Rabbi Ackerman's Blog
09/21/2009 - Rosh Hashanah 2nd Day Sermon 5770
Rosh Hashana 2 -5770 – Rabbi David Ackerman – Beth Am IsraelThe story of Akedat Yitzhak, this morning’s Torah reading, has challenged and perplexed readers for millennia. Questions far outnumber answers each year as we encounter this difficult story in the midst of our celebration of Rosh Hashanah. Churchill’s famous description of the Soviet Union comes to mind – the Akedah feels very much like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The story’s enigmatic nature finds reflection in the way in which the Torah narrates the tale of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. Erich Auerbach, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and one of the 20th centuries leading literary critics, offers us a telling and evocative description of the Akedah’s literary style. Auerbach notes the story’s “heavy silence,” within which “everything remains unexpressed.” Then he offers this analysis: “the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches.”
Thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed. We don’t know why God tests Abraham and consequently we do not know what it will take for Abraham to pass the test. Nor do we know what motivates Abraham simply to obey without question let alone challenge. We know nothing at all, not even names, of the young men who accompany Abraham on this journey. Isaac’s emotional state remains a mystery throughout as, frankly, does Abraham’s. Sarah, for whom Isaac is truly an only child, is entirely absent. All we know, as Auerbach puts it, are “the phenomena necessary for the purpose of the narrative.” Just the facts, and not too many of those.
And then there’s the ram; in Yehudah Amichai’s deliciously mischevious opening line, “the real hero of the Isaac story was the ram.” Let’s start there –
הגבור האמתי של העקדה
- The Real Hero of the Akeda
The real hero of the Isaac story was the ram,
Who didn’t know about the conspiracy between the others.
As if he had volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
I want to sing a song in his memory –
About his curly wool and his human eyes,
About the horns that were so silent on his living head,
And how they made those horn into shofars when he was slaughtered
To sound their battle cries
Or to blare out their obscene joy.
I want to remember the last frame
Like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:
The young man tanned and manicured in his jazzy suit
And beside him the angel, dressed for a party
In a long silk gown,
Both of them empty-eyed, looking
At two empty places,
And behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
Caught in the thicket before the slaughter.
The thicket was his last friend.
The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of the Isaac story was the ram.
Amichai finds tragedy in the ram’s death and gives voice to the overlooked and voiceless. Drawing on the words of a diverse group of Hebrew poets and Bible scholars, I’d like to try this morning to fill in some of the blanks in this saga, to attempt to articulate some of the unexpressed thoughts and feelings, to give voice to the characters lurking mysteriously in the obscured background of this morning’s Torah reading.
I like Amichai’s notion that the ram is the real hero. A parallel thought is that Sarah is the real victim. In the flow of the Torah’s narrative, the very next thing reported after the Akedah is word of Sarah’s death. In a very real sense, Sarah doesn’t survive the ordeal. How might she have responded to God’s command to bring her only child to the altar? Israeli poet Ra’aya Harnik gives us one possible version –
I Will Not Offer
I will not offer My first born for sacrifice Not I
At night God and I Make reckonings Who can claim what
I know and am Grateful But not my son And not For sacrifice
Noting the close bond between Isaac and Sarah, feminist Bible scholar Phyllis Tribble argues that Sarah ought to have been tested by God rather than Abraham. “The dynamic of the larger narrative…suggests that Sarah learn the meaning of obedience to God, find liberation from attachment, free Isaac from maternal ties, and emerge herself shorn of idolatry.”
Woody Allen sees it all a bit differently. He’s in the Bible scholar category, not the Hebrew poet group. Here’s his version of Sarah’s response to God’s command.
And Sarah who heard Abraham’s plan grew vexed and said, “How doth thou know it was the Lord and not, say, thy friend who loveth practical jokes, for the Lord hateth practical jokes and whosoever shall pull one shall be delivered into the hands of his enemies, whether they can pay the delivery charge or not.” And Abraham answered, “Because I know it was the Lord. It was a deep, resonant voice, well-modulated, and nobody in the desert can get a rumble in it like that.” And Sarah said, “And thou art willing to carry out this senseless act?” But Abraham told her, “Frankly yes, for to question the Lord’s word is one of the worst things a person can do, particularly with the economy in the state it’s in.”
Irreverence aside, Woody Allen’s Sarah sees no sense at all in God’s command. She remains attached to the full constellation of human relationships and cannot even begin to imagine that God would demand detachment or obedience.
Abraham, in contrast, has no trouble with obedience. That’s the content of God’s test and Abraham passes with flying colors. Bible scholar Jon Levenson notes that “Abraham’s fear of God…his reverential obedience to Adonai has altogether overwhelmed his love of Isaac…Abraham’s obedience is absolute and uncompromising.” Picking up on that sense of absolutist obedience allied with a dreamy detachment, Israeli poet Zelda, sees in her own saba, her grandfather, more than a hint of spiritual kinship with Abraham.
Like our father Abraham
Who counted stars at night,
Who called out to his Creator
From the furnace,
Who bound his son
On the altar –
So was my grandfather.
The same perfect faith
In the midst of the flames,
The same dewy gaze
And soft-curling beard.
Outside, it snowed;
Outside, they roared:
“There is no justice,
No judge.”
And in the shambles of his room,
Cherubs sang
Of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Our tradition tends to celebrate Abraham’s certainty, his focus, his steely resolve. But I suspect we would all agree that as a character trait, uncompromising and absolute obedience is more than a little problematic. Indeed, I’ve long felt that Abraham comes off as something of a fanatic, whose blind obedience prevents him from recognizing the impossibility of God’s commandment and from seeking out another path. The traditional Sefardic piyyut that accompanies the Shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah, a masterpiece of medieval Hebrew poetry, goes out of its way to soften Abraham, depicting him as a loving father who seeks God’s mercy and who weeps bitterly as he binds Isaac to the altar. Abraham may be obedient to a fault, but at least he obeys with feeling and recognizes in some measure the tragedy in which he participates.
Woody Allen, not surprisingly, is less forgiving.
“…at the last minute the Lord stayed Abraham’s hand and said, “How could thou doest such a thing?” And Abraham said, “But thou said ---” Never mind what I said,” the Lord spake. “Doth thou listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?” And Abraham grew ashamed. “Er --- not really --- no.” “I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately run out to do it.” And Abraham fell to his knees, “See, I never know when you’re kidding.” And the Lord thundered, “No sense of humor. I can’t believe it.” “But doth this not prove I love thee, that I was willing to donate mine only son on thy whim?” And the Lord said, “It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice.” And with that, the Lord bid Abraham get some rest and check with him tomorrow.
Humorlessness goes hand in hand with uncompromising absolutism. A sense of humor, writes Amos Oz, is a great cure for fanaticism. So too imagination, humility, and open mindedness. Luckily, Abraham’s openness to seeing another path at the critical moment saves Isaac’s life and allows the story’s tension a measure of release.
But not before we hear from Isaac. Three poets, three aspects of Isaac. The Sefardic piyyut that I just mentioned puts words of tender devotion into Isaac’s mouth, words that reflect his love and concern for Sarah:
See how my mother’s joy is gone;
The son she bore when she was ninety years old
Has fallen prey to the slaughtering knife and the fire.
Where shall I find someone to comfort her? Where?
I sorrow for the mother who must weep and sob.
Isaac who grieves in advance for Sarah, also fears Abraham. Amir Gilboa presents Isaac’s recollection of the Akedah as a nightmare.
Isaac
At dawn, the sun strolled in the forest Together with me and father, And my right hand was in his left.
Like lightning a knife flashed among the trees. And I am so afraid of my eyes’ terror, faced by blood on the leaves.
Father, father, quickly save Isaac So that no one will be missing at the midday meal.
It is I who am being slaughtered, my son, And already my blood is on the leaves. And father’s voice was smothered And his face was pale.
And I wanted to scream, writhing not to believe, And tearing open my eyes. And I woke up.
And my right hand was drained of blood.
And Israeli poet Haim Gouri brings us back to the ram, via Isaac and his legacy to us, his descendants.
Heritage
The ram came last of all.
And Abraham did not know
That it came to answer the boy’s question –
First of his strength when his day was on the wane.
The old man raised his head.
Seeing that it was no dream
And that the angel stood there –
The knife slipped from his hand.
The boy, released from his bonds,
Saw his father’s back.
Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed.
He lived for many years,
Saw the good, until his eyes dimmed.
But he bequeathed that hour to his descendants.
They are born
With a knife in their hearts.
Gouri’s ram comes last and leaves behind the central symbol of Rosh Hashanah. The shofar stands for many things but I want to stay focused on one. Maimonides likens two of the shofar’s sounds – teruah and shevarim – to a plaintive wail, yevava in Hebrew, and to an anguished groan, anakha in Hebrew. Yevava, says the Rambam, is the howl and wail of women who cry together, while anakha is the ongoing groan of one whose heart is filled with worry over something large. A complex web of midrashim connects the yevava, the wailing teruah with Sarah Imeinu. We’ve heard her maternal wail already this morning and we’ll hear it again during musaf. The existential groaning anakha, I suggest, brings to our ears Abraham’s tears in the last moment before he bind his son to the altar. He obeys, but with trepidation and with a halting, tearful uncertainty in his heart. We’ve heard and will again hear the bitter weeping of Avraham Avinu in the slurred shevarim of the shofar. And then there’s Isaac’s cry of terror, which I suggest we hear when shevarim and teruah are sounded back to back. Isaac’s terrorized scream combines his mother’s wail and his father’s groan. That combination is our legacy of hearts pierced by a knife. The shofar, the horn of the hero, gives voice to the unexpressed thoughts and feeling hiding behind the Akedah’s terse narrative.
And then there’s the ram whose horn fills in the blanks in the Akedah story. The riddles remain, the mysteries and enigmas endure. Ironically, the clarion call of the hero’s horn brings us the very human side of the saga, filled with anger and anguish, complexity and struggle, tenderness and devotion and love. That truly is a story worth telling over and over again.
May the voice of the shofar summon us to our own struggles with attachment and idolatry, blind obedience and the potential for fanaticism, real connection and deep compassion.
And may that voice keep us connected with the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that is Akedat Yitzhak.
L’shana tova tikateivu – may we all be inscribed for a good and sweet new year.
Gut Yontif, Gut Yahr, Shana Tova.
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