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
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