Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur Sermons
Dancing around the Akedah
by Adrienne Rosen
It is time to do the dance again. The portion read year after year on second day Rosh Hashanah is one of those awful portions, awful in both senses it has truly horrible elements to it and it fills one with a sense of awe. As in: the power to inspire dread.
It has all the elements of horror. Abraham is good and decent his whole life through. He is obedient to God and loyal. He always does as he is told. He and Sarah wait their entire lives to have a child. Isaac is finally born and then some years later, the truly horrible happens.
Abraham hears the voice of God calling out to him: Abraham. Abraham responds: Hineini Here I am. Says God: Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will tell you. Abraham duly complies and sets out with Isaac. There is no emotion involved. God has willed it and his trusted servant simply complies. In fact, God has more emotion about it than Abraham. He reminds Abraham that it is your ONLY son, whom you LOVE.
I don't know about you but I have spent many years wrestling with this one. I have done many d'var Torah's on this subject- some more successful than others. I have imitated Sandy Renaldo going live to the scene at Mt. Moriah as Abraham is led away. I have talked about the possibility that Abraham was hallucinating and hearing voices.
I have talked about the fact that in contemporary time that no Rabbi would eagerly sit by and agree with a congregant that conveyed a similar message from God. The Rabbi would not allow him to proceed. He or she would rightfully call the police and the police would agree that a checkup from the neck up would be in order.
We cannot in any way understand this portion. As human beings, we cannot condone this portion. We are stuck. We are stuck in a dance. We don't want to say we are stuck because it leaves us in the desert. We don't want to believe that God would ask anyone to do something so horrible just to prove our love and we similarly don't want to believe that anyone would acquiesce. We must be missing something... and the dance continues.
Kierkegaard struggled through this portion in his book Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard is opposed to Hegel and is opposed to systemic thinking. Kierkegaard's world is one of the individual in isolation from a system. He makes a distinction between the ethical world of Hegel and the religious world. The ethical is part of the universal it is with the system. It is about understanding, mediation and infinitude. It is about putting ourselves as individuals aside and finding expression in the collective, in the universal principles. Acting always for the greater good. The religious, Kierkegaard's world, asks us to remain individuals. It encourages us to keep the faith and make a leap to faith. It asks us to remain anxious and to constantly seek expression and dialogue with God and to enter into a private relationship with God that transcends the ethical.
To Kierkegaard, Abraham's non- questioning is the paradigm case of the leap of faith.
It doesn't work for me and it probably wouldn't work for most people here today. It may work for the Orthodox although, I'm not completely sure of that though because as Jews we have a very clear dialectical relationship with community and principled behaviour. In fact as Jews we are used to living in the discomfort of those two relations the personal/the collective and the public and the private. We are used to riding the dialectic. We crave a personal relationship with God but know that we are morally obligated to serve society to create a better world for all. That doesn't leave us much of a dance floor.
Just as I was beginning to give up on finding a new way to do the dance with this horrible portion I had a completely illuminating experience.
I accompanied the grade 7 /8 class from the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish day school to the Tengye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre. We were treated to a private address by the Venerable Lama Tenzin Kalsang. There are three female Lamas in the world ordained by the Dali Lama and Tenzin Kalsang is one of them. She spoke to the kids about Buddhism and recounted the story of Abraham and Isaac. She instantly had my attention. As she recounted the story she wiped a tear from her eye. She said it made her very unhappy to think about the story and then gave her philosophy on its content and meaning. She said:
Sometimes in life we treat even people as possessions. She said: to get to the truth, to a state of holiness we must let go of possessions and that sometimes means detaching from people. God knew how much Abraham loved Isaac but knew that Abraham could never really grow as a person and move forward if his entire focus and being was constantly tied up with his greatest possession-Isaac.
The Lama saw this test as a way to detach in order to get closer to God.
For a few days, this story did it for me. It quelled the discomfort but it didn't take long for the dance to begin anew.
I took the Lama's philosophy and elongated it. If it could apply to things or persons, if we should separate, if we should detach from things and persons that slow us or interrupt our equilibrium or our quest for spiritual fulfillment then perhaps ideas too could be separate. We could detach from an idea and walk away from it. If we could detach from an idea we would be in essence be proclaiming- free will.
I am choosing today to detach entirely from this portion. After today I will never think about it or deal with it again. I don't like it and it doesn't move me closer to an ethic, a principle or a state of being that I find helpful. Perhaps this is why we really trot out this portion every New Year. It is after all a New Year. I believe we are meant to exercise our ability and our willingness to detach from abject discomfort. Perhaps it is a time for a fresh start. A God inspired proclamation of free will. I for one will choose what I dance to and with whom I dance. I hope all of us move into this New Year with a sense of joy and hope, with a sense of freedom. I hope we all have the opportunity to dance often and to choose our dance partners wisely. May we remember the words of my favorite Jewish Anarchist Emma Goldman: If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution.
Shana Tova.
