September 23, 2006 On Religion Religion and Comic Books: Where Did Superman’s Theology Come From? By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN When Rabbi Simcha Weinstein leads Rosh Hashanah services this weekend at the B’nai Avraham synagogue in Brooklyn Heights, he will read a liturgy deeply concerned with the concept of teshuva, or repentance. And when Rabbi Weinstein speaks of repentance, he often thinks of a young man he met decades ago by the name of Peter Parker. Parker had been walking home after competing in a wrestling match, vain in the aftermath of his victory, and as a robber dashed past him, he did nothing. That same robber proceeded to attack and kill Parker’s uncle. Coming upon the scene, the nephew was struck by such guilt and remorse that he resolved to spend the rest of his life fighting crime. As any fan of comic books, including Rabbi Weinstein, would recognize, Peter Parker is Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee and drawn initially by Jack Kirby and then Steve Ditko. Parker’s moment of moral awakening occurred in the first issue of the Spider-Man strip, published in 1962 and discovered by Rabbi Weinstein during his own boyhood in the early 80’s. Something else that Rabbi Weinstein came to learn much more recently was that Lee and Kirby were Jewish — born Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg, respectively. So it seemed to the rabbi no accident that their comic resonated with a quintessentially Jewish theological theme. That insight, among others drawn from Rabbi Weinstein’s study of the classic superhero comics, infuses a new book, “Up, Up and Oy Vey!” The volume, which has nearly sold out its first run of 5,000 copies, contends that writer-artists of the classic comics, many of them Jewish, were influenced by their religious heritage in devising characters and plots. “I feel queasy when I read people who use pop culture to try to proselytize,” said Rabbi Weinstein, a member of the Lubavitcher Hasidic sect who is the campus rabbi at Pratt Institute. “And I didn’t want to enforce my own fantasy. “But I knew the writers were Jewish. That’s a historical fact. And when I bought all the comics, and gave them my rabbi’s reading, I saw something there. Judaism is filled with superheroes and villains — Samson, Pharaoh. And it’s a religion rich in storytelling and in themes of being moral, ethical, spiritual.” That thesis made sense to another expert in the field, the author David Hajdu. “Many of the important early comic-book creators were barely adults when they started working,” said Mr. Hajdu, whose coming book, “The Ten-Cent Plague,” explores the comics craze of the postwar years. “Nor were they worldly, nor very well read or educated. They drew, literally, from what they knew. That is, the culture of their homes and their neighborhoods, which were mostly Jewish.” “Up, Up and Oy Vey!” arrives as the classic comics are being treated far more seriously than anyone might have imagined in their heyday. A major exhibition on comics is on display at the Newark Museum in New Jersey and the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. The reconsideration began in the late 70’s, when Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit,” put the form to literary purposes in a memoir of his childhood in a Jewish immigrant household in the Bronx, “A Contract With God.” The novelist Michael Chabon reimagined the prime years of the comics industry in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay,” which is being made into a feature film. Mr. Chabon made a connection between superheroes and Jewish theology, starting the book with a riff on the Golem, the mythical Jewish avenger made out of clay. Rabbi Weinstein, though, has gone much more deeply in making the connection between Judaism and the comics. His upbringing gave him a firm footing in each world. Reared in a secular family in England, he started reading comics as an offshoot of his passion for the movies. He went on to study at film school and work as a location scout for productions. In his late teens and early 20’s, though, he also felt the pull of faith and, ultimately, enrolled in a yeshiva in Jerusalem. Ordained in 2003, Rabbi Weinstein wound up being appointed the rabbi at Pratt, the institution devoted to the visual arts. There he found that his knowledge of and ardor for comics provided a common language with the students. “This book came out of midnight conversations over wine and chicken soup around the Shabbos table,” said Rabbi Weinstein, 30. In his research, the rabbi delved into the biographies of comic-book greats. Mr. Kirby was the son of an Orthodox father and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the early 60’s, when he developed the character known as the Thing as part of the Fantastic Four, Mr. Kirby gave the bricklike being a human past as Benjamin Jacob Grimm, using his and his father’s Jewish names, and a tough childhood on Yancy Street, a thinly veiled version of the real Delancey Street. For his home, Mr. Kirby even made a drawing of the Thing wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl. Along with those examples of Judaic influence, “Up, Up, and Oy Vey!” offers instances like the name of Superman’s father, Jor-El, with “el” being the suffix to many biblical names and the common use of masks and false identities, akin to the heroine Esther in the Purim story, who goes by an alias in Persian society. Trying not to overreach, Rabbi Weinstein cut out a passage that likened Batman’s bat cave to the Machpelah, the so-called Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where the Bible says Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried. “Simcha,” he says aloud to himself, “the night you wrote that, you had too much Starbucks.” In the months since publication, the book has brought Rabbi Weinstein invitations to book fairs, Jewish events and comics conventions in places like San Diego and London. And it has given him what all rabbis worry about and plan for at this time of year, a sermon topic for Yom Kippur. On the Day of Atonement, Rabbi Weinstein said, he will be preaching about the Thing. This column is the first of an occasional series. The author’s e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company