AlephBet An Alphabet for the Perplexed Author:Joshua Cohen Here, writer Joshua Cohen and artist Michael Hafftka interpret the twenty-two letters of the Aleph Bet, the Hebrew alphabet. Through their images and texts, Cohen and Hafftka engage these letters, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: the letter HEY becomes a hat, or a ritual head-covering; the letter YOD is said to repr... more »esent a young girl... These images, and their three texts (two stories entitled Naming and Shabbos Dinner, with Letterforms, and the essayistic A Metaphysical Disquisition Upon the Nature of the Hebrew Sophiyot), together formulate a challenge to the Second Commandment, which forbids representation, in a style at once traditional and modern, expressively mindful of what it means to lack faith and yet, in the turn of a phrase, at the stroke of a paintbrush, refusing the consolation of cult. Here is a rewrite, and a re-depiction, of the spoken, the written and the visual Law a brilliant, future classic of Judaica... An Alphabet for the Perplexed.« less