Rabbi Jordie Gerson 2017 The Aqeda Revisited: Sarah s Choice Rosh HaShanah Day 5778 This morning, just a few moments ago, we finished reading the Aqeda, the binding of Isaac, a story that has, for years, mystified me. It is, in equal parts, terrifying, painful, and incredibly sad. As a teenager, when I was wrestling with whether I wanted to be Jewish at all, the story of Isaac sacrificing his son seemed to confirm what I d long suspected: that Judaism was the religion of an angry God who was liable to demand unbelievably unreasonable things from us that we were just supposed to do without questioning. The justifications we were given in Hebrew school didn t help: God was testing Abraham s faith, one teacher said, Abraham was proving his loyalty, said another. But what kind of God, I ve always thought, would demand a sacrifice like this in the first place? And what kind of religion would insist 1
that we read this story every single year, on the day when everyone shows up? A few years ago, a friend gave me a poem written by a woman named Eleanor Wilner called Sarah s Choice that helped me think through some of these questions. In Sarah s Choice, Wilner imagines that when God asks for the sacrifice of Isaac, the request is first brought to Sarah, Isaac s mother. This imagining, this departure from what the Torah tells us actually happened is a contemporary midrash, a modern take on an ancient story. The poem begins like this, Go! said the voice, Take your son, your only son, whom you love, take him to the mountain, bind him and make of him a burnt offering. Now Isaac was the son of Sarah s age, a gift, so she thought, from God. And how 2
could he ask her even to imagine such a thing to take the knife of a butcher and thrust it into such a trusting heart, then light the pyre on which tomorrow burns. What fear could be more holy than the fear of that? Go! said the Voice, Authority s own. And Sarah rose to her feet, stepped out Of the tent of Abraham to stand between The desert and the distant sky, holding its stars Like tears it was too cold to shed And then it was that Sarah spoke In a soft voice, a speech The canon does not record. No, said Sarah to the Voice, I will not be chosen. Nor shall my son if I can help it. You have promised Abraham, through this boy, a great nation. So either this sacrifice is a sham, or else it is a sin. Shame, she said, for such is the presumption 3
Of mothers, for thinking me a fool, For asking such a thing. You must have known I would choose Isaac. What use have I For History an arrow already bent When it is fired from its bow? Saying that, Sarah went into the tent And found her restless son awake, as if He d grown aware of the narrow bed in which he lay And Sarah spoke out of the silence She had herself created, or that had been there All along. [and said] Tomorrow you will be A man. Tonight, then, I must tell you the little I know. You can be chosen or you can choose. Not both. The voice of the prophet grows shrill He will read even defeat as a sign Of distinction, until pain itself Becomes holy. In that day, how shall we tell The victims from the saints, The torturers from agents of God? 4
But mother, said Isaac, if we were not God s chosen people, what then should be we be? I am afraid of being nothing. And Sarah laughed. Then she reached out her hand. Isaac, I am going now, before Abraham awakes, before The sun, to find Hagar the Egyptian and her son Whom I cast out, drunk on pride God s promises, the seed of Abraham, In my own late-blooming loins. But Ishmael, said Isaac, how should I greet him? As you greet yourself, she said when you bend over the well to draw water and see your image not knowing it reversed. You must know your brother now, or you will see your own face looking back the day you re at each other s throats. She wrapped herself in a thick dark cloak Against the desert s enmity swung her bundle on her back Reached out once more toward Isaac. 5
It s time, she said, Choose now. But what will happen if we go? the boy Isaac asked, I don t know. Sarah said But it is written what will happen if you stay. Isaac stays. He chooses to trust Abraham, and wakes early the next morning, asking his father only one question: We have the wood, we have the fire starter, but where is the lamb we re going to sacrifice? God will provide the lamb, my son. says Abraham, choosing to obey the command he believes he has heard, overlooking its most important element, overlooking that God s request does not start with a command. Instead, God starts the request by describing the relationship between father and son, saying: Take your son, your favored son, whom you love. Biblical commentators and scholars tell us there are no mistakes in the Torah 6
that when words are repeated repeatedly, we re meant to understand that there is some not-so-subtle subtext at work, a message we re supposed to pick up on. So why does God remind Abraham multiple times that he loves his son? Doesn t Abraham know this? Well, as Sarah implies in Wilner s poem, it s possible that Abraham doesn t know, or that he does know, but needs to be reminded. He has, after all, allowed Ishmael to be exiled at Sarah s request, and, in the doing, broken something essential between himself and his first born son, Ishmael. And so, Take your son, your favored son, whom you love is at once reminder and rebuke, a way of reminding Abraham what he has done to Ishmael and holding him accountable for the choice he will make with Isaac. But he does not hear it that way. Instead, Abraham simply obeys God s command, 7
not realizing that he has been given an opening to object to this trip to the mountain and the opportunity to break his pattern; to fight for the people he loves, even if the cost is disobedience. And so it seems to me that it s not a mistake that we read this parsha today, the day of the year on which we re asked to stop doing what we normally do, look at our hurtful patterns, and resolve to break them. On Rosh HaShanah, we, like Abraham, are being asked to evaluate the cost of those choices we have made without thinking. We, like Abraham, are being asked to step back and stop. And this is why we read the Aqeda at the New Year: to remind ourselves that it is never too late to change, to choose differently, to make a different choice about the kind of people we wish to be, the kind of sons and daughters, parents and children, partners and spouses. We always, as Sarah says in Eleanor Wilner s poem, have a choice. 8
The aqeda is teaching us that we can become more authentically ourselves more human - when we stop doing what we think is expected of us and realize the immense possibilities of our lives. And this is the best thing about your years at UVM. You have an opportunity that you ll never have again to recreate who you are, to go against conventional means, to try on new beliefs and new values, new ideas and new kinds of friends. You can wear different clothes, explore different hobbies, and figure out what you truly love. Because the aqeda isn t really about the sacrifice of Isaac. It s about Abraham s sacrifice it s about Abraham giving up his perception of what is required of him by external voices. Because as Professor Marsha Mirkin argues, 9
even though Abraham promises Isaac that God will provide the lamb for the offering, this is a promise that goes unfulfilled. God does not provide a lamb. No, God ultimately provides a ram for the sacrifice, the father of a lamb. And so is Abraham who must sacrifice something of himself on Mt. Moriah, not Isaac. On Mt. Moriah, Abraham is being freed of an understanding of Judaism as a religion which demands absolute obedience, being freed of a life where he can do no better than simply consent to what he has been told to do by others, even at the cost of his own happiness, even at the cost of the people he loves most. Which is why I imagine an addition to Wilner s poem that has Sarah speaking directly to Abraham the night before the aqeda. I imagine her saying: What do you think you re doing, taking literally everything that God says? Taking literally everything you re commanded? 10
How can you believe that killing our child is what God would want? Don t you know that Judaism stands for life and not death for compassion and not cruelty? Have you forgotten the freedom we ve been given the ability to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice? You can be chosen, I imagine Sarah saying to her husband, or you can choose. And I picture God speaking to Abraham the next morning, saying: You were about to kill the child and blame me for it, weren t you? Haven t you been paying attention? Where did you learn to believe that Judaism and our lives are about unquestioning obedience? Why do you believe being a good person means not challenging what you ve been told to do even if you know it is wrong? Why too, do so many of us believe this? Why do we have a black and white view of religion? Why do we believe that Judaism demands from us 11
absolute obedience? And that we don t have a choice? In Rabbinical School, I took a class called Rabbinic Leadership and Social Responsibility and one afternoon, as we were discussing the Aqeda, my professor, a Rabbi and ground-breaking civil rights activist who once marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, said, The best thing that ever happened to human beings was being thrown out of the Garden of Eden. God would not have presented Adam and Eve with the tree of knowledge if God hadn t wanted them to eat from it. God wanted them to eat from the tree God wanted them out of the garden. I think what he meant by that is this: God, like Sarah, wants us to grow up. God wants us to take responsibility for our choices. Our childhoods, like Isaac s, are over being good no longer means being obedient. The door to the garden has swung shut behind us. We have to deal with the world. 12
We have to take responsibility for our own choices. And we have only ourselves to blame for our mistakes, not religion. And so Rabbi Jack RIemer suggests, what if the sacrifice of a sheep on the altar is really a way of God telling Abraham not to be a sheep. What if it s a way of discouraging thoughtless obedience, the kind of obedience that condones the death of innocents, and allows supposedly religious people to do unspeakable things in the name of faith? What if what if Abraham was chosen because God saw him as someone who would be willing to say no to things that were asked of him that he thought were wrong, because God saw Abraham as someone who knew himself enough to be able to say no, to choose differently, even when doing so was a tremendous risk? What if the test was not to see if Abraham would obey without question, but to see if Abraham s conscience had matured to the point where it could distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic voice of God, 13
between a voice that justifies murder in the name of God and a voice that knows better. The point, as Sarah says to Isaac in Eleanor Wilner s poem, is not merely that we are a chosen people. We are a people who can choose. [PAUSE] Do you remember the last four lines of the poem? They went like this: It s time, Sarah said, Choose now. But what will happen if we go? the boy Isaac asked, I don t know. Sarah said But it is written what will happen if you stay. May we in this New Year have the vision, the wisdom and the compassion to choose well. And may our choices become blessings: for ourselves, our families, our community, and the world. Kein Yehi Ratzon. May this be God s will, and may it be ours as well. (This sermon was inspired by Marsha Mirkin s article Reinterpreting the Binding of Isaac from Tikkun, Sept/Oct 2003, Vol 18, Issue 5) 14
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