May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be holy
and acceptable in your sight, Adonai our Strength and our Redeemer.
What an honor to be asked to give a talk for the second day of Rosh Hashanah,
I told Rabbi Aviva in the spring. And
then the realization. Oh great. The Binding of Isaac.
Let's start here: God does not desire, God has never desired, the death
of children. I'd go so far as to suggest that any healthy and humane and yes,
any truly devout and righteous reaction to this story involves an element of visceral
revulsion. It's a great credit to the tradition of scholarship on the passage
that Jewish exegesis has for many centuries made space for such responses. The early midrash Bereshit Rabbah imagines God as saying
"I never considered telling Abraham to slaughter Isaac,"
distinguishing between the verb for slaughter and the verb for sacrifice. The
Spanish Rabbi Yona Ibn Yanach in the 11th century followed in this tradition
when he wrote that God demanded only a symbolic sacrifice. A later Spanish Rabbi
Yosef Ibn Caspi in the 14th century wrote that Abraham allowed his imagination
to lead him astray, making him believe that he had been commanded to slay his
son. Ibn Caspi asked, "How could God command such a revolting thing?"
Another possibility is that
the test is actually not whether Abraham will be willing to sacrifice Isaac,
but whether he will have the moral integrity to reply to God, "Are you out
of your freaking mind?"--a test he fails.
I find great comfort in these
voices of exegetical dissent to the disturbingly broad current of
interpretation that in considering this story represses empathy and accepts
without hesitation the legitimacy of God asking anything God wants, or at very least
the legitimacy of God testing Abraham by asking for something so outrageous
that he never intended for Abraham to go through with it. "Hey, just
kidding," says the angel, which supposedly turns it into a story of God's
mercy and favor to one so righteous that he's assented to an atrocity. Such
interpretations remain blind not only to the monstrous pressure this puts on
Abraham's motivations, but to the trauma suffered by Isaac--a trauma that some
have identified as scarring Isaac for life and leading down the generations to
some of the spectacular relational dysfunction that follows in the later
chapters of Genesis. That kind of emotional dissociation in the interpretation
of scripture has led to some heartless attitudes in all three of the Abrahamic
religions, as English biologist Richard Dawkins has gleefully pointed out in
his ongoing sophomoric rant against all religious faith.
But this morning I want to
invite you down a path that begins by looping back for its starting point to
Yosef ibn Caspi's suggestion that we might read this story as an account of
Abraham being awakened, in the nick of time, from a delusion into which his own
imperfect perception of the Divine had led him. I invite you to consider the
story as exemplifying the possibilities of our developing understanding of
God--through all human religious history, through the history of Judaism, and
through the course of our own individual spiritual journeys.
In other words, we have to
make a radical distinction between what
Abraham perceives God as saying to him, and what HaShem, the Ground of our
Being, could possibly whisper in the hearts of the righteous. So I'm asking you
to entertain the possibility that when the text says that God spoke to Abraham,
we can read this as stating Abraham’s own point of view at the time, not an
absolute point of view that establishes the demand to sacrifice Isaac as the
genuine will of God. We might support this argument by observing that the
description of the command to sacrifice, at the beginning of the parshat, is notably
distinct from the last-minute command to stop. We hear at the very beginning of
the reading that Elohim tests Abraham. Later, it's not Elohim but an angel who
speaks, and more perhaps to the point, God is referred to this time not as
Elohim, but by the Divine Name, as Adonai. Some modern scholars have suggested
that this represents a splicing of originally separate narratives, or
alternatively, that the prevention of the sacrifice represents an interpolation
that reflects the unease of later redactors with the story. In any case, if we
put pressure on this distinction of language, it's also striking that the voice
of deliverance is not the voice of Elohim Godself, but of Adonai's messenger.
We don't have to look far into
the record of religious self-assurance to see Abraham's deluded certainty at
work. We can see it in the collusion of multiple Christian denominations in the
tragedy of the residential school system, with its decades of attempted
cultural genocide against the First Nations. We can see it in theocratic
tyranny over the lives of generations of
women and children in Ireland. We can see it in the rise of Hindu
fundamentalist violence in India. We can see it in Buddhist violence against
the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar. We can see it in the horrors of
Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria. We see
it in the refusal of ultra-Orthodox settlers to cease from further illegal
appropriation of West Bank land to which they have no rightful claim. We can
see it in stabbing attacks on marchers in the Tel Aviv Pride parade. We can see
it in American Christian fundamentalists picketing the funerals of men who died
of AIDS in the 1990s and the funeral of Matthew Sheppard when he died of a
brutal queer-bashing outside Laramie, Wyoming. In all these cases, it's the
certainty that there is no gap between God and our understanding of God and God's
will that has laid Isaac on the altar and put the knife in Abraham's hand.
In and of itself, this isn't a
hard lesson for most of us in this particular congregation to absorb. Shir
Libeynu exists in great part because many of us have had the experience of
being Isaac, laid on somebody else's altar. Many of us had the experience of
leaving the faith communities of our origin because of the marginalization we
felt as feminist women, as queer, as intermarried, as not Jewish enough, as not
Jewish at all. Speaking for myself, I'm here not only in spiritual solidarity
with my partner Jonathan, but because of the deep, solemn joy I derive from
being called to account in light of the original goodness of my created nature,
our created nature; the deep joy I derive from being called in these Yamim
Noraim to take part in the sanctification of time itself--a joy I simply cannot
find in the self-abnegating penitential practices of Lent in the Christian
tradition in which I was reared, and in which I still participate, albeit with
a wary, critical edge.
That said, it's incumbent on
us this holy day to remember that we're called to account for the ways in which
we've also been Abraham with the knife in our hand, in which we continue to be
Abraham, ready to do something terrible if we're not listening for a voice that
comes from beyond the limits of our imagination to call us back from the brink.
The paradox of our lives is that we can be both Isaac and Abraham at once--even
when our liberal, freethinking credentials are impeccable. In our own small
way, we participate in Abraham's misguided zeal every time we justify our
behaviour toward others by imagining that there's no gap between our conception
of the Divine and the Divine itself. Every time we're not prepared to hear the
angel say, "Dayenu, already. That's your child on the altar, and any god
you imagine might desire his death is not Adon Olam, the Rock of your Salvation
and the Sustainer of heaven and earth."
We let ourselves too easily
off the hook when we imagine it's only others who can set up their own sense of
divinely sanctioned certainty like an internal mental idol on whose altar we're
prepared to immolate love. Today's parshat invites us to recognize that our
conception of the Holy One is always imperfect, always provisional, always fall
short. It warns us that we're likely to go the farthest off course when we
forget that and forge ahead, using our own understanding of truth and righteous
action to ride roughshod over the dignity, the livelihood, even the lives of
others.
More optimistically, today's
reading reminds us simultaneously that humanity is capable of spiritual growth,
that religious traditions are capable of spiritual growth, that we as
individuals are capable of spiritual growth, and that our errors, even our
truly terrible errors, once we put them behind us, are themselves part of the
path forward. Abraham hears the angel and lowers the hand that he held ready to
strike. Ireland votes for same-sex marriage. The Confederate battle flag comes
down from the South Carolina Statehouse. Parents who've ostracized queer kids come
around to love and inclusion and celebration of their children's lives. Kids
who've shut out newly self-declared queer parents, or divorced parents, or
polyamorous parents, come around to empathy and acceptance. An
eighteenth-century slaveship captain turns his boat around in mid-Atlantic and
sails back to Africa, goes on to write Amazing Grace, and spends the rest of
his life as an abolitionist. We let go of our self-assured knowledge and stop
using God, or God's will, or our notion of Truth with the dreaded capital T, in
order to justify making those around us into objects of our sacrifice. We open
our eyes to the fact that beyond our imperfect understanding, it's the beloved
who lies at risk right before our eyes, it's the beloved we're ready to slay
who shows us the genuine presence of the Holy One, and the deeper Truth. The
angel not only stops Abraham in the nick of time, but blesses him for the worthiness
of his desire to serve God that has coexisted with his delusion.
We're all Abraham. At the same
time, we're also all Isaac. And I invite you, as these Days of Awe continue to
unfold, to engage in some midrash of your own, imagining what it was like as
Abraham unbound his beloved child. What passed between them? Did the angel hang
out for a while coaching them through a sort of personalized Truth and
Reconciliation process? Or just disappear, as angels so often do? Did they
break down weeping together at the side of the road, as Jacob and Esau will do
two generations on? Did they succeed in the work of healing as they went back
down the mountain, rejoined the servants, made their way back to Sarah?
