Like so many people, we live with unresolved polarities. Opposite perceptions of the world, each appropriate to a specific situation, jostle our sense of security, identity, and self. For Jews, that sense of living with contradictions extends back to our earliest beginnings. A small people, we encompassed the universe with our poetry and our prayers. A weak people, we articulated notions of good and evil which have challenged and restrained the most powerful nations of the world.
Our own age is not free of contradictions and ambiguities as well. As we celebrate an Israel that is democratic and productive, we also fear for its safety and its integrity. As we rejoice in the rich cultural and religious life of so many American Jews, we simultaneously worry about the threatening blandishments of assimilation and indifference.
There is a time for everything under the heavens. Our struggle is that we have everything under the heavens all at once. To ignore the real accomplishments of the Jewish People, both in Israel and in the Diaspora would be to impugn the power of the human spirit, the triumph of a small people to reestablish itself and to contribute to the development of a more humane and caring world.
Yet to focus only on our achievements--the many thriving institutions and synagogues, the Jewish day schools, a strong Israel, the rebirth of a vibrant Hebrew literature and a modern Israeli art would be pollyannish--a superficial ignorance of the risk that ours may be the last generation of Jews, that our culture, our religion, and our people face severe threats to our continuation and our health.
As did our ancestors, we must learn to live with paradox. Jewish survival may be in question, but our attitudes toward Jewish living play an essential role in determining our future. If we only fret over our losses, we will miss the opportunity to muster our resources for the fight ahead. If, on the other hand, we espouse a facile optimism, asserting that all is well and ignoring serious challenges, we may not see the need to mobilize. And there is a need to mobilize.
Judaism has always been a religion which insisted on confronting reality directly. Death, suffering, and evil were significant realities that Judaism refused to deny or minimize. The Reality Principle--that religion must recognize reality as its starting place--has guided Judaism from its inception.
But so has a stubborn refusal to despair. Jews have had ample reason to succumb to debilitating grief--millenia of persecution, pogroms, forced conversion, the Sho'ah, and a century of mindless hostility to Zionism and to Israel. Yet we never despaired. Instead, our confidence in our mission, our love of Torah and mitzvot, of learning and of family, carried us through the centuries.
Our challenge has always been to recognize reality as it is, while simultaneously working to transform reality to what it ought to be.
The story of the binding of Isaac which we read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah is a powerful precedent for sustaining our dual commitment, for recognizing the dangers of reality while still insisting that we shall overcome.
Examine the biblical story with me, and you will see that paradoxes abound: in God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, yet promising that the covenant would continue through that same son, in the willingness of both Abraham and Isaac to carry out God's shocking command, despite Abraham's vocal protest of God's intended destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the complete absence of Sarah from the story despite her centrality in previous moments in Abraham's career.
Perhaps most puzzling of all, is the very idea of God testing a chosen friend: Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test (22:1). But what, precisely, was the test about?
Was the test whether or not Abraham would engage in child sacrifice? We know that human sacrifice was universal in antiquity. Cemeteries with the remains of sacrificed children, and even an example of a pagan king who sacrificed his son within the Tanakh itself, testify to the far-too frequent perception that the gods require human offerings. If that is so, then Abraham would not have been surprised that his God, like everybody else's, wanted a child sacrifice. Noting that his God was more like other deities than he had previously surmised, Abraham would have simply recognized this demand as being typical of what Supreme Beings generally require.
So if human sacrifice is not the test, if the suspension of the ethical is not unusual, then what was it that Abraham was being tested on?
Abraham's test, I would suggest, was his ability to live with paradox, to be able to take the tension inherent in human existence and utilize that tension to generate growth, insight, and depth. Tension can be fruitful, its resolution can lead to a higher plateau. The paradox that faced Abraham challenges us as well today. In the face of an ominous and threatening reality, how can we affirm our trust in God's promise to our People? In other words, how can we act with sufficient confidence and commitment to ensure that Judaism and the Jews survive and grow? How can we contribute to a reality which adheres more closely to our highest ideals?
If we look back in the Torah, we see that just one chapter earlier, God had assured Abraham
It is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you(21:12).
God promises Abraham that the brit, the covenant made between Abraham and God, a covenant that extends to the entire Jewish People throughout time, will be transmitted through Isaac. And, then, one short chapter later, God orders Abraham to sacrifice that same son, thereby threatening to terminate the promise of a Jewish future.
Abraham's test, in short, is to affirm the possibilities inherent in paradox, to hold on to the polar opposites of the world as it is and the world as it might be, refusing to abandon either one in the process of repairing them both. Abraham's test was to accept God's command to go through the motions of offering up Isaac, fully confident that Isaac would indeed be the vehicle through which the covenant with the Jews would begin.
Indeed, we see hints of that insight throughout the story. Whereas Abraham always spoke out against injustice in the past, in this moment--most crucial of all!--Abraham is silent. How to explain his silence except to recognize the boundless depth of his faith that the crisis was only apparent, that his God would not abandon his covenant with the Jews.
Or, again, the silence is broken only once, in a conversation between father and son that marks their only recorded conversation in the entire Torah! Isaac asks his father:
Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?(22:7)
Abraham's response provides the essential information necessary to make sense out of our story. His reply is traditionally translated as "God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son(22:8)." Yet I must tell you that the punctuation of the biblical text is medieval, and might be more profitably read in a different way. Following Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, we can also hear Abraham as saying: "God will see. He has the lamb for the offering, my son."
In that second reading, Abraham reveals to his pliable son that the lamb for the offering will be on the top of the mountain when they get there. Abraham's faith is that strong.
And, in fact, Abraham proves to be right. Once Isaac is strapped to the altar, they do find a ram trapped in the branches of a nearby tree. As Abraham knew all along, God did provide a lamb for the offering.
The second half of Abraham's answer was correct--God did provide the offering on the mountain top. But what of the first part of Abraham's response, where he claims that "God will see." These two words are pivotal, so significant that when Abraham names the altar where his son was to be sacrificed, he calls it "God will see."
What is it that Abraham knew God would see? And what is it that God will see in our lifetimes?
What God saw on that mountain top was that Abraham and Isaac were there, body, mind, and soul. When God called them, no matter how paradoxical was the call, those two responded actively, totally. To God's summons, they both said, "Hineni," Here I am.
Abraham did not deny the terror of his situation. He did not ignore the pain and the uncertainty of what he was ordered to do. But he refused to surrender to the pain and the fear. He refused to allow the situation, any situation, to dictate the content of his identity as a Jew.
Abraham's test was whether, in trying times, he would still insist on his Jewish identity, would still retain confidence that God's promised covenant would survive. By refusing to abandon hope in the face of a bleak reality, by refusing to wish away a challenging reality in favor of simplistic beliefs and wishful stories, Abraham remained true to the brit, the covenant.
We too face that same test. In the luxurious abundance of America, in the threatened trenches of Israel, in the poorly supplied and still-risky gatherings of Soviet Jews, our people are called to recognize the reality of the threats facing us, to admit the statistical improbability of Jewish survival, and then to do the hard work necessary to transcend those statistics.
Threatened by assimilation and anti-Semitism, by Jewish indifference or disinterest, we, like Abraham, are tested.
For we, too, are the heirs to the promise, and the transmitters of that promise. God needs us to supply the hands to do the work, the hearts to bear the love, the mouths to give speech to the ancient primal utterance.
Netzakh Yisrael lo Yishaker,the Eternal One of Israel does not lie, and the eternity of the Jewish People is no lie. Here, today, if we resolve to survive, then we will. Here, today, if we determine to take our Judaism just a little more seriously than we did last year, if we undertake to grow in knowledge, in practice, and in participation--to take the next step--then we can remain the agents for God's Torah and for our People's Heritage.
Like Abraham and Isaac before us, we too can say, "Hinneni," we are here.
With faith in the merit and permanence of Judaism, recognizing that the reality of our lives and our community require special effort on our part, we too can pass the test.
Hinneni.
Shabbat shalom.