The Swan (link)

Steering Committee Chair Leslie Dolin’s Rosh Hashanah d’var Torah:

Today we read one of the most disturbing and difficult stories in the Torah, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing his beloved son Isaac on an altar to God; You remember the story — Isaac is saved at the last minute when an angel shows Abraham a ram caught in the bushes. In my younger days, I remember hearing that this story shows the greatness of Abraham, that he was willing even to sacrifice his son to prove his faith in God.

But that explanation doesn’t work for me any more (if it ever did). After all, what kind of God asks someone to burn up their child? Would I want to have anything to do with such a God? And it doesn’t seem an act of greatness or faith to me to be willing to sacrifice one’s child in such a manner.

So…I could just say, what’s the point of this? This means nothing to me. How can I find anything relevant to my life in this story? But if you are one of our Saturday regulars, and have heard the many wonderful d’var Torah given by our bar and bat mitzvah students this past year, you know that they have struggled with some difficult Torah portions and have quite masterfully found relevance to today’s world and their own lives. The least I can do is follow their example and struggle with this text, trying to make some sense of it; trying to make it relevant.

Certainly I am not the first one to do this. There is no shortage of commentaries on this story, discussing a variety of questions: Why did God need to test Abraham if he knew Abraham would pass the test? Why didn’t Abraham argue with God like he did over Sodom and Gomorrah? Why would Abraham do what God asked, taking his last son to be sacrificed, when this would mean that God’s own words about Abraham’s descendants would not be fulfilled? Why would God ask such a thing of Abraham?

We would be here all day if I looked at each of these questions with you.

But some of the commentaries are quite surprising, and so I thought I would share a few with you, to help you think in a different way about this story.

Lippman Bodoff, a contemporary Orthodox writer, suggests that God was testing Abraham’s willingness to refuse to murder his child even when God had commanded him to do so. (Abraham, when the angels tried to show him the ram, could, after all, have continued with the sacrifice as God had originally asked.) But, at the same time, Abraham was testing God, to make sure that the God he was agreeing to follow would not in the end require him to sacrifice his son. In other words, if this God demanded the same kind of things as found in his father’s pagan society, this would not be a God that Abraham would want to dedicate himself and his children to. Both Abraham and God pass the tests. What an amazing idea, to think that Abraham might be testing God. I like that, but I am still a bit dissatisfied, since this whole process was so hard on others in the story, Isaac and Sarah.

Some contemporary commentators say that we haven’t learned the lesson of this story; that we always have and continue today to sacrifice our children, though we just don’t see it that way. We continue to send them off to war to fight and die.

Our great sage Rashi implies that perhaps Abraham did not quite understand what God asks, and Abraham thinks God changed his mind. He reports a conversation between God and Abraham. Abraham speaks first:

“You said to me, ‘For [only] through Yitzchok will seed be considered yours.’ And then, again You said, ‘Take your son.’ And now, You say to me, ‘Do not touch the lad.’ ” G-d responded to him, “I will not profane My covenant nor alter the utterance of My lips. When I said to you, ‘Take’ I am not altering the utterance of My Lips, [for] I did not say to you, ‘Slaughter him’ but only ‘Sacrifice him.’ Now that you have brought him up [and prepared him for sacrifice], take him down.” (Bereshit Rabbah 56:8)

I have read a lot of commentaries to try to come to terms with this puzzling story, and perhaps even more important, I have talked to other people about it. I still don’t feel that I understand it, or have found explanations that work for me. And it is still hard to see what relevance this has for my life. My faith will probably never be as strong as Abraham’s, and with the discomfort this story leaves behind, I am not sure I would want it to be so strong.

But in thinking about all of this, I noticed something I never noticed before: Abraham struggled to understand God’s words alone. He talked to God, and God spoke to him, but God did not zap Abraham with understanding of the meaning of God’s words.

Last year we read the story of Hagar and her son, and how Abraham sends them away after Sarah insists that he do so. If you were here last year on Rosh Hashanah morning, you heard me talk about God telling Abraham to “heed Sarah’s voice”. Abraham understood that to mean that he should do whatever Sarah said, but I suggested that what God may have actually meant was that Abraham should listen to the implications of what Sarah said, that he should hear the pain and need behind her words, and help her through that. Perhaps, I said, Abraham misunderstood God’s words to him.

Again in this story of the binding of Isaac, perhaps Abraham misunderstood again. Our great sage Rashi suggests as much, as I said earlier.

Abraham did not talk to anyone else about his conversations with God. It is pretty clear from reading Torah that he didn’t talk to his wife Sarah about these things. And if he had talked to Sarah about this request from God, I don’t think it would have gone well. Nor could he have spoken to Isaac, even though in the story Isaac was an adult, not a child as we usually picture him. What could he say to his beloved child about this?

And who else could he have talked with? Can you imagine the conversation he would have with the local shepherds down by the well?

“God wants me to travel 3 days with my son to a place where I will sacrifice him.”
“Well, Abe, that’s what we do around here. It is a great honor.”

But, unlike Abraham, when I struggle with my thoughts about God, or about Torah, I have plenty of people to talk with. I have this community.

Abraham was on a spiritual journey. And, if you are here this morning, you too are probably searching for something. But why are you here; what makes this community special? How is it different from our work communities, our families, our school friends, other community organizations we belong to?

At the last place I worked, there was a real community feeling. A number of people who worked there felt this was almost their family. They celebrated birthdays together, helped each other when they were sick. But what would have happened if I wanted to discuss this story there? Or talk about if God exists, or my spiritual search within Judaism? Or the purpose of prayer?

I’d get responses like these: “I don’t talk about religion or politics.”
“I am not religious, but I am spiritual. So I can’t really say much about that.”
“I don’t need religion. I am a good person.”
And the most popular response: “Don’t you know about all the destruction and wars that religion causes?”

We know the ending of the Isaac story; he doesn’t die at the end. Yet it is easy to think about our own children when we hear this story. Many of you don’t know that during Shir Tikvah’s first year, before our rabbi returned from Israel, our 29 year old daughter died. Of course we got plenty of support from friends and family, but there was something special about this community. It was here that I could work through the meaning of this event in my life, over as long a time period as I needed. I was expected to think about it every week, when saying kaddish. Here we talk about things like memory, and the importance of our rituals. Here, when I say kaddish on the anniversary of her death, I will still get the pat on the shoulder, and needed hugs. And it was here that I found I could use this experience, horrible as it was, to help others in similar circumstances.

That year, when I did the flowers for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, it was an intense spiritual experience for me. Doing these large arrangements, thinking how they symbolize my current feelings, is always spiritual, but that year, it was the first creative thing I had done since my daughter had died 5 months before. I knew then that even though I was not out of the woods yet, that I would be all right.

Here at Shir Tikvah, we have a sacred, a holy community. Here we not only support each other and make friends, but we can find a path toward meaning in our lives. We can explore concepts of justice and morality and what they mean in a Jewish context. We can talk about Torah, and prayer, and Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. We can talk to others about what God wants for us. We can even discuss whether God exists, or what we mean when we say the word God. We might be able to do some of this in our other communities, though in my experience that is not so easy. Here, though, we are expected to do so.

I may not have found that perfect explanation of what this story of Abraham and Isaac is trying to show. I may not yet be satisfied that I understand what Abraham wanted, and what God expected. But I now at least have more sympathy for Abraham. He struggled alone on his spiritual quest, trying to make sense of it all himself. We don’t have to. We have this sacred community to support us in our search.