Jewish Relationships Initiative

Tag: Akedah

  • Both Boys Lived- A message from Rosh HaShanah

    Both Boys Lived

    Nobody is sacrificed on either morning. We move past that faster than it deserves.

    The knife stops. The well appears. Both boys grow up and become something. Ishmael is promised twelve princes and a great nation. When he dies, the Torah uses the identical phrase it gave Abraham eight verses earlier, vayigva vayamot vayei’asef el amav, meaning he breathed his last, died, and was gathered to his people. Isaac carries the covenant. Neither is destroyed by what was done to him, and neither ever says a word against the man who did it.

    Begin with what they were called, because neither boy was given a name of his own. Yishmael, “God will hear,” is assigned because the Lord has heard your affliction. It is the record of his mother’s rescue, fastened to him before he was born. Yitzchak, “he will laugh,” comes from a father laughing face down on the ground and a mother laughing behind the tent flap. One name commemorates a woman being heard. The other commemorates two people who did not believe. Neither name is about the boy carrying it.

    A mother saves them both.

    Hagar lifts her voice in the desert, and God hears the boy. Then comes a verse we don’t read on Rosh Hashanah. Vayehi Elohim et hana’ar vayigdal. God was with the lad, and he grew. He lived in the wilderness and became an archer, and his mother took him a wife from Egypt. She arranged her son’s marriage herself, in exile, with nothing. Isaac’s father sends a servant and ten camels to do it for him.

    Sarah is harder. She acts on her child’s behalf so he will live, and she puts another woman’s child in the desert. She sees her son, but she sees him so narrowly that she cannot see anyone else’s. And still, the one fact the Torah gives us about Isaac’s inner life is that he was comforted after his mother. Not after his father. Vayinachem, from the root that also means to change your mind, because comfort in Hebrew is a turning, and Isaac has a great deal to turn from.

    So, what happens to the children we do not see? Are they sacrificed? The Torah’s answer is no, but it is not a comforting no. The trauma somehow endures despite the achievements.

    They live. That much the text will say. They grow, they marry, they raise twelve princes, they inherit the covenant, they are gathered to their people full of days. Somebody looks at them. The looking gets done. Someone who is not you does it. Whether that is the same thing as being fine, the Torah leaves it for later, and it does answer it.

    What gets sacrificed is the relationship.

    Count the words. After the mountain, Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the Torah. Between Abraham and Ishmael, there is not a single recorded word in either direction. Here is a man who fathers two nations yet has no conversation with either of his sons. That is the cost of the Akedah, and it is not paid by a boy.

    You can see this happen now in families where everybody is still alive and nothing has visibly gone wrong. The child is thriving. There is work, a partner, and children of their own. The parent can narrate all of it accurately and has learned every detail from somebody else.

    Abraham dies at a hundred and seventy-five, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him together at Machpelah. The verse does not say they mourned him. It says they buried him. Then the Torah moves on, listing Ishmael’s sons, and Isaac returns to the well.

    The boys were never the sacrifice. Ask who was. Then ask whether somebody is out there right now, growing up without you.

    May the Days of Awe bring you meaning; may the year ahead be good.

    L’ShanahTova U’metukah.

  • Your Personal Story- Meaning from the Akedah

    We are about to read the story known as the Akedah, The Binding of Isaac. It is the story of Abraham hearing God’s command and taking his son on a journey to Mount Moriah, to offer Isaac as a sacrifice to the Eternal.

    What does the Akedah really mean? And why do we read it now, on Rosh Hashanah? It is a hard text to comprehend. It is incongruous, it seems too sparse- so much of the story seems to be untold; the unspoken words in between the words on the page seem almost boundless. It is also a hard text as we grapple to find Jewish values in a narrative that does not seem to explicitly embrace them very well. It is a fascinating example of remembrance.

    When we look back, it is interesting to see how we remember. Last year, all 365 days are compressed into some memories. We do not relive every moment. Instead we select highlights, and even those we filter and interpret. For anyone with a partner or spouse, we all have experienced a retelling of a story or event only to be interrupted by our partner with a different recollection of the same event. “No, it was Thursday— at 2 o’clock. And it was YOUR mother, not my father.” And even if you are single, we have all heard someone recall an event to which we think to ourselves, “that’s not how it happened at all.” Who we are affects and where we are in our lives affects what and how we remember. It is like that with the Akedah.

    Each time we approach this story it is new. The words are familiar but we see things we had not seen before, often we see things for the first time. We have grown and we have experienced and we are not who we were the last time we encounter the story. And because of this, the story is new, revealing things to us we did not or could not see before.

    There are stories and elucidations in our tradition that the rabbis told called Midrashim wherein they attempt to explain what is really happening in a particular biblical story, filling in the gaps that exist. The Akedah is a particularly fertile opportunity; the rabbis attempt to explain what is really going on here. Some Midrashim suggest that Isaac actually was sacrificed. One piece of evidence used to substantiate this understanding is that Abraham was instructed by God to sacrifice Isaac. The Angel telling Abraham to stop would not have swayed Abraham from following God’s instruction. It would be akin to a Lieutenant countermanding a General’s order. But ultimately God remains true to the promise and resurrects Isaac. This could account for why Abraham and Isaac ascend the mountain together, but Abraham descends the mountain alone.

    Why would such an interpretation come about?  Possibly it was in response to a time of great persecution when Jews were being martyred killed for their observance. We needed something to hold on to at a time of great hardship and trial. And it may have fallen into disuse as Christianity embraced the Akedah story as a foretelling of their theology.

    And then at other times, the Akedah presents the saving of Isaac as the triumphal expression of God’s love and the prohibition of human sacrifice. Some of the greatest minds, both Jew and non-Jew, throughout history have argued almost every conceivable interpretation. We carry on an illustrious tradition by continuing to grapple with this text.

    So for you here today, at this stage of your life what does the story of the Akedah mean to you? On Rosh Hashanah, this time of introspection, we are likened to Abraham. So as you reflect on your year gone by, how do you make meaning from your journey? What do you remember, what do you leave out? How do you make sense of your story as you listen to the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Akedah?