Rosh Hashanah Morning 5786: Coming Down

In 1999, an old controversy was rekindled when a team of mountaineers found the body of George Mallory buried beneath a slope of frozen scree, 26,000 feet up the north face of Mt. Everest.  A broken altimeter in his shirt pocket suggested that Mallory may have reached the summit before dying on the descent.  If so, he would have been the first man to stand atop the world’s highest peak, beating Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to this feat by twenty-nine years.

But when news of this discovery reached Hillary, then 79 years old, he remained remarkably unperturbed.  With cool understatement, Sir Edmund told a television reporter, “Coming down is also important.”

With this observation, Hillary echoed the wisdom of the great Hasidic sage Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, who once asked his students about this morning’s eternally challenging Torah portion.  He queried: “What was the most difficult part of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac?”

The young disciples offered all the expected answers: when Abraham first heard that incomprehensible command from the Holy One; the excruciating three day walk toward their fate on Mount Moriah; the moment when Isaac is bound to the altar and Abraham raises the fateful blade.

The Kotzker Rebbe listened compassionately to their responses, then shook his head.   He sat in deep reflection, then taught: “These were all extraordinarily difficult things, but the hardest part was coming down the mountain.”  For it is then, in the aftermath of the traumatic event, that Abraham, Isaac and even God start to realize how profoundly that fateful day would reverberate over the ages.  Only upon coming down can the hard and holy generational work of renewal commence.

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Abraham and Isaac do not leave Mount Moriah together.  Both the Torah and its Rabbinic commentators emphasize that they descend on different paths, the father-son bond broken by the unspeakable drama at the summit.  But each of them, in his own way and in partnership with the Holy One, wrestles with the sacred calling that endures for us, their spiritual offspring: how to restore the fragments of a shattered world.  Three thousand years later, on this Rosh Hashanah, that essential Jewish challenge of tikkun olam has rarely been more relevant.  As Jews and as Americans, we enter 5786 in a gut-wrenching time.  We are living through intense social upheaval, deep polarization and the astonishingly rapid evisceration of norms and institutions whose wellbeing and even basic existence we’ve long taken for granted.  In the Middle East, the war that most of us expected to last a couple of months will soon enter its second year, at a terrible cost that few could have foreseen.  The ongoing conflict has exposed perilous fractures within Israeli society, throughout the Jewish diaspora and in the world at large.  For most of us, the current ethical and political landscape feels as dire as any we have experienced in our lifetimes: morally bankrupt leadership, humanitarian disaster, climate catastrophe, disintegrating democracy, political violence, pervasive racism, sexism, and antisemitism, and resurgent chauvinistic ethno-nationalism.  With all this devastation, how might we begin to bind the wounds of this heartbreaking season?  What wisdom might guide us as we navigate our own journey down from the mountain of despair?

I believe that, in classic Jewish fashion, we might draw strength from words of Torah.  Our Rabbis noted: מעשה אבות סימן לבנים-the stories of our ancestors’ lives are a guiding sign for us, their descendants.   The paths that Abraham, Isaac and God embark upon following the events described in this morning’s portion have a lot to teach us about hope and healing in the aftermath of trauma.

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Upon his homecoming, Abraham’s tragedy is almost immediately compounded by the sudden death of his wife Sarah.  The Rabbis suggest that she dies of shock when Abraham returns alone and confesses how close he came to slaying their child at God’s behest.  So twice bereft, as an elderly widower estranged from his beloved son, Abraham dedicates his remaining days to a two-fold mission: honoring the past and planting seeds for the future.

To address the former, he negotiates with his Hittite neighbors to purchase a cemetery plot.  He pays a premium for the Cave of Machpelah where—on what constitutes the first piece of Jewish property in the heretofore Promised Land—he buries Sarah, just outside the town of Hebron.  Later, he and eventually Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah will be laid to rest there.  By Jewish tradition, this site is second only to Jerusalem in holiness.

With this act memorializing his founding family’s remarkable history, Abraham turns his attention to posterity.  He sends his trusted chief servant Eliezer back to his ancestral homeland to find a wife for Isaac.  Eliezer fulfills his appointed task.  He meets Rebecca at the well of Aram-naharayim, where she appears as a miraculous answer to his heartfelt prayer to the God of Abraham.  Rebecca distinguishes herself by her strength and compassion, and when she eventually meets Isaac, the couple fall in love at first sight.  Having thus secured the future for his tribe and the Jewish people, Abraham can die in peace at the ripe old age of 175.  

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Abraham responds to the trauma of the Akedah by looking backward and ahead.  Isaac seeks healing through empathy and reconciliation in real time. 

While Abraham heads home from Mount Moriah, Isaac sets off on his own.  The next time we meet him, we are told that he “had just come back from the vicinity of Be’er-lahai-roi.” In his commentary The Heart of Torah, Shai Held explains that this is the same place where, years earlier, God’s angel had extended loving care to Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael and his mother Hagar after Abraham and Sarah cast them out.  Indeed, it is Hagar who named the place, calling it Be’er-lahai-roi, the hidden well where the Holy One truly sees and remembers those whom others have scorned or forgotten.  As Rabbi Held notes:

Where does Isaac go in the aftermath of the Akedah?  To the place where Hagar met God.  Why does he want and need to find Hagar?  Perhaps Isaac, newly traumatized, goes to find comfort in his father's other wife, undoubtedly bearing some deep traumas of her own.  Perhaps Isaac also has newfound compassion for Hagar's predicament and seeks not only to be consoled but also to offer consolation.  Having been made to suffer at Abraham's hands, he has a newfound capacity to embrace those who have endured a similar fate. 

This is a remarkable turn: the man who comes within a hair’s breadth of being killed for the sake of his father’s God finds, against all odds, a powerful way to remain a committed Jew through open-hearted learning and listening with the outcast mother of his estranged half-brother.   It is no accident that Isaac and Ishmael ultimately unite to bury Abraham.  They teach us that with time, intention and serious soul-work, our trials and tribulations can help us become more caring and kind-hearted people. 

In this reading, Isaac’s journey from his personal ordeal to Be’er-lahai-roi foreshadows the lesson that the Holy One will repeatedly implore the Jewish people to draw from our paradigmatic communal affliction: “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”  After the Akedah, Isaac’s calling—and ours—is to transform trauma into empathy.  In this, we succeed when we strengthen and support one another.  Alone, our pain festers into grievance; when we stand together in trying times, our collective distress can inspire us to build a more just and compassionate world.

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Which brings us to God, the prime mover behind this profoundly troubling tale.  Thankfully, the Holy One is also fundamentally changed in the aftermath of the Akedah.  If Abraham’s response is to honor the past while securing the future and Isaac’s is to turn suffering into sympathy, God is challenged to radically re-define God’s relationship with humankind.  From the opening of Creation through Isaac’s binding, the Holy One overwhelmingly relates to humanity from the top down, delivering demands and exacting unalloyed obedience.  After the Akedah, God begins to recognize that this sort of relationship woefully diminishes human dignity and responsibility.  As Jack Miles notes in his book, God: A Biography, while the “masterful, abrupt, inscrutable being we first met” still makes occasional appearances in the rest of the Torah, from this time forward,  God will come to seem more like a busy friend of the family than the Judge of all the earth. God’s help will be sought for conception and other human needs, but, significantly, the initiative will be on the human side. 

The Akedah thereby constitutes an essential turning point.  It shifts the defining metaphor for God’s relationship with humanity.  We move from a domineering parent instructing their dependent children or an omnipotent sovereign ruling sycophantic subjects, to the much more empowering image of a marriage between devoted partners.  In this new model, Mount Sinai becomes a wedding canopy and Torah our ketubah.  We begin a new covenantal love story between the Holy One and the Jewish people.  As that partnership matures, it will be embodied by the Temple in Jerusalem, a bridge between heaven and earth, where reconciliation and forgiveness flow freely.   That holy place will, by our tradition, significantly be located atop the same mountaintop where Abraham once bound his son at God’s request.  In this reimagined relationship, harm turns to healing and blind fealty blossoms into reciprocal dialogue.  Where Abraham and Isaac once obeyed, a proud heritage of prophets and sages, following in the line of Moses, will challenge and cajole, question authority, and speak truth to power, both human and divine.  Their example guides us to this very day.  After the Akedah, God, as it were, starts to grow up—enabling humankind, however imperfectly, to do the same.

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מעשה אבות סימן לבנים-The stories of our ancestors—and our God--are a guidepost for their spiritual descendants.

Like Abraham, Isaac, and the Holy One in our parsha, we now enter a critical season.  How will we come down from the chaos, confusion and cataclysm that mark this difficult era?  Can we transform our trauma into growth, our darkness into light?  How might we find hope and healing in this new year, 5786?

I pray that we may follow in the footsteps of Abraham, honoring the best parts of the Jewish past and creatively securing a fruitful future for our families and congregations, for the Jewish people, for our struggling, not-so-United States and for the entirety of God’s beloved creation. 

May we, like Isaac, resist the temptation to let adversity harden our hearts.  May our very real suffering renew our empathy for all who struggle against injustice, within our Jewish community and across the wider world.

And let us emulate God in our resilience, our capacity to embrace change, and our determination to find new modes of leadership that address the evolving needs of our rapidly shifting times. 

Like all of them, may we rise to this enormous challenge by proclaiming, in word and deed הנני—Here I am!

And when we sometimes falter, as we inevitably will, given the sheer magnitude of the task, may heed the talmudic wisdom that though we are not obliged to finish that labor, neither are we free to desist from it.  In those moments, when doubt and despair sap our strength, we might find solace in Wendell Berry’s beautiful poem “Our Real Work”:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Ken y’hi ratzon

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786: All You Need is Vav

Rosh Hashanah holds within its name a paradox, for the word shanah—or “year”—comes from a Hebrew root that points to two seemingly opposite things:  ש–נ–ה means both repetition and change.  On the one hand, the cycle of the Jewish new year repeats over and over. We gather yet again to sound the same shofar blasts, read the same Torah passages and pray the same liturgy enshrined for over two millennia.  On the other hand, the goal is to experience true teshuvah, to change ourselves and our communities for the better.  It can be challenging to honor these contraries, to simultaneously celebrate tradition and transformation.  Yet that is precisely what the Holy One asks us to do tonight—and throughout the coming year.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  While Fitzgerald was no great lover of the Jewish people, his observation neatly summarizes a defining Jewish principle at the heart of Rosh Hashanah, which looks beyond simple binaries.  To quote a prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism, Dr. Biti Roi, “Either/or is for grade school mathematics.  Jewish life is about both/and.”

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In her poignant memoir, Lost and Found, Kathryn Schulz recounts the story of grieving her father’s illness and death while also meeting and embracing the love of her life—mourning and joy, losing and finding all at the same intense, complicated time.  The book is an eloquent ode to the power of both/and.  She notes: 

Multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common that by the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork.  We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel.  In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.”  He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or.  We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.

Indeed, that small but mighty conjunction and is so essential that for most of the history of the English language, it was considered the twenty-seventh character of the alphabet.  Represented by the ampersand symbol, it followed the letter z on countless slates and grade school primers until it fell out of use in the nineteenth century, probably because it didn’t fit neatly into the ABC song that music publisher Charles Bradlee set to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in 1835.

But in Hebrew, the term for and—the single letter vav—remains very much a part of the aleph bet.  It’s the simplest of characters,  an unassuming vertical stroke of the pen that holds entire worlds.  Its enduring presence testifies so powerfully to the Jewish primacy of both/and that one of our most creative contemporary sages has made it the centerpiece of an anti-binary manifesto playing on a classic Lennon-McCartney lyric. To quote Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie: All you need is vav.  

Our reductivist American culture, so dominated by either/or thinking, cries out for this wisdom.  All we need is vav.  In a hyper-polarized society that frequently feels like a stark zero sum game, our tradition’s counter-cultural promise of both/and offers multi-hued beauty, community and abundance.

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The world of either/or is diminished and desolate; the universe of both/and is wide and wondrous.  While sharp lines and binary solutions admittedly offer a kind of comforting clarity, they come at too high a cost, distancing us from the rich intricacies of truth and beauty.  As H.L. Mencken once noted, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  While fundamentalist religious traditions distill complicated doctrine into unambiguous maxims—as evidenced by the classic literalist slogan God said it.  I believe it.  That settles it.—Rabbinic Judaism does just the opposite.  Our Sages start with a seemingly straightforward Torah command like “Remember the Sabbath day,” then explicate it at such length that we end up with an entire Talmudic tractate debating what constitutes work on Shabbat.  At the center of such disputes we find Hillel and Shammai, who take diametrically opposed positions on practically everything.  As the Talmud recounts: 

For three years, the schools of Shammai and Hillel disagreed, with each side declaring, “The law is with us.”  Finally, in the quintessential Rabbinic assertion of both/and, the Holy One ends the dispute by proclaiming: אלו ואלו דברי אלוהים חיים—Both these and those are the words of the Living God.  (Eruvin 13b)

To be a Jew, then, is to hold that contraries are the road to the Divine, to embrace unresolvable paradox and aspire to the quality that John Keats famously called Negative Capability—the capacity to live with “uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without any irritable striving after fact and reason.”  Or as the founding father of American Modern Orthodoxy, Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, put it: “The religious person doesn’t solve life—they live it.”

While this path is often messy, it is also authentic, open to unexpected grandeur and true to our lived experience.  Perhaps the renowned Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai put it best in his friendly argument with the book of Ecclesiastes, which famously claims that “there is a season and time for every purpose under heaven.”

Amichai writes:

A person doesn’t have time in their life 

to have time for everything.

Ecclesiastes was wrong about that.

A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment, 

to laugh and cry with the same eyes, 

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, 

to make love in war and war in love.  

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, 

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest 

what history takes years and years to do.

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Transcending binaries invites beauty; it is also the way of community.  Where either/or divides, both/and connects us while respecting our disparities.  Returning to Amichai Lau-Lavie’s wisdom of “All you need is vav,” the name of that letter that stands for and also means “hook” or “peg.”  In its discussion of the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that housed the Divine Presence in the wilderness, Torah repeatedly employs the word vav to describe the hooks that attach its curtains and coverings.  As such, vav represents a holding of differences; it is a symbol of interconnectedness that binds the Jewish people, humankind, and the entire Creation.  The mishkan—and later the Temple in Jerusalem—becomes a sacred paradigm for the sort of interdependent community that Dr. Martin Luther King described in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture where he taught:

We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together — black and white, easterner and westerner, gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu — a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.

We might envision Dr. King’s inclusive world house when we recall the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, who assembled an intrepid band of Jews in Jerusalem after seven decades of Babylonian captivity.  They built the Second Temple—known in Hebrew as the Beit HaMikdash or Holy House—and read the Torah aloud to the people on Rosh Hashanah in 444 BCE.  The time and place embodied a vast spectrum of emotions, for the land that the newly ingathered exiles encountered was very different from the powerful kingdom they’d heard about in their grandparents’ stories. The Jerusalem they had longed for was still scattered with ruins, and the returnees’ hearts undoubtedly ached for the large numbers of their friends and kin who remained in Babylon.  Thus, even at the magnificent dedication of the restored Sanctuary, the crowd contained a multitude of mixed feelings.  As Ezra describes the scene: 

All the people raised a great shout of praise to the Holy One because the foundation of the House of God was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they beheld the founding of this one, while many others shouted for joy.  No one could distinguish the shouts of joy from the sounds of weeping, because the people made so much noise, which could be heard from afar.

We know those shouts, that inseparable mix of sorrow and celebration, because they echo the call of our own hearts, filled with joy and weeping, hope and despair, pain and healing, bound together at the root.  This is where we find ourselves on the cusp of this new year, in the challenging and sacred World House, which has always been the truest home of the Jewish people.  On this holy day we affirm that to be fully human is to hold multiple emotions at the same time, and recognize that our friends, neighbors, and the strangers among us are all trying their best to do the same.  To live in this place requires abundant compassion, for those around us and for ourselves.  Both/and is what makes meaningful community possible—for life is difficult enough as it is; let us strive to offer the grace of inclusion, at least to those willing to extend it in return.

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Both/and promises beauty and community; it also constitutes the road to enduring peace. In the realm of either/or, life frequently descends into a brutally competitive zero-sum game, where the success and empowerment of any person, community or nation always comes at another’s expense.  The bottom line in this outlook is scarcity, the grim economic principle wherein boundless human needs and desires constantly collide in an unending battle for limited resources.  Today, this perspective holds our country in its grip.  Our reigning political and corporate elites, from Washington, DC to Silicon Valley, thrive by dividing America and the wider world into winners and losers.  They celebrate themselves and their friends as the former, and scorn all who dare to question their authority as the latter.  

In this polarized hellscape, where there is never enough to go around, perpetual conflict is a fact of life.  Morality bows to brute strength, vulnerability is for fools, and the victors reap the spoils.  If you’re not with us, you’re against us.  In the ferocious debate around the Middle Eastern conflagration that has engulfed the world Jewish community over the last two years, this dynamic is front and center.  By its stunted logic, to be pro-Israel, one must be anti-Palestinian, and vice versa.  Within our communities and out on the streets, we argue vehemently for our side, shouting our slogans at maximum volume without listening to those who don’t share our views.  We’re right, you’re wrong. We’re good, you’re evil.  We’re victims, you’re oppressors.  As long as we continue to play by the rules of either/or, there can be no end to this caustic mess.

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The only path to peace—among nations, in our synagogues and households, and within each of our own hearts—is to change the game.  It is time to heed the words of one of my favorite teachers, Bruce Springsteen, who for decades has offered this sage advice: “Remember, in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.”

Nobody wins unless everybody wins.  

If the ethos of either/or is rooted in laissez-faire economics, the ethic of both/and is founded on something far more generous and inspiring: love.  In his book Honey from the Rock, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner notes that our most pressing human challenge is to overcome the dismal science of scarcity.  He writes:

Is it not the great childhood problem—and therefore the great human problem: To learn that it is good for you when other people love other people besides you.  

That I have a stake in their love.  

That I get more when others give to others.  

If I hoard it, I lose it.  If I give it away, it comes back to me.

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This is the miracle of both/and, for when love prevails, there is more than enough to go around and we all share in life’s bounty.  In the words of the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer: 

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically.  It’s created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together in ways that allow us to generate, celebrate and share a common store.  Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection, but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them and receive them from others when we are in need.

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All we need is vav--the both/and promise of truth, beauty, community and peace.  Rabbi Lau-Lavie reminds us it is no coincidence that vav is also the opening letter of the Torah’s most urgent command: V’ahavta—And you shall love.

V’ahavta et Adonai Elohechah—And love God, with all your heart, soul, and might.

V’ahavta l’rayechah camocha—And love your neighbor as yourself.

V’ahavta…ha-ger ha-gar eetchem—And love the stranger with whom you dwell.

And so, friends, on this Rosh Hashanah eve, we come together yet again, all of us containing multitudes.  We gather: sacred and secular, grieving and grateful, dust and divinity, restless and restored, brave and fearful, angel and animal.  Our calling is to receive it all, this awesome, complicated, contrary life, with open hands and heads and hearts.  To respond to the Creator’s embrace with love.  In that spirit, let me conclude with a passage from naturalist Barry Lopez’s gorgeous essay, “Love in a Time of Terror,” that feels to me very much like a benediction written for this holy day:

In this trembling moment, with armor rolling, with civilians beaten to death, with fires roaring and forests being felled, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland—in this moment is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?

Ken y’hi ratzon