Rosh Hashona 3

Rosh Hashona


I have a feeling if we built a storage house for all the commentaries on the Akeda it would be a skyscraper of a building, with steps climbing from vault to vault, era to era. If we listened to the words of God, really listened, we would start at ground level. We would take our beloved child. Step after step. Higher and higher. No easy elevators here. In the first vaults, voices of Torah would flow out to greet us. Soon we’d be met by sheaths of parchments written by scribes and Talmudic rabbis. A bit higher for papers, books, mail, faxes, email, new forms of communication we can’t imagine today.

There would be truth in each vault, discoveries, dreams, philosophies. Each revelation would open our hearts a bit more. The new opening would allow the entry of wisdom and the release of divine sparks. The force of this release would propel our bodies onward and upward. Our very love for God therefore and our transformation would be our engine. We would place one foot on the next step, a key in a vault. Our yearning to consolidate the expanse of God-wisdom into something solid-pocket-size would be overwhelming. We would want to give it to the child. And yet the very gift (we know) would kill him.

Let’s do the hypothetical climb. We open the first vault and see Torah. The Akeda itself. But first, here’s some pre-Akeda happenings. Two boys are born, Ishmael and Isaac, to Hagar (Abraham’s slave) and Sarah (Abraham’s wife). Sarah wants to drive away Hagar and Ishmael. Though Abraham is pensive about it, God agrees. So off goes Hagar. When Ishmael is about to die of thirst she sits a bowshot away, faces her son and begs God so that she might not see her son die.. God answers her prayer and shows her a well of water. Next, Abraham makes a treaty with Abimelech and gives him seven ewes to retrieve and prove ownership of a well taken by Abimelech’s servants. So off go Abimelech and his general. First Hagar and Ishmael leave, then Abimelech. There’s an emptying in the Abraham-circumference. Now God steps in and seems to want to clear away Isaac as well.

Take your only son, He says, your beloved son and bring him as a burnt offerings to the mountain that I choose. Abraham listens, wakes up early, saddles his donkey, cuts wood, takes Isaac and two men and travels for three days. Then, per God’s instructions he takes Isaac with the wood, the fire (in his heart) and the knife. He builds the altar, arranges the wood and even binds Isaac for the sacrifice. This is when God’s angel steps in and tells him to stop. Abraham looks up, sees a ram in the thicket. Abraham offers the ram instead and names the place Adonoy Yireh. God’s angel now comes down a second time and declares (for God) that because Abraham obeyed God’s voice, he would be blessed greatly.

Let’s look at some more vaults as we climb up. We can peer into Chronicles. Gee, it’s almost empty. Very little is said about Abraham. However, it does say that the mount (the place of the Akeda) is called the Mount of the Lord (First Chronicles 3:1).

Let’s now look in the vault of prophets at Isaiah. In 2:2 to 2:4 the climb to the Mount is a joyous occasion. We gaze on it with joy. It is called Zion and the people encourage each other to come, let us go up to the mount of the Lord so that we may walk in His path. What might seem like pain, drudgery and almost-child-sacrifice therefore is enlightenment. For there, on the Mount, the people will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

We continue climbing. Prayers and music echo through the halls. More divine sparks leave us at each step, each thought, each memory of things we may have said or done that keep us from God. We replay the scene in our head. We replay the future scene of sacrifice. We are experiencing the death of our own child by immersing ourselves in the almost-death of another. We are living the death-moment. Seeing it. Planning it. Being it. Being the dying. Feeling even the last scrap of sparks racing from our body in heart wrenching breakage. And again the last spark. And again the last spark. These fleeing sparks keep propelling us forward. Like Abraham (beginning with the eviction of Hagar and Ishmael) we are being emptied out and filled with purified light and we are still moving. We watch the boy sleep at night (this is a very tall building). We feel his death. We sacrifice our very hearts and souls in the silence.

We can barely step into the next crowded vault. It’s a divine test, one Talmudic rabbi says. God has to make sure that Abraham loves Him. It’s a test for Isaac as well, some say. But no, another disagrees, many ordinary Jews would surrender their lives back then for God. This would be a trivial test for someone as great as Isaac.

Onward and upward to Genesis Rabbah. Again, a filled vault. Isaac, one rabbi says, is like God’s chariot. He’s a vehicle that brings Abraham to traits of strictness, kindness and compassion… It’s the spiritual surrender alone that God requires (47:6).

We pass hundreds of vaults and lured by an image of feminine beauty and grace we open one door and see spheres spinning. Ten spheres join in each construct. They fly right into us, enter our blood streams. We listen to the words of Rabbi Yonah Ibn Janach of 12th century Spain. God, he whispers, demands from Abraham only a symbolic sacrifice. We stare at his spirit for a while. Say it louder, I request, shout it. He whispers even softer. I can feel his breath within his breath. I wonder how he can expect anyone to hear his message. You have to listen real hard, I think. I wonder what I can’t hear. I think about levels of hearing, of symbols, of how ten centuries later the Akeda is viewed (by many) as a father son debacle., the kabbalist still partly lost in his own whisper.

Maimonides has his own vault. He’s there. He hands us his thoughts from A Guide to the Perplexed… Abraham, he says, acts on prophetic vision of what God asks him to do. The story exemplifies that prophetic revelation has the same truth value as philosophical argument…even a dream or vision. This means, we realize, that Abrahams revelations (and ours) are just as solid as the ideas we study in college, things written, proven, supported by theorists.

In the next vault we meet with Hasidic scholars, their souls jumping. The child leaps from a box of documents and catches one in his hand before it flits away. We hear laughter echoing from wall to wall. We giggle. It’s not a divine test, the child says, the Hasidic soul-energy still in him. It’s a punishment for Abraham’s mistreatment of Ishmael. We slip out and pass two doors with big lights shining on them and big prophets standing outside. These are important vaults, I think to myself. I’ll do these another time. We are being waved to them but we run past.

How are we going to get back down, the child asks, if we’re almost at the top and so little food is left?

We open more vaults. More modern scholars. The Hasidic commentary (Spiegel says) is just a reaction to the power of Christianity at the time. It’s an implicit argument against the Christian claim that God would sacrifice his own son. Another scholar applauds Abraham for his willingness to spare Isaac and go against God’s will. J. H Hertz says that child sacrifice was common among Semetic people at the time and the shock of the story is not the impending sacrifice but the fact that God would step in to stop it.

We keep thinking of the child dying. We feel sad. We try to be strong. And yet we live and relive the moment of his death which (we guess) will happen at the top fo the building. It can’t be far. As sparks fly from us we feel even more empty. It’s as if some being is using a hand to grab our heart. There’s pain, deep pain. Light leaving us. Light we didn’t know we had. We feel dizzy, a bit disoriented, protected, stoned, ecstatic, horrified, in almost pure release.

This leads us to the next vault. Here we see all kinds of writings including those by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. This is what he says: The inner enlightenment that wells up forcefully within the person and the enlightenment from without…both contribute to building the human spirit….the more the person puts his heart to contemplating the spiritual edifices that these two basic paths fashion within him the more he perfects them and rises increasingly in clear spiritual ascent.

We continue. Soon, we come upon a vault and there aren’t any writings at all. It looks empty. We can feel the wisdom though. It permeates our cells. Here, Abraham is a vessel of light as well as Isaac. There’s a flow going from one to the next as they rise to the divine radiance. It’s Abraham’s vessel though that is almost completely emptied. The flow, we see is pushing them up, propelling them higher. Isaac’s vessel is necessary for the emptying to have the energy to propel them. By the time they get to the top of the mountain Abraham is empty. There is nothing else for him to give. He binds Isaac almost in full repeat of the scene he has replayed in his mind over and over again. But there’s no reason. The sacrifice has been made.

Then we leave the room. There are more steps to climb yet they are invisible. The building continues up even though our eyes can’t see it. Our hearts can see and we know we must keep climbing.

We enter one more vault. There are beings who aren’t there. In a large circle. Eyes shooting light. Hair golden. Bodies filled with viscous gold. Their hearts empty the purest divine essence into individual funnel/spiral-like shofars that meet at a central nexus, a globe of the purest essence equidistant from all the beings. We hear this happening..it’s the solid sound of the shofar. Then, the light shoots up from the nexus and comes down like a circular fountain through crowns and back to hearts through the shofar. This is a continuous cycle. And then we see it. The nexus is magnetic. Sparks are rising to it from everywhere. The sparks go in and they look like people. The whole world is in the nexus, even Abraham and Isaac.

Quietly, so as not to disturb them,. we leave. We can’t see each other anymore. We keep climbing. We know that soon, so soon, we will be completely emptied and the sacrifice will be consummated. The building is gone, the steps are gone, we are gone, simply rising with sparks fleeing from our hearts. The sound of the shofar carries us to God’s glory.

This New Year, may we have the faith to continue the climb whatever we see or don’t see, hear or don’t hear, fear or doubt. May we have a beautiful and joyous emptying-out as we move closer and closer from the revealed to the concealed, and rise knowingly or unknowingly to the mysteries and the magnificence.