Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 21, 2017 0:07:52 GMT
It’s interesting that we read the akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, on Rosh Hashanah. Why do we do that? Most of us were told as kids that this is a story that shows Abraham’s complete devotion to God, that shows us how we must behave – that we must be prepared to do whatever God asks of us. But if that were true, then that would make it a totally inappropriate story for Rosh Hashanah! The overriding metaphor of this time is of judgment and repentance, not of unquestioning obedience. The Rabbinic concept of Rosh Hashanah is of a time spent returning to the immediacy of God’s presence through teshuvah, often translated rather simplistically as atonement. There’s none of that in the story of the akeidah. In our experience of Rosh Hashanah, we have a relationship with God. God calls to us, “Return to me” and we simultaneously ask God to “Bring us back to You.” There is no return for Abraham, just blind obeisance.
I understand the perspective that says that Abraham is an exemplar of religious behaviour, that he doesn’t question God and just does what he knows is right. According to that narrative, we should therefore copy him and just do exactly what God wants, and then we would not need atonement. I understand that perspective but there are, in my opinion, a number of issues with it. Firstly, if Abraham is such an examplar of following God’s word whatever happens, why does he argue with God only a couple of chapters before when God wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? How come when other innocent people are involved, Abraham openly argues with God for half a chapter, but when it comes to his own son, he doesn’t lift a word in complaint? This inconsistency means that he can’t be an exemplar of unquestioningly doing whatever God wants of us.
More importantly, though, Abraham clearly hears the word of God, but we don’t, so it’s impossible for us to do what he did anyway. We don’t know exactly what God wants of us, we can only now try to work that out. Abraham’s example does nothing for us in terms of religious decision making because he didn’t have any decision to make, whereas we do. Abraham’s narrative is one of direct transmission of law, whereas we have to work out law in our lives.
The absence of a bat kol, a heavenly voice that instructs us, is profoundly important for us today because it places Judaism in our hands, not in the hands of a Divine authority. The priests used to be the intermediaries between humanity and God through sacrifice, then the Rabbis were through study and prayer. The tiered structure of authority helped to instill fear and obedience, which is reflected in our liturgy that aims at Divine appeasement. Now, though, a Rabbi is an authority only in the sense of learning and guidance. As Enlightenment values made their way into the Jewish community, and as legal authority was transferred to the state, halakhah, Jewish law, lost any meaningful legal status. Now, more than ever, authority is in our hands. A famous story in Talmud understands this. When Rabbi Eliezer is arguing with the other Rabbis about a matter of law, a bat kol, a heavenly voice, interrupts and asks the Rabbis “Why do you disagree with Rabbi Eliezer, with whom the halakhah always agrees?” That should be the end of the argument, but it’s not. The Rabbis reply by quoting Scripture back at God – lo bashamayim hi, meaning, “It is not in heaven.” “Ein anu mashgichin b’vat kol - We do not pay heed to a Heavenly voice” because God has told us to follow the majority ruling.
Lo bashamayim hi. It is not in heaven. The story of the akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, very clearly places authority in the non-human realm, God instructs Abraham to offer up his son and Abraham is stopped from performing the same act by an angel who calls to him from heaven. It suggests that authority is from heaven. But the Rabbis turned that on its head, even in the face of a bat kol, a voice from heaven. They seized religious authority from the Divine realm and dragged it into the human realm. In so doing, they liberated Judaism from theocracy but at the same time they cemented their own interpretive authority. Nearly two thousand years later, Reform Judaism seized interpretive authority from that same Rabbinic elite and opened it up to the people. In so doing, they liberated Judaism from meritocracy but at the same time created a crisis of authority. With traditional authority gone and no-one to tell Jews that they have to observe festivals or come to services or keep kosher, there was no compulsion to act. Then, when they exercise their free will and choose to come back to services on Rosh Hashanah, they are read a Biblical story and are told that Judaism is epitomized by God telling us what to do, whether it’s something horrifying or not. The result of this is that when they leave the service, they feel inauthentic and less likely to return!
We therefore have to totally reread the story of the akeidah, and I think that’s not only possible, but essential, because I believe that the usual reading of Abraham’s unquestioning submission is a Rabbinic gloss. I don’t think that’s how the story was originally intended at all. To be clear, the Rabbis understood Isaac as being 39 years old and also submitting to the acts of his father. They read the story as hierarchical submission. I believe that the Rabbis’ reading of the akeidah as being about submission was a way to reinforce their authority and this is why this reading continues in non-Reform communities where the continuance of hierarchy is essential. I actually believe this reading is forced for the reasons I mentioned earlier – firstly, because Abraham doesn’t always do what God wants – indeed, also Moses, who is considered by Torah as the greatest prophet who ever lived, constantly argued with God - and secondly because it makes no sense to have a reading about total submission to God’s will on Rosh Hashanah. We don’t submit to God’s will, we struggle with God. Later in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, he struggles with God, he is renamed yisrael because of that struggle with God, and we are named after him. Judaism is not a religion of submission, but of struggle. So, then, if the akeidah was not intended as a story of submission and obedience, what was its message?
Only a couple of weeks ago when we were studying the sidrah of Ki Tavo, we explored the use of horror in the Bible. Contemporary readers often fail to notice the differing styles of writing in Torah, from comedy to horror. Comedy is much easier to spot but the idea of there being horror in Torah is challenging for some contemporary readers, and I believe that says more about the readers than it does the text itself. If you see the Bible as a collection of ancient fables, some of which may have some relevance to our lives, then you’re not likely to see the depth of the text, and particularly the elements of horror in it which are meant to shake us profoundly. Think of the story of Noah where God wipes out almost every living being on earth. Think of Pharaoh who orders the extermination of baby Israelites and think of the ten plagues that fall upon Egypt as a result. Think of Mount Sinai quaking and the people being too terrified to encounter God so they send Moses instead. Think of the chilling curses that God promises on the Israelite people if they disobey the Divine will. And that’s just Torah – there’s plenty more in the rest of the Bible, like Ezekiel’s terrifying vision or the entire Book of Job. Horror, it turns out, has always been an essential element of religious writing. Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto looks at the usual (I would say sterile) perception of God as “the holy”, das Heilige, the notion equating God with moral goodness and purity. He says that true religious experience is not with this hand-holding, action-affirming concept of God, but rather is an encounter with the mysterium tremendum “that is beyond reason and imagination and that elicits, simultaneously and irreducibly, an oscillation between terror and fascination, fear and desire.” That is an encounter so utterly outside our everyday experience that horror is a valid genre for helping to describe it. Sometimes, the Bible uses horror in order to make a point about God, or about our relationship with God.
Horror is created when our world boundaries are undone, when what should be safe becomes unsafe, and this is relevant to the akeidah in three ways. Firstly, God has previously promised Abraham that his descendants will be extraordinarily numerous, and remember that Abraham is someone who has argued with God before and that disagreement never threatened that Divine promise in the past. Secondly, with God’s approval, Abraham has just lost one of his sons, having sent him away with Hagar, in the previous chapter, and thirdly, God reassured Abraham at that point that it would be through Isaac, not through Ishmael, that his ancestors would be counted. So, when God demands that Abraham offers up his son… his “only [remaining] son whom he loves” … as a sacrifice, Abraham, is totally undone in three profound ways. Firstly, he is being asked to destroy his legacy. Secondly, he is being asked to kill his son whom he loves, and thirdly, he comes to realise that the Judge of the earth doesn’t act according to human understandings of justice. We, the reader, are meant to be horrified by all this. Isaac isn’t a 39-year old man, he’s a helpless little boy, strapped confused to the altar as his father prepares his slaughter. As Abraham reaches for the knife, we’re meant to be cowering behind our seats, screaming “Don’t do it!” which is exactly what the angel from heaven is forced to do, intervening by shouting Abraham’s name twice because of how close Abraham actually gets to killing his son. He and his son never talk again, and for good reason, because Isaac cannot believe who his father has become, or rather, how quickly his father has become undone by listening to a Heavenly voice and by abandoning his own selfhood in the face of that voice. Isaac gets it – “lo bashamayim hi, it’s not in heaven, Dad! Ein anu mashgichin b’vat kol – we don’t listen to Heavenly voices, Dad!” Torah says it and Talmud repeats it. The religion of the bat kol, the religion that takes authority from outside the realm of human experience, is a religion that has the potential for disaster… for horror, even. The bat kol isn’t just a voice of authority, it is a voice that strips the human being of their dignity, of their very selfhood that God has given them. It is a terrifying voice that transcends rationality and that consequently strips the human being of the free will that is so essential to their being, and so essential to this very season. Don’t be like Abraham. That’s the point of the story. Don’t lose the struggle with God and become a slave of the Divine because then you will end up excusing horror due to supposed piety. That’s why we read this story on Rosh Hashanah, on the day when we face the consequences of our actions. We don’t come to services on High Holidays to be told how to behave, we come to search for meaning, to deepen our understanding of own selves as individuals and in the context of community. We come to learn and to grow, to face the traditional and the ancient, to dialogue with it, and to grow with it. We read the story of the akeidah because it acts as an ancient mirror of tradition through which the modern Jew can honestly see their reflected self. And the mirror isn’t always complementary – sometimes it is terrifying, sometimes it challenges our very boundaries and understanding of normal life in order to help us grow.
Our tradition, our mirror, is a faith tradition that changes through the generations. That means that the relationship with Divinity also changes in every generation. Instead of just das Heilige, the ethical, friendly holiness that guides us hand-in-hand toward a perfected world, the sanitized Deity who sanctifies our otherwise secular social justice work, God also has to be the mysterium tremendum, the Otherness, the Abyss, the Incomprehensible Who humbles us and terrifies us in our humanity. For us to grow, for our Judaism to grow, it has to challenge us and face the darkness within us and in the world. It can’t just be safe. We read the akeidah to remind ourselves also of the darkness – not to follow Abraham, but to learn from his mistake. We read this story to remind ourselves that lo bashamayim hi – the focus of Jewish life is not on passively waiting for God to tell us what to do from on high, but rather on the active search for Divinity in our lives, on the search for meaning, on the search for the democratic creation of a valid Jewish praxis in the modern age. May we, therefore, actively work together to create a meaningful, challenging and inspiring Jewish life for ourselves and our community. May we replace theocratic certainty with a genuine search that embraces doubt and that addresses the ever-present fear of the loss of self in the modern age. May we come to see the darkest parts of ourselves so that we may honestly address them and then engage in really responding to the Divine call. May these changes come to our Jewish life, personal and communal, soon, and let us say, Amen.
I understand the perspective that says that Abraham is an exemplar of religious behaviour, that he doesn’t question God and just does what he knows is right. According to that narrative, we should therefore copy him and just do exactly what God wants, and then we would not need atonement. I understand that perspective but there are, in my opinion, a number of issues with it. Firstly, if Abraham is such an examplar of following God’s word whatever happens, why does he argue with God only a couple of chapters before when God wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? How come when other innocent people are involved, Abraham openly argues with God for half a chapter, but when it comes to his own son, he doesn’t lift a word in complaint? This inconsistency means that he can’t be an exemplar of unquestioningly doing whatever God wants of us.
More importantly, though, Abraham clearly hears the word of God, but we don’t, so it’s impossible for us to do what he did anyway. We don’t know exactly what God wants of us, we can only now try to work that out. Abraham’s example does nothing for us in terms of religious decision making because he didn’t have any decision to make, whereas we do. Abraham’s narrative is one of direct transmission of law, whereas we have to work out law in our lives.
The absence of a bat kol, a heavenly voice that instructs us, is profoundly important for us today because it places Judaism in our hands, not in the hands of a Divine authority. The priests used to be the intermediaries between humanity and God through sacrifice, then the Rabbis were through study and prayer. The tiered structure of authority helped to instill fear and obedience, which is reflected in our liturgy that aims at Divine appeasement. Now, though, a Rabbi is an authority only in the sense of learning and guidance. As Enlightenment values made their way into the Jewish community, and as legal authority was transferred to the state, halakhah, Jewish law, lost any meaningful legal status. Now, more than ever, authority is in our hands. A famous story in Talmud understands this. When Rabbi Eliezer is arguing with the other Rabbis about a matter of law, a bat kol, a heavenly voice, interrupts and asks the Rabbis “Why do you disagree with Rabbi Eliezer, with whom the halakhah always agrees?” That should be the end of the argument, but it’s not. The Rabbis reply by quoting Scripture back at God – lo bashamayim hi, meaning, “It is not in heaven.” “Ein anu mashgichin b’vat kol - We do not pay heed to a Heavenly voice” because God has told us to follow the majority ruling.
Lo bashamayim hi. It is not in heaven. The story of the akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, very clearly places authority in the non-human realm, God instructs Abraham to offer up his son and Abraham is stopped from performing the same act by an angel who calls to him from heaven. It suggests that authority is from heaven. But the Rabbis turned that on its head, even in the face of a bat kol, a voice from heaven. They seized religious authority from the Divine realm and dragged it into the human realm. In so doing, they liberated Judaism from theocracy but at the same time they cemented their own interpretive authority. Nearly two thousand years later, Reform Judaism seized interpretive authority from that same Rabbinic elite and opened it up to the people. In so doing, they liberated Judaism from meritocracy but at the same time created a crisis of authority. With traditional authority gone and no-one to tell Jews that they have to observe festivals or come to services or keep kosher, there was no compulsion to act. Then, when they exercise their free will and choose to come back to services on Rosh Hashanah, they are read a Biblical story and are told that Judaism is epitomized by God telling us what to do, whether it’s something horrifying or not. The result of this is that when they leave the service, they feel inauthentic and less likely to return!
We therefore have to totally reread the story of the akeidah, and I think that’s not only possible, but essential, because I believe that the usual reading of Abraham’s unquestioning submission is a Rabbinic gloss. I don’t think that’s how the story was originally intended at all. To be clear, the Rabbis understood Isaac as being 39 years old and also submitting to the acts of his father. They read the story as hierarchical submission. I believe that the Rabbis’ reading of the akeidah as being about submission was a way to reinforce their authority and this is why this reading continues in non-Reform communities where the continuance of hierarchy is essential. I actually believe this reading is forced for the reasons I mentioned earlier – firstly, because Abraham doesn’t always do what God wants – indeed, also Moses, who is considered by Torah as the greatest prophet who ever lived, constantly argued with God - and secondly because it makes no sense to have a reading about total submission to God’s will on Rosh Hashanah. We don’t submit to God’s will, we struggle with God. Later in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, he struggles with God, he is renamed yisrael because of that struggle with God, and we are named after him. Judaism is not a religion of submission, but of struggle. So, then, if the akeidah was not intended as a story of submission and obedience, what was its message?
Only a couple of weeks ago when we were studying the sidrah of Ki Tavo, we explored the use of horror in the Bible. Contemporary readers often fail to notice the differing styles of writing in Torah, from comedy to horror. Comedy is much easier to spot but the idea of there being horror in Torah is challenging for some contemporary readers, and I believe that says more about the readers than it does the text itself. If you see the Bible as a collection of ancient fables, some of which may have some relevance to our lives, then you’re not likely to see the depth of the text, and particularly the elements of horror in it which are meant to shake us profoundly. Think of the story of Noah where God wipes out almost every living being on earth. Think of Pharaoh who orders the extermination of baby Israelites and think of the ten plagues that fall upon Egypt as a result. Think of Mount Sinai quaking and the people being too terrified to encounter God so they send Moses instead. Think of the chilling curses that God promises on the Israelite people if they disobey the Divine will. And that’s just Torah – there’s plenty more in the rest of the Bible, like Ezekiel’s terrifying vision or the entire Book of Job. Horror, it turns out, has always been an essential element of religious writing. Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto looks at the usual (I would say sterile) perception of God as “the holy”, das Heilige, the notion equating God with moral goodness and purity. He says that true religious experience is not with this hand-holding, action-affirming concept of God, but rather is an encounter with the mysterium tremendum “that is beyond reason and imagination and that elicits, simultaneously and irreducibly, an oscillation between terror and fascination, fear and desire.” That is an encounter so utterly outside our everyday experience that horror is a valid genre for helping to describe it. Sometimes, the Bible uses horror in order to make a point about God, or about our relationship with God.
Horror is created when our world boundaries are undone, when what should be safe becomes unsafe, and this is relevant to the akeidah in three ways. Firstly, God has previously promised Abraham that his descendants will be extraordinarily numerous, and remember that Abraham is someone who has argued with God before and that disagreement never threatened that Divine promise in the past. Secondly, with God’s approval, Abraham has just lost one of his sons, having sent him away with Hagar, in the previous chapter, and thirdly, God reassured Abraham at that point that it would be through Isaac, not through Ishmael, that his ancestors would be counted. So, when God demands that Abraham offers up his son… his “only [remaining] son whom he loves” … as a sacrifice, Abraham, is totally undone in three profound ways. Firstly, he is being asked to destroy his legacy. Secondly, he is being asked to kill his son whom he loves, and thirdly, he comes to realise that the Judge of the earth doesn’t act according to human understandings of justice. We, the reader, are meant to be horrified by all this. Isaac isn’t a 39-year old man, he’s a helpless little boy, strapped confused to the altar as his father prepares his slaughter. As Abraham reaches for the knife, we’re meant to be cowering behind our seats, screaming “Don’t do it!” which is exactly what the angel from heaven is forced to do, intervening by shouting Abraham’s name twice because of how close Abraham actually gets to killing his son. He and his son never talk again, and for good reason, because Isaac cannot believe who his father has become, or rather, how quickly his father has become undone by listening to a Heavenly voice and by abandoning his own selfhood in the face of that voice. Isaac gets it – “lo bashamayim hi, it’s not in heaven, Dad! Ein anu mashgichin b’vat kol – we don’t listen to Heavenly voices, Dad!” Torah says it and Talmud repeats it. The religion of the bat kol, the religion that takes authority from outside the realm of human experience, is a religion that has the potential for disaster… for horror, even. The bat kol isn’t just a voice of authority, it is a voice that strips the human being of their dignity, of their very selfhood that God has given them. It is a terrifying voice that transcends rationality and that consequently strips the human being of the free will that is so essential to their being, and so essential to this very season. Don’t be like Abraham. That’s the point of the story. Don’t lose the struggle with God and become a slave of the Divine because then you will end up excusing horror due to supposed piety. That’s why we read this story on Rosh Hashanah, on the day when we face the consequences of our actions. We don’t come to services on High Holidays to be told how to behave, we come to search for meaning, to deepen our understanding of own selves as individuals and in the context of community. We come to learn and to grow, to face the traditional and the ancient, to dialogue with it, and to grow with it. We read the story of the akeidah because it acts as an ancient mirror of tradition through which the modern Jew can honestly see their reflected self. And the mirror isn’t always complementary – sometimes it is terrifying, sometimes it challenges our very boundaries and understanding of normal life in order to help us grow.
Our tradition, our mirror, is a faith tradition that changes through the generations. That means that the relationship with Divinity also changes in every generation. Instead of just das Heilige, the ethical, friendly holiness that guides us hand-in-hand toward a perfected world, the sanitized Deity who sanctifies our otherwise secular social justice work, God also has to be the mysterium tremendum, the Otherness, the Abyss, the Incomprehensible Who humbles us and terrifies us in our humanity. For us to grow, for our Judaism to grow, it has to challenge us and face the darkness within us and in the world. It can’t just be safe. We read the akeidah to remind ourselves also of the darkness – not to follow Abraham, but to learn from his mistake. We read this story to remind ourselves that lo bashamayim hi – the focus of Jewish life is not on passively waiting for God to tell us what to do from on high, but rather on the active search for Divinity in our lives, on the search for meaning, on the search for the democratic creation of a valid Jewish praxis in the modern age. May we, therefore, actively work together to create a meaningful, challenging and inspiring Jewish life for ourselves and our community. May we replace theocratic certainty with a genuine search that embraces doubt and that addresses the ever-present fear of the loss of self in the modern age. May we come to see the darkest parts of ourselves so that we may honestly address them and then engage in really responding to the Divine call. May these changes come to our Jewish life, personal and communal, soon, and let us say, Amen.