Encoding the Pshat

Shay Charkas Cast your bread upon the waters.

Brandon Payne . 850226663
3 - August - 2016

Structure of this paper

This essay looks at a single page titled Cast your bread upon the waters from the Shay
Charka comic book, What if Baba were in the Bible? I begin with a brief description of
the author, then of the book. Next I provide an overview of the Baba character. Lastly
I analyze the page, providing any needed theoretical framework at that point.

Author: Charka in the press

I found only three articles written in English about the Israeli cartoonist Shay Charka. An
article in the Forward talks about representations in Charkas art. Charka explains how
he would represent a left-wing Israeli, a right-wing Israeli and a Diaspora Jew. The categories themselves are interesting, that he chooses, in this instance, to divide World Jewry
into these categories, and not others, such as Ashkenazi/Sephardi or Religious/Secular.
Representatives of the left and right in his depiction are separated by a key feature. On
the right, the figure has a line under its feet, representing the land.
Charka went on to explain that for him, this is the key difference between left
and right in Israel. He can no more delete the lines indicating the land on
which he stands than he can delete the lines of his nose. Land is part of his
identity. It is part of who he is. The left-wing Israeli has no such attachment.1
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Charkas initial Diaspora Jew is Spiegalmans Maus. He later changes his mind and
decides that a more appropriate image would be a fiddler on the roof. The main audience
for Charkas work is Israeli, with only one of his books translated into English so far. His
art appears both in the weekly right-wing, pro-settler newspaper Makor Rishon,2 and in
his hard-backed comic books. Charkas blog, http://shaycharka.blogspot.co.il lists him
as the author of 18 books. Charka is a religious settler who lives in Zufim.

Book: What if the Bible were a comic book?

Charkas book, What if Baba were in the Bible?( ) was published in
.20053 In Hebrew the acronym Tenach has the meaning of Torah, Neviim and Ketuvim, or
The Five Books of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings. Charkas comic book contains
pages from all three divisions. The formulation Negid She ( /What if . . .) is used
in many of the pages of the book. In the form of What if Baba (were) + proper name,
it is used 15 times. What if Baba were Noah? What if Baba were Samson? Thrice
this formulation is used for an unnamed character. What if Baba were a henchman of
Abimelech? ( ) Four comics focus on another character
of Charkas, Zuta. What if Zuta were Gideon/Saul/King Solomon/Isaiah Ben Amoz?
Eleven comics dont use the What if? formulation at all. The Binding of Isaac
(" )" becomes The Binding of Baba (")" . Other pages are titled A
woman of valor (" )" and Song of Songs (")" . The text contains 33
named comics, plus the unamed two-page spread that begins on the inside front cover
and appears again on the last page and inside back cover of the book. Here I analyze
the comic on page 47, which comes from the writings and does not use the What if
formulation in its title.

Evolution of Baba
The book opens with a two page spread that begins on the inside front cover. It is in
blue and black and easy to skip over as one rushes to the colorful body of the book.
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This spread is Charkas version of the familiar monkey, Neanderthal, modern man learns
to walk upright piece from the 1965 piece March of Progress. It features seven kinds of
Jews. The first and last are large, muscled, heroic. The ones in the middle are smaller
and weaker. The first figure is a long-haired Samson carrying a sword. Next is Baba,
with his Second-Temple period clothing. Next comes a medieval European Jew with
the cone-shaped pilleus cornutus. He is followed by a turbaned Jew from the Islamic
world. Next is an Eastern European Chasid with a shtreimel. He is followed by a pile
of still smouldering ashes. The last figure is an Israeli soldier with the Israeli made Uzi
submachine gun on a sling over his left shoulder. This serves to position both Baba and
the reader within Jewish mythic history. Baba exists in the position of a down-trodden
anti-hero. His country is already dominated by foreign influence and on the way to a
long dispersion. The reader is a child who can grow up to be the Israeli soldier. He
is once again free and strong enough to defend his land and people. The figures have
varying positions of the head and pupils. I divide these into straight, up or down. The
head indicates where the mans focus is in this life, while his eyes show the inner focus
that motivates his actions. Samson for instance, with his eyes up to heaven, but his head
held straight, serves eternal interests by mundane actions like killing animals and beating
people with their bones. The Israeli soldier similarly has his head straight to reality, but
his eyes are closed to spiritual reality, the reader of the comic, by learning about the
Biblical past, is exhorted to not have his spiritual eyes closed. Babas head is in fact
up to the sky, in his everyday life Baba was careful to hear the trumpet which warned
him to cease work before the Sabbath, he tithed on his crops, he made pilgrimages and
brought offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem, along with myriad other Commandments
which he knew how to observe just by living in that society. Babas eye is directed up
on the two-dimensional page, but it is not directed left and up, in the same direction as
his head, the same direction in which he is walking. Instead it is directed both up to
heaven and out at the reader. Baba challenges the reader, are your thoughts and actions
directed toward and by heaven? Cartoonist and cartoon theorist Will Eisner covers the
position of the head and body in his chapter Expressive Anatomy.4

What is the Pshat?

The Pshat is the simple or literal meaning of a verse. Thanks to modern technology,
I was able to quickly view more than thirty commentaries on the passage in question.5
Not all of these commentaries focused on a literal interpretation. At least three different
explanations for the meaning of the aphorism appear. In a figurative interpretation,
bread could mean seed and water is the good, fertile, watered soil next to a river.
The verse has also been understood as an admonition to pay for a crewed vessel to engage
in foreign trade. Further elucidation along this line can include the danger from storms
or pirates. Not every voyage will return your initial investment and a profit, thus it is
wise to be a partial investor with others and spread your risk in seafaring enterprises.
Lastly it may mean to feed someone who you may never see again, who can never repay
your kindness. Which of these interpretations would Charka choose for his illustration?
Instead of choosing one of these meanings, Charka instead encodes the original, simple,
plain, wording of the verse in a visual form.

Cast your bread upon the waters.

1.1 Text
The top of page 47 has one sentence. !Cast
thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days. (JPS 1917)
The bottom of the page contains the citation. . , Ecclesiastes 11:1 The
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page contains one more sentence, contained in a speech balloon in the third and final
panel. !Really, we came again to a meeting
place, but its all wet!

Panel layout
Cast your bread on a page roughly divided into vertical thirds. Panel 1 occupies the
top third and overlaps, partially obscuring Panel 2 in the bottom two-thirds. Panel 3
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overlaps Panel 2 and is placed in the bottom left, occupying about one-twelth of the page.
It seems to me that there is a hidden Panel 2b. It is circular and occupies most of the
space of the rectangular Panel .2 Another cutout within 2b is 2c, a circle placed to the
right of the center of the page. It includes visible blue gears and a dark black empty
section which occupies the absolute vertical and horizontal center of the page. The way
that Panels 1 and 3 cover Panel 2 relate to their position as the visible, apparent layer
of reality. Panel 2 is not any less real, but it is the hidden part of reality. This verse
from Ecclesiastes, and Charkas comic illustrating it are trying to tell us something about
reality which is usually hidden.

Time
The verse illustrated deals with time, after many days. What does the theory of comic
art tell us about the depiction of time? In a normal sequence of evenly spaced panels of
even length one can expect the same amount of time to have passed between panels. This
is the equivalence between time and space that McCloud discusses.6 If Panel 3 establishes
the normal size of a panel for the page, there might have been ten intermediate actions
between the bread being cast and its return. These however are unknown to Baba, they
take place behind his back.

Iconography
McCloud introduces the idea of icons in comics, visual ways to encapsulate an idea.7 The
clockwork mechanism here functions as an icon. It encodes the idea that the universe is
mechanistic. It also includes the idea that there was some watchmaker who designed it
and that the world is not the result of random processes. In Panel 1 Baba stands on the
yellow sand of the beach. The beach extends into the sea in convex curves, the blue of
the water meets it in convex curves. In Panel 2 our view zooms out to see that the land
and water are each clockwork gears and the interface of the waves and shore is the place
where the gears intermesh as they turn. In this way Baba can throw the bread into the
water, be moved away from it as the land he stands on and the water the bread floats in
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continue to tick around until, after an indeterminate amount of time, they circle back to
each other.

Cosmology
The clock work gears of land and sea occupy the foreground of 2b. 2b also includes the
sun and moon. A movable shutter can cut in front of the circular moon, changing it
through its phases of crescents and full circle. The sun is attached to the entire circle
that makes the midground of 2b, as it rotates it will be seen to rise and set over the
land and water. Through the cutout of 2c we see the background of 2b, it is a system of
gears and a spring. 2c I believe corresponds to the visible stars and planets, the moving
constellations of the Zodiac which are said to influence and predict the affairs of men.
Outside the large cirle of 2b is the rest of the rectangle of Panel .2 It includes more
clockworks, gears and pinons. These correspond to even more hidden layers of reality,
the realm of angels and forces and powers that are cannot be seen by the human eye.

Use, Transmission, Meaning

This section involves more speculation. I have not interviewed owners of the book about
how it is read. I think that this book invites rereading by children several times and
discussion with their parents. With a cover price of around $15 USD and a hard cover
it doesnt seem like a consumable and disposable tome. I think that it is an item that
would remain in the home and be passed on from older to younger children. It can be
consumed by pre-readers as well as those who can decode the text. I think that the page
Cast your bread invites a discussion between parent and child about the nature of the
universe, about the flat earth depicted and the possibility of some bread which would not
be returned while some would, depending on different interpretations of the verse.

Conclusion
I thought it was interesting to examine in detail this page from What if Baba were in the
Bible?. This page used the comic conventions of panel layout and iconography to deliver
its meditation on time and the mechanistic prognosis of the verse that the bread would
return. While articles on Islamic comics can make international headlines,8 articles in
English on Israeli comics, be they scholarly, popular or journalistic are rare and less well
known. This article adds to the scholarly discussion of Israeli comics and hopes to invite
others to do the same.

Notes
.1 Robbie Gringas, The Bottom Line, Forward, January 2010, 3, http://forward.com/
culture/124445/the-bottom-line/.
.2 Wikipedia, Makor Rishon Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Online; accessed 3August-2016], 2016, https : / / en . wikipedia . org / w / index . php ? title = Makor _ Rishon &
oldid=732076347.
.3 Shay Charka, What if Baba were in the Bible? (Meshek 33, Moshav Ben-Shemen, Israel:
Modan, 2005).
.4 Will Eisner, Comics and sequential art (Poorhouse Press, 2000), 100-121.
.5 Biblehub Commentaries, http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ecclesiastes/111.htm.
.6 Scott Mccloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Harper Paperbacks, 1994), 94114.
.7 Ibid., 26.
.8 Arifa Akbar, The all-Islamic super-heroes: Muslim children love The 99 comics, but
hardliners loathe their creator - whose trial for heresy is looming, The Independent, March
2015, http : / / www . independent . co . uk / arts - entertainment / books / features / the all- islamic- super- heroes- muslim- children- love- the- 99- comics- but- hardlinersloathe-their-creator-10101891.html.

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features/the- all- islamic- super- heroes- muslim- children- love- the- 99comics-but-hardliners-loathe-their-creator-10101891.html.
Biblehub Commentaries. http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ecclesiastes/111.htm.
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