Rosh HaShanah 5780/2019
God Called Your Name
God called your name. God called, Abraham.[1]
And I wonder what I’d do, too, if I heard my name called
out into the ether like that. And when I think about it, maybe my name has been called, but I haven’t
been listening closely enough.
God called, Abraham, and you answered Hineini, Here I am. And I wonder if I
would be able to answer so readily. Would Hineini roll off my tongue as assuredly
as yours?
Abraham, you answered Hineini. You answered, I am ready. But
ready for what? You hadn’t even heard an ask yet. Just God speaking your name.
Maybe that is enough of an ask when the words are uttered by God.
Perhaps you could answer so readily to God’s call because
you and God have been in relationship for a while now. God has tested you –
many times! And you, too, have tested God. But this test, this ask will be something beyond what has ever
been asked before.
God said to you, Take your son, your only son, the one
that you love, take Isaac and ascend the mountain. And then when you reach the
highest point… sacrifice that which is dearest to you. That which you have
pined for. That which represents your future.
As I read these words, Abraham, I am horrified. I want to
scream. You must want to, too! And yet… yet when I scan the sacred scroll, I find
no words of protest. Do you really have nothing to say?
Abraham, a page before, weren’t you just arguing for the
lives of the innocent in the valleys of Sodom and Gemorrah?[2] God
told you that the cities were about to be destroyed due to their corruption and
their evil ways, but when you looked down at those cities, all you could see
were the innocent who would be swept away along with the guilty.
And so, you argued God down. You cried to God: if there
were ten good souls left in Sodom and Gemorrah, then hold back the decree of
destruction. You stood up to God and God stepped back; God agreed. You won that
argument. But maybe… maybe you think you didn’t win… because there were not even
ten good souls left to save, were there? And so those cities burned.
You believed in the goodness of humanity, Abraham, but
humanity let you down.
Maybe you think now that your argument with God was an
exercise in futility. Maybe you wonder if all your protesting was worth it in
the end. And I guess I relate. There are moments when I feel the same.
Is that why you didn’t protest when God asked for your
son? Did you think your words wouldn’t matter? Had you given up?
But Abraham, forefather, your protest at Sodom and
Gemorrah did count for something. Even though those cities burned, your
words mattered. They mattered to me.
I read that text where you square off with God as the
very foundation for my own sense of justice in this world.
Your righteousness, it inspired me. Your challenge to the
greatest authority there ever was and ever will be calls to me for I learned from it that if you were able to muster
the courage to stand up to God for what you thought was right, then certainly I
should be able to muster the courage to stand up to the powers that be around
me.
What’s more, Abraham is that I don’t think God was really
your adversary in that scene. No, as readers of the text, we were privy to more
information than you had. We had the great narrator’s voice in our head. Before
God tells you about the plan to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah, God thinks to God’s
self: Should I hide from Abraham what I am doing? … I’ve chosen him so he will
teach his children and those who come after him to follow in My ways, doing
what is right and just.
You see, God wanted to teach you, Abraham about righteousness
and about justice. This glimpse into God’s inner thoughts reveals to us that
God drew you into the drama of Sodom and Gemorrah precisely to give you the
opportunity to speak up and to act boldly.
God pushed you, Abraham to stretch your moral capacity
and your instinct for justice. And you did; you modeled advocacy for us, your
descendants, the sacred readers of the text. Not just for me, but for all of
us, your people. Your protest changed lives. Maybe not in the moment, no, but I
promise you the ripples of that moment have been felt for millennia.
Which is why in this moment, in this text, the basis of
our Rosh HaShanah reading for the holiday, this text where God asks you to give
up everything you love, I look desperately for your protest and it’s nowhere to
be found on the page.
So, in silence, we trek together up the mountain. I’m no
longer an observer. None of us really are. We’re there beside you. This is now
our story, too.
As we walk, I consider your passiveness and I feel the
outrage building inside of me. I want to shake you. I want to scream at you:
Why won’t you do anything but walk on? And then I’m ashamed. For how many times
have we all been
passive at the seeming outrages in our world? How many times have we sat back,
angry, but numb? Scared into submission, unable to muster a response. As we
make our way higher up on the hill, we whisper, someone should do something.
We understand you, Abraham, because we are you. With each
step, you know you are walking closer and closer to destruction, but you don’t
know how to stop the story.
And we, your readers, we who accompany you, we, too, know
that there are times when we want to stop the world from spinning and we want
to scream at the powers that be to stop the commands, but we are not sure our
voices matter or that we will have any effect.
After all, the ice caps are still melting, the wars are
still raging, the greedy are still winning... So in the end, we just keep
walking.
Maybe we are not only like you, but you are like us. Hoping
for a reprieve. Hoping that the story is wrong, that we have misunderstood
something along the way. That there is some sense to be made of all of this.
The silence is broken. The child calls out: Father. And
we hear you say that familiar word again, Hineini, here I am. And I wonder if you mean
it – if you’re really present and listening at all.
The child asks, where is the sacrifice? Our words come tumbling
out: God will see to it. How often do we tell the truth and lie at the same
time? Are you lying because you love your son? Or are you holding onto hope that
it will all work out in the end, that the future for our children is not yet
lost?
Before we know it, we’ve reached the top. There is no
more stalling. A choice needs to be made and it feels like the time to act may
have passed. The knife is there in our hand and you’d think we would feel
powerful, but it’s the opposite. We have never felt more powerless in our
entire life. Powerless, yet it is our hand we raise up. It is our future we are
killing. Why can’t we stop? Why can’t we help ourselves?
And then all of a sudden, God’s voice rings out with your
name again like it did at the start of our story, but this time in an attempt
to stop the story. It is called twice with urgency: Abraham, Abraham. And for
the third time, your voice utters a familiar word. I imagine this time
your voice is weak. Hineini, here I am. An angel holds back your hand.
In our lifetimes, we pray for reprieves like this one.
For expected endings to change. For miracles.
Sometimes we are lucky; sometimes, we are not. Tradition
imagines this moment going in so many different ways.
One midrash imagines God calling out and yet you are so
focused, so stuck in the awareness that there is no other way, that this will
be your story that you fail to hear God’s voice and your knife comes down
anyway.[3] This
midrash exposes the truth – the truth that sometimes we think it is easier to
live without hope. Easier to lean into the tragedy than to risk disappointment.
Maybe you didn’t want to hear your name because at that
point, things had gone too far, hadn’t they? Because now you… we would have to
account for our silence as we struggled up the mountain, our lack of protest,
our numbness to our fate. Perhaps, we figured, it was better to let the world
rain down on us than to take responsibility for our inaction. The knife was
already in our hand. We were ready.
If we didn’t go through with it now, we’d have to live
with our children’s disappointment in us that we didn’t speak up sooner. Isaac,
the next generation, will surely never speak to us again.
And it dawns on us: What were you really asking of us,
God? Did we pass or did we fail your test?
In what feels like a response to that eternal question,
our eyes lift and we see a ram nearby, its horns entangled in a thicket. In a
time that required sacrifices, the presence of the ram is a miracle so that
Isaac’s life can be spared.
I wonder, Abraham, forefather, if you had
lifted your eyes earlier, would you have seen the ram before this moment? I
can’t help, but imagine that there are rams out there now, miracles all around
us, but in our anguish, we have blinded ourselves.
A midrash teaches: the ram throughout its life continued
to get its horns stuck in the thicket and then unstuck and then stuck again and
then unstuck, waiting for just this moment.[4] One
version of the story teaches us the ram had been waiting there for all of
eternity, its purpose to offer us hope in the moment when we feel most
hopeless. [5]
You ask God, "What's the meaning
of this, the ram getting stuck and unstuck?”
God explains: the ram is us. We get
stuck and unstuck all throughout our lives.
And as we hover between hope and
hopelessness, you ask, “Ribbono shel olam,
Master of the Universe, will it always be like this?"
And that’s our question, too. Will it
always be like this?
And God pauses, letting us consider our
own response before finally God breathes out, No.
No, it will not always be like this.
God continues, The answer to your
redemption will come by the horn of the ram.
The horn of the ram. The shofar. When
we blow the ram’s horn each year, we bring ourselves back to this moment on the
mountain when our future seemingly set in one direction suddenly changed. When
the shofar is sounded, we open ourselves up to the possibility that perhaps
there is a different ending to our story than we originally perceived.
Fear and hope intertwine on the mountain top as we
realize humbly how very close we are – at all times – to that knife raised high,
to loss and to death. But this moment atop the mountain also makes us realize
how very close we are – at all times - to hope. The ram, the symbol of
potential and redemption, is waiting just around the bend if only we lift up
our eyes. We veer in between
radical despair and radical hope, in between being spiritually stuck and
spiritually unstuck, and we ask, Will it always be like this?
In the now three months that I have been here and in the
many more of my rabbinate, I have been asked that question many times.
Sometimes, the question comes out of personal pain.
Dealing with a chronic illness. The death of a loved one. A raw issue in your
life, one that festers and crawls inside of you. And you ask, Will it always be
like this?
And sometimes, the question comes out of simple, daily
interaction with this world. Searing images of the Amazon burning. Vitriol in
our political discourse. Mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting
– all too close to home. And you ask, Will it always be like this?
Abraham, we wanted you to protest because it all is personal. It all is too
close to home. We want you to stand up so that we have a model to lean back on,
especially now at the beginning of our new year, when all seems potentially
possible. We need hope.
We want the Abraham who stood up to God at Sodom and
Gemorrah. We don’t want time to have slowed you down and made you satisfied
with the status quo, wondering if you have the power to change anything at all.
We don’t want to be powerless like you.
The rabbis could have
chosen any other story to start our season of introspection and newness, but
they chose this moment on the mountaintop
with you. So here we are – all of us - trying desperately to glean a message
for this day.
You are the human
condition, Abraham. You, the defender of the innocent at Sodom one day and the
one cowed into submission the next. The example that our moral victories one
day don’t dictate our moral victories the next, how we must continually strive
to be at our best for the battles never end.
You are our
warning, Abraham. Your silence, your fear, the way you have leaned back and away
to allow this extraordinary ask to wash over you as if it was nothing. How numb
we have become. How numb we have become to the extraordinary asks in our lives.
We need the courage to call out: This is not normal.
This story, when we dig deep, is about confrontation. Confrontation
with who we are and who we want to be.
We are required to bring ourselves back to the mountain
every year with you, Abraham when you are at your worst as a sacred reminder
that when we want to shake you, it’s really ourselves we want to shake. It’s
ourselves at which we want to scream the words: Wake up!
I want
to wake up… Don’t you?
When we are asked to sacrifice our children and their
future so that the Amazon can burn to support the beef industry and the soybean
industry, to line pockets at the expense of our planet, I cannot stay asleep. I
cannot stay silent.
When we are asked to sacrifice a piece of our identity,
when we are asked whether we are loyal to our Judaism or our America or our
Israel as if that is not an age-old anti-Semitic trope, I cannot stay asleep. I
cannot stay silent.
When we are asked to weigh our very lives and the lives
of our children against the right of someone to own an assault rifle that can
shoot any number of bullets in some miniscule amount of seconds without a proper
background check just because they bought it at a gun show, I wake up and I
scream.
Because I know God does not want these sacrifices atop the
mountain. No, God doesn’t want your son, Abraham. And God doesn’t want mine.
God stays our hand. God wants your protesting heart, Abraham. Your commitment
to the innocent, Abraham. Remember, God taught you to be an advocate for
justice. And through Torah, through the telling of your multi-fold story, God
has taught us as well.
God
wants us to lift our eyes and find
hope in this world, the ram around the bend, and to hold on with everything
that we are to that which matters most.
When we get to the
end of our lives, let us not look back and ask why we waited, why we lacked
courage, why we let go of hope. Too much depends on us changing our story now.
When we reach heaven, a Talmudic legend teaches we will
be asked several questions, including this one: Tzapita le’yeshuah? Did you anticipate redemption?[6]
Read another way, we will be asked: Did we live with
hope? Despite the pain and struggles and extraordinary asks that came our way,
did we wrestle to find the light? Did we lift our eyes and seek out the ram?
And we realize with a start that the question we
have been asking all along, the question, Will it always be like this, must now
be put aside. And we must lean deep into the question, Do we anticipate redemption?
To anticipate redemption means our hearts must ache so
much with hope that we can’t bear the world as it is and so we must double down
on creating the world we need, the world we deserve, the world as it should be.
Hope is the first step, but it is not enough. We redeem ourselves, we redeem
our world when we act on that hope.
God
called your name. God called, Abraham. And God is calling our names, too. Our
names sound like the shofar; our names sound like hope caught in the
thicket.
I pray, I hope that
when we enter heaven and we are asked Tzapita
le’yeshuah, did you anticipate redemption, we will say yes. Yes, we did and
so much more. We helped to make it happen.
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