Rabbi's
Sermons
Rosh HaShanah 5770
Day Two
September 20, 2009
Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote
an op-ed column earlier this year about his increasing struggle with sending his
children off to summer camp. He asserts that he is not one of those parents
whose anxiety over their safety causes havoc for summer camp directors; rather
it is a gnawing realization that as his children become more and more
comfortable with their independence, they become more distant from him.
He writes, “Four years ago, the first time my wife and I left
our youngest son at sleep-away camp, there … were only piteous tears, which
returned …every night for two weeks. I wanted nothing more than to run to him…
rescue him from independence. But I didn't. Each summer this departure grows
easier for him and my older son -- and more difficult for me, until my bravery
finally fails and all the tears are mine.
So this is the independence we seek for our children -- to
turn our closest relationships into acquaintances. Of course, I knew this
getting into parenthood. But the reality remains shocking. For a time, …
children look upward, and you fill their entire universe. They remain, to you,
the most important things in the world. To them, over time, you become one
important thing among many. And then an occasional visit or phone call. And then
a memory, fond or otherwise.
Gerson concludes that his own father “shrank in my mental
universe from sun to star, bright and distant. With every season of camp, I dim
to my sons as well. It is the appropriate humility of the generations. It is
also harder than I thought. And I don't know how to let go.”
Michael Gerson’s heartfelt column offers a new insight to our
Torah portion this morning. We usually approach the call that Abraham go and
offer up his son Isaac by questioning the violence of the command. And more than
a few contemporary rabbis have sermonized that this sacrifice is a metaphor for
the ways demanding parents sacrifice their children on the altar of their own
egos and desires.
But Michael Gerson’s essay suggests a different metaphor in
our Torah reading – it is not a Divine call to sacrifice but to let go. We can
imagine an Abraham, longing for a son from Sarah for so many years, and then
finally in his old age achieving this passion. Of a father so desirous of
defending this child and so solicitous of his relationship with him that he is
willing to exile his other son in order to placate Isaac’s mother. It is not
hard to imagine a father so over-protective and attached to this special child
that he cannot let go. “Isaac, don’t go out with the goats and sheep, you stay
home. Isaac do not light the fires, let your mother do that. Isaac you come with
me to the market today, Okay? Just don’t touch anything.” “Gosh Dad I am 37
years old, I think I can go to the shuk myself.” The rabbis tell us that Isaac
was 37 years old at the time of the Akedah. We laugh because the story in
Genesis is clearly about a young boy. But what if the rabbis are right and he
only had the personality of a child because his father would not let him grow
up?
The summons to bind his son and offer him up may have been
God’s way of telling Abraham the parent that you must to let go. Know that the
process of letting go is going to be painful, it is going to hurt, but that is
the way of the world, in Gerson’s words “the humility of the generations. Yes it
requires tremendous humbling of the ego to allow our children to gain their
independence from us but that is the way they become fully human.
Now let me share with you a different perspective on the
Akedah story from Rabbi Henry Balser, a Conservative rabbi who served for a
short time as a neighbor in Benton Harbor. According to Rabbi Balser the Akedah
is a story in which Abraham is given a choice between having God or having his
son. He speaks personally, “I am a father…Every fiber of my being cries out to
protect my children. Yet I understand Abraham’s response... He realized that he
could not live with out God. Without God life has no meaning, no purpose, no
sanctity. Without Isaac life will be unbearably painful. He will wake up every
morning and go to sleep every night thinking about Isaac. Yet he will live.”
Rabbi Balser’s understanding of Abraham’s actions is also a
form of letting go. Echoing the teaching of the psychologist Victor Frankel, he
suggests that a person, at least a religious person, can if forced let go of
everything –- any possession, be it a material comfort or a loved one -- but
what one cannot let go of and still live is a sense of meaning in life. For the
religious person, belief in a transcendent Being, whose revealed teachings offer
purpose and guidance, gives us a sense of meaningfulness in life that can only
be extracted at the risk of spiritual and perhaps literal death.
In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the protagonist is
a middle class bureaucrat whose main concern in life was “getting ahead” and
putting on proper appearances. When he contracts an aggressive cancer in late
middle age for the first time he begins to question his attitude towards life:
“The doctor said his physical agony was dreadful, and that was true; but even
more dreadful was his moral agony, it was what tormented him most. What had
induced his moral agony was that during the night …he suddenly asked himself:
What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real
thing?” It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before –
that he had not lived the kind of life he should have – might in fact be true.
It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest
what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always
suppressed might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been
the real thing.”
The deepest terror we can face is not the loss of things but
the sense that we have lived to no purpose. This resonates with a curse that
comes near the end of the Tochecha, the list of curses in Deuteronomy describing
in graphic detail what will descend upon the people if they spurn God and the
Covenant. (Deut. 28:66) Robert Alter translates the verse, “Your life will
dangle before you; and you will be afraid day and night, and you will have no
faith in your life”. No faith in your life. You will be uncertain as to what
will come tomorrow, you will not know whom you can rely on, and even more
importantly the external chaos affecting you will reflect an internal psychic
chaos. In the comments of Reb Yaakov bar Rav Hai, it will be a psychological
fear unassociated to the reality one sees around him. What can be called
‘existential terror’. This is what Rabbi Balser is suggesting might have been
life for Avraham without God.
The Biblical scholar Uriel Simon taught that two times God
calls to Abraham “Lekh-lekha” go forth, and each of these calls leads to a
difficult test. The first time he is called to leave Ur of the Chaldees, to
wander until he arrives in Eretz Yisrael. The second time is the call sacrifice
his son. The reason the second test is so much more demanding is because in the
first test he is asked to renounce his past and present, but in the Binding of
Isaac he was called upon to surrender his future. And wihthout a future, despair
can ensue.
Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search For Meaning, noted that “The
prisoner who lost faith in the future – his future—was doomed. With his loss of
belief in the future he also lost his spirtual hold…any attempt to restore a
man’s inner strength in the camp had to succeed in showing him some future goal.
Nietzche’s words, ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’
could be (a) guiding motto… Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life. No
aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”
Now if Uriel Simon is correct and the call to sacrifice his
son was a call to give up everything for God, including his future, why did
Abraham not give up on life? Because he was able to sacrifice the ram instead?
I don’t think so. I think it is because Abraham’s future was
not really dependent on Isaac but on Abraham’s teachings of righteousness and
justice. In Genesis we are told why Abraham is special: “For I have singled him
out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the
LORD by doing what is just and right”.
The message God sent to Abraham through the Akedah was a dual
message. First, that his future did not depend on a ‘thing’, even if that thing
was his beloved son Isaac. His future depended on his living and teaching ‘the
way of the Lord’. And secondly, just as Michael Gerson learned and just as each
of us parents must learn, over time our children become more and more remote
from us. To think we can hold on to them forever is an illusion; we did not want
such adhesion to our parents and our children will want and need to grow
independently from us.
The only hold that we do have on our children is to instill
within them our values and principles. And we Jews should be like Abraham, and
instruct our children and posterity to keep ‘the way of the Lord’ by doing what
is just and right, to live and to love Torah and to be proud of our Jewish
heritage and traditions. This is the only right of retention that we have.
In the Talmud tractate Niddah there is a curious passage that
many of you are probably familiar with. It is an explanation of why we have this
indent on our upper lip.
Rav Simlai taught: To what can a fetus in its mother’s womb
be compared? To a writing tablet that is all folded up…..Its mouth is closed and
its navel is open, and it eats and drinks what its mother eats and drinks..... A
lamp is illuminated over its head, with which it can see from one end of the
universe to the other.....And there are no days in which a person has it better
than in those days.....The entire Torah is taught to it..... But once it begins
breathing the world’s air, that which was closed is now open, and that which was
open is now closed -- for were that not to happen, it could not live even for a
moment. And again, once it begins breathing the world’s air, an angel comes and
smacks it over the mouth and causes it to forget the entire Torah.....And it
does not emerge from the womb until it has agreed by oath to this exhortation:
“You must be righteous; you must not be wicked.”
In this midrash we are both parent and child. For us there is
no greater moment then when our children are small and dependent on us. All is
good, what the mother gives, the child receives; the child is content to be
attached to the mother. There are no greater days then this. But there is no
choice, such a condition cannot last forever, the child must exit the womb. And
in exiting it takes no thing. Not even Torah. Here we become the child of the
midrash – we own nothing permanent in this world not even something so holy as
Torah. There is only one thing we retain as we step into the world, there is
only one promise we can expect to extract from our children as we let go: Be
righteous! Be righteous!
It is not the things we own nor the material possessions we
dispose of, it is our commitment to righteousness, our determination to live
lives of holiness and goodness and to instill these desires in our children.
That is all we have.
As we enter a new year may we be blessed with a year of life,
not simply to breathe as many breaths as possible, but to do good and to inspire
our children, our friends and our community to live righteously.
