of the word "commandment", I got to thinking what God might look like if he actually appeared in a comic book, uttering a commandment. I began to feel very uncomfortable with the stereotypical image of God as looking like a shaggy old man in white robes. Now, I know all about the prohibition about portraying creatures and God in a visual sense, but that hasn't prevented people from doing it anyway.

Visualizing is a powerful way of learning. If a subject seems vague or unclear, draw a diagram: a picture, and then suddenly, the sweet light of understanding graces your brain! Even though the diagram may be wrong, it still has explanatory value: it takes a stand, and makes a claim on reality.

So, why can't we play a game and imagine what God would look like if he had a superhero costume? God's been playing with us for thousands of years. It's a popular observation in our Torah study class at our local Temple: if God is all-knowing, why does he test us? Presumably He's complete knowlege of our lives, our actions, their causes, and their eventual results. (If that were really be the case, then His anger would be revealed as cruel. Does an all-knowing being feel shock or surprise? There's the paradox) But still, He tests us just to see how we'll choose (even though he presumably knows what the outcome will be in advance) So though God is Fierce, Awesome, and All-Powerful, He still has an impish quality: he like to test us, just to watch our reaction to our actions.

Well, what I'm suggesting is not too radical. From the murals on the walls to at the synagogue at Dura Europos, to the archetypal image of God as being a big guy with a white beard in flowing white robes, we've always had (I'll wager) SOME hidden image in our minds that stood for God. It may have been a burning bush, it may have been a sentient cloud, it may have been beautiful woman doing a fan dance,it may have been a sunset, or it may have been the image of the hard cover edition of the Plaut Torah Commentary -- but still, we use images as stand-ins for concepts.

Simplification helps you get a glimpse of the "Big Picture", and the Big Picture can give you the qualities of a visionary. So imagining a what God's costume would look like in a superhero comic book isn't too far-fetched. So right now, we're saddled with the image of God as an old guy with a long white beard in a flowing gown. Well, I say He's due for a costume change. I say that instead of representing God in human form, that we just make Him a floating undulating pulsating infinity symbol. That would capture the idea that God is boundless in an infinite number of ways, but maybe we could add the quality of God not being where you think He is, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: so make the infinity symbol flickers, to mess with you! This is to capture the idea that God cannot be bound by time or space either.

There. I've come up with a start for creating a superhero repesentation for the idea of God Himself: a flickering Infinity symbol. This could be emblazoned on the chest of a Man (we'll call the man "Mo"-- as in "Moses") and the flickering infinity symbol with hover in a space right square in the Man's chest. The man (Mo) and the "logo" (Infinity) are One; they act with telepathic knowledge of each other. Sometimes the logo disappears...and then it reappears again, depending whether God is connecting with someone at that particular moment, because we know that God is only present when Man/Woman looks for Him, and tries to see Him. Oh, and our character will also look something like the Silver Surfer, but there will probably be a blue face mask with some blue trim elsewere.

God really only exists if we acknowledge His existence. This gets back to the point I was making earlier about Reality. Our world is populated with things that we allow to exist. If we don't acknowlege their presence, or better, if we aren't AWARE of their presence, then they're invisible to us.

These are awesome concepts, hard to get one's "mind around", so I don't see anything wrong with creating a superhero design for God that helps remind us of the properties of God. The gruff shaggy old man in a throne just aint cuttin' it, because that image only gets across the ideas of old, angry, vindictive men. It doesn't represent anything about Eternity, or Infinity, or us being in a sort of partnership. Thus a costume redesign, with accompanying undulating flittering logo is a good move. I have spoken!