One Highland Park couple has made the Torah the focus of their life and work for three years.

But, Aaron Freeman and Sharon Rosenzweig aren’t rabbinic scholars—they’re artists.

Together, they have perhaps found a way to breathe new life into the Old Testament by developing a graphic novel called “The Comic Torah,” which they describe as “re-imagining the very good book.”

“Every Jew is commanded to write their own Torah,” Freeman said. “This [is] what happens when a comedian and a an artist collaborate to fulfill that commandment.”

Freeman and Rosenzweig have had to re-imagine their lives a few times. Both coming from previous marriages, they’ve been together for only about five years.

Freeman, a Chicago native, is an author, cartoonist, blogger, public radio personality and stand-up comedian. He has also been part of a traveling show called The Israeli/Palestinian Comedy Tour since 2007.

Rosenzweig, a Glencoe native, is a painter and printmaker-gone-cartoonist and used to teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Neither of them is a lifelong devotee to the study of Torah. Freeman, for example, is an African American who converted to Judaism in his mid-30s and now identifies himself as an observant Jew.

Rosenzweig, who was raised Jewish, said “it didn’t take really well” until Freeman gave her a “second chance at being a Jew.”

The project began with Freeman tinkering around on a new comic strip program on his computer called Comic Life.

“At the beginning, I was absolutely committed to letting all the guys who really knew about the Torah know that I had read the same books,” Freeman said.

It grew into a joint effort, with him writing the text and Rosenzweig drawing the images. With that creative merger, interpretations flowed more freely. In its completion, the book has 54-two-page spreads, which condense all the chapters of the Torah.

The couple started toward the middle of the book, not at the beginning, Rosenzweig said. And, Freeman became the model for Moses.

“We were all kind of panicked [about] what was going to happen when we got to Genesis,” Rosenzweig said. “We had these big, important stories to tell. So, how are we going to pick the deity?”

When the two got to the part of the Torah about the sacrifice of Isaac, Rosenzweig said she felt like she knew the character. The God figure started out looking like her brother Larry, she said.

“He was like 6’11" and really was a big bully,” Rosenzweig said. “I mean I have four brothers, but he was the biggest, and he was really a God-like figure in my youth.”

When she got to the burning bush story in the Torah, she said her perception of the God character changed.

“It became this really flirtatious thing where it was more female,” she said. “And I had a friend call me up and say, ‘Oh, I see you’re playing God now.’”

From there, a romance between Moses and God, or Yhwh—a phonetic match to the Hebrew spelling—developed.

They captured most of the major players, Rosenzweig said.

“I can’t really just make up characters,” she said. “So, we troll who’s in the news and whose picture we can use and [for] good faces.”

The images took on a political hue during the Bush administration, she added.

“Pharaoh was George Bush and the Egyptian magicians were Rumsfield and Cheney,” she said. “But, when we’re working on the book now, I’ve really sort of made it less topical. I took out all those characters that would place it in a certain time.”

While other characters took on the visages of friends, they did throw in another famous face for one of the key players—a female personification of the holy land called “Honey ‘The Land’ Milkand” —some may recognize her as Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.

“It became obvious that the land was used as this great object of intense desire,” Freeman said. “We searched the Internet and found Shetty, arguably the most desirable woman on the planet.”

With the graphic novel, they’re basically producing modern midrash—or Biblical interpretation—Rosenzweig said.

“Midrash is a tradition of doing stories that are rooted in text but aren’t actually stated,” Freeman said.

Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell of  Aitz Hayim Center for Jewish Living, of the North Shore, where Rosenzweig and Freeman are congregants, also said the project reminds him of midrash.

Bendat-Appell said he doesn’t share the theological assumptions of the couple, but does respect their endeavor. In some ways, midrash was a way for rabbis to express certain theological positions that were a bit too radical for expression in other arenas, he added.

“The sensibility that the story is for all of us to play with is a really beautiful one,” Bendat-Appell said.

Aitz Hayim President Marc Slutsky said “The Comic Torah” is a “powerful way of taking not just the classic stories, but all the challenging pieces and making them accessible and engaging.”

“All Torah has to be modern otherwise it’s worthless,” Slutsky added. 

The graphic novel project, which took three years, was broken down by work on weekly Torah portions that were posted to the couple's Web site and sent out to their friends on a list serve.

The whole project put them in touch with the Jewish blog community, Rosenzweig said.

“I thought I was the only one sort on the threshold, looking in, not being able to be comfortable,” Rosenzweig said. “It turns out that there’s a whole new Jew movement full of people like that who are trying to find a way in and find a way to make rituals meaningful—people like me, who’ve been turned off [of] mainstream Judaism.”

Various blogs picked up their comic, Rosenzweig said. And, that’s also how the two found a publisher, New Jersey-based Ben Yehudah Press.

The book is not published yet—the publishing company, also run by a husband and wife team, is small and can’t afford color printing.

The company registered Freeman and Rosenzweig on an Internet startup called Kickstarter.com so the public can pledge money for a period of 90 days to help them raise funding.

The couple needs to raise $12,000 by Nov. 18, or none of the pledges will go through on the site.

The couple is offering pledge gifts for different levels of donations. The gifts include anything from a homemade hallah by Rosenzweig to naming the Torah volume after the donor.

For more information, go to www.thecomictorah.com.

By Blair Chavis|Triblocal.com reporter

Triblocal.com photo by Blair Chavis

Images from "The Comic Torah" submitted by Sharon Rosenzweig.