How Do We Draw God?

We sat down for an interview with Shoshana Brody, the longest serving member of the Aleph Beta staff, second only to Rabbi Fohrman himself! She has overseen several transformations of Aleph Beta’s visual style and animation over the past 13 years.

Q: What is your job as art director?

A: For all videos that go onto the website, I develop the vision of what it's going to look like. I storyboard and guide our animators to create images and animate the course. Everything that goes into a video, I am there from start to finish. 

Q:  Aleph Beta videos have a certain style or a certain visual language, where did that come from and was it inspired by anything? 

A: When we started Aleph Beta, Rabbi Fohrman would create PowerPoints and he would have two pieces of text on the screen and he would be highlighting things and underlining things and circling things with like his little red pen. When we started to do animation, one of the first things that we really changed from just having a PowerPoint was creating charts. And that is where our style started from. So we needed a really clear way to show all of Rabbi Fohrman's information.

The characters have changed so much over the course of the years. We literally started with stick figures and have gotten more sophisticated and tried out new styles every time. Then we change every couple of years. We change our visual style to keep it fresh and interesting.

Q:  I can imagine that there are some concepts or people that are more difficult to portray than others. So for example. It's not easy to portray the presence of God, and I do know that certain people within the Jewish community take issue with portraying any great person, whether it's Abraham or Sarah or Moses. How do you approach these delicate issues?

A:  So that was actually something that came up very early on: can we show God? And we actually had people write in and ask, ”how can you portray Abraham and how can you put this on screen?” And our answer was we are just trying to teach people. We're trying to make things as clean and as clear as possible. 

Our first image of God was literally a white circle with the word God in it. That was the first ever way that we portrayed God on screen. And it was a weird thing to do, but we just wanted it to be understandable. There's so much text and parallels and connections that you need to really keep your brain turned on for that. So we had to show some kind of visual representation of the concept of God to make it easier to follow.

But these are animated videos. Everybody understands that it's not God on screen. We've tried it a bunch of different ways over the course of the years. Usually we portray a ray of light coming out of a cloud so that we're not actually portraying God himself. It's almost always light with a cloud on top or different color shapes on top of it to hide His presence.

Same thing with the humans in the Torah. We realize that it's not ideal to portray Moses. We don't presume to know what he looks like. So usually we base him off of Charlton Heston, honestly.

Q:   It reminds me of the obligation to educate your children to do mitzvot. For example, in order to teach your children to make blessings, you are allowed to use the name of God, even though in another context that would be called taking God's name in vain. So we see that is how it's very possible to make exceptions when it's for the sake of education. 

A:  Yeah, that was exactly the example that we used when we were deciding how to do this. We're trying to teach. A lot of people would say oh, you found a loophole. It's not a loophole. Teaching people is the only goal that we have here. 

Q:  What is the video or series of videos that artistically you are most proud of? 

A:  Off the top of my head, I'm going to say our re-animation of “Rachel's Tears” from a content perspective. It is really just incredible. It's one of these courses that Rabbi Fohrman did many years ago. And as we were re-editing it, I was going through the storyboard, and I realized that I never fully comprehended the material as well as I should have.

When we did the re-animation, it was what we call an “A-ha” moment, where I was just like, wait a second... this just blew my mind 10 years later. Again. I loved it the first time around when Rabbi Fohrman had taught it to me, and I've grown up since then. I've gotten married, I've had children since then, and it really just absolutely blew my mind. And that allowed me to do the storyboard so much differently because I was coming from this perspective of a wife and a mother now, and a woman who has a relationship, and the relationship with your sibling, the relationship with your husband, and the visuals that came out of that I think were just incredible. This has always been one of our best courses just from a content perspective. And now animation wise, it just got pushed up to 11. It really is just a beautiful course. 

Q:  Do you wish that there was more creativity from a visual or artistic perspective in Jewish education? Do you feel like that's something that's lacking out there?

A: I think that the Jewish educational world is stuck in a routine and a comfortable way of doing things. I don't know. It's hard. It's hard when you're trying to say “oh, you should bring more art and music and creativity and acting and all these different things into your classroom,” but you're also trying to do science and technology and all of these things, and it's hard to weigh which one is it gonna be. Especially in the Jewish world where it's like half of our day or even more of that is really being devoted to Torah learning.

Q:  If you could recommend one Aleph Beta series that's underrated in your opinion, but it's really a stunning visual feast, which one would you recommend?

A:  It's a Chanukah course that we just redid recently, like in the last two years. It's called “Why light the Candles and Ignore the War?” The thing that we're really celebrating is the lighting of the candles. But the really big thing that happened during that time was we won the war. And that was the very obvious miracle. Everybody saw that we won the war. Everybody saw that this was this crazy thing that nobody expected to happen, but this tiny little miracle of the candles lasting for eight days seems to be the most important thing that we are looking at. 

If you have any questions about the artwork or animation featured on Aleph Beta, please email info@alephbeta.org.