Every year our father
Abraham would take his sons to Mount Moriah
The way I take my children to the Negev hills where I once had a war.
Abraham hiked around with his sons. “This is where I left
The servants behind, that’s where I tied the donkey to a tree
At the foot of the mountain, and here, right here, Isaac my son,
you asked: Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt
offering? Then, up a little further, you asked for the second time.”
When they reached the mountaintop, they rested a bit, ate and drank,
And he showed them the thicket where the ram was caught by its
horns. After Abraham died, Isaac started taking his sons to the same
place.
“Here I lifted the wood, this is where I got out of breath,
here I asked, and my father answered: God will see to the lamb
for the offering. Over there, I already knew it was me.”
And when Isaac’s eyes were dim with age, his children
Led him to that same spot on Mount Moriah, and recounted for him
All that had come to pass, all that he might have forgotten.
Like every generation of Jews that went before us right up the
very present day, the Akedah will take our hand and lead us up that same mountain
so we also will not forget. On Rosh Hashanah
we therefore visit Mt Moriah where in a troubling story Abraham was asked to
sacrifice his son Isaac with a knife at the behest of God. The
traditional view of this narrative says that this test by God was intended to
see how faithful Abraham was. Yet, how can we as modern people
embrace such a story, or conceive of a God who morally would ask a father to do
such a heinous act? Why do we have to reconcile our humanity with
what seems like a perverse act of the Divine who on this day
we direct our prayers?
In the 19th century two Philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Immanuel Kant, attempted by
“reason” to make sense of this jarring story. Kierkegaard taught that this was
about the suspension of the ethical for extreme faith (sometimes faith must
dictate logic even if illogical) whereas for Immanuel Kant it was a
failure on Abraham’s part who failed to question how a moral God could ask such
a thing; God provided the lamb to rescue Abraham from his own
error. The ethical question asks … “if I listen to God will I betray
my son, but if I do not kill my son, do I betray God,” but my gosh, is that
even a real question? You see such a question posits a lose-lose by
asking Abraham to make a choice between his son and God let alone a choice
between the value of life and death.
Regarding this story, a story that is best read as an early Jewish myth as opposed to an actual event, I believe Abraham only knew justice and did not know mercy, something that in the end can teach us that we must listen to what cannot be heard and see what is not before us. When Abraham removed his son Ishmael from his midst he only knew that something had happened and justice required swift action (Tradition teaches Ishmael did evil). Abraham did not know that later God would approach Ishmael and in mercy promise to protect him (Gen. 21:19); the same goes with Lot. Why did Abraham not bargain God to 1 instead of stopping at 10? Abraham knew that while nowhere as evil as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot was not righteous either (remember he offed his daughters up), and therefore Abraham was afraid to know what that meant for his fate. In the end, Abraham made the only reasonable presumption that he could; if Lot did not get out it was God’s justice against his own failings. Yet tradition also tells us that based on the mercy of God Lot was saved by an Angel before the two cities were destroyed. Likewise, consistent with the common social structure of the day, Abraham is willing to slaughter his son for the same reason; he knew justice and not mercy. So it goes that in the same way Ishmael was banished to die in the wilderness and Lot was caught up in God’s wrath of justice, Isaac must have deserved his fate. What Abraham did not experience with Ishmael and Lot was the mercy of God, yet with Isaac, Abraham’s compulsion for absolute justice was supplanted by an act of mercy symbolized in the ram that appeared to be sacrificed instead. There is an ethic to this story, but it is not one of loyalty, but an ethic of self-realization, reinforced by a disturbing narrative that captures the entire person.
The Zohar asks why God called to Abraham twice in Genesis
22:11. The Zohar teaches that it “represented the perfected and
incomplete Abraham. The incomplete Abraham thought it was his duty
to carry out the sacrifice of his son, whereas the perfected Abraham upon
seeing the ram in the bush in that moment understood the truth of God lay in
the pre-ordained role of the ram itself.”
This test was about Abraham’s ability to see the other side and not about some misguided loyalty to God. Embedded in this story is the internal human voice that spoke to Abraham and asked him; what is justice without the bedrock of mercy? Perhaps this story may ask us: is assumption without fact rendered as meaningless? Or is anger without compassion a doorway to self-destruction? It might even prompt the question is death final without closure?
Judaism is always being rebirthed, even more so on this side of
the Holocaust, and much of our tradition is read through a new lens, a lens
where many Jews today, young and old, define themselves as spiritual as opposed
to religious, seeking the humanity of a ritual over its religious character alone, aspiring to understand the value of Jewish life but maybe just not like
yesterday. And the Akedah in the same way is a window to our souls
where we struggle to make meaning out of a story that on the surface appears
devoid of something acceptable; yet like with Abraham it can allow us to
recognize our perfected and incomplete selves.
Life as we know it right now is black and white – you are either
on my side or you are not. Aside from normal social concerns, our
communities are broken politically; the COVID virus and views of vaccination
have created a bifurcation of an already highly polarized society. Folks
to the left and right each feel strongly about their convictions as well as
being disrespected by the other side; where will this get us in the
end? Is the world we want to live in made up of an “us and them”
mentality, creating a barrier that fails to move our country (let alone family
and friends) forward during this unprecedented time in history. What
will future generations think when they read about our lifetime in the history
books?
The test of the Akedah asks us to understand that everything has two sides, or even more, and our role in our own way is to strive to bring healing to what lay before us. Rosh Hashanah celebrates the day the world was created, which we have memorialized in Tikkun Olam, helping fix what we can helps to recreate our world anew daily. Fixing what we can begins with knowing that the world is not one-dimensional, and while I know we know that, the Akedah can act as a not so subtle reminder. I wonder each year if the journey to the top of this mountain could help make a bigger difference than we may think.
