Genesis Cycle 7 Vayera

 Vayera

 The Shock of a Lifetime

(this is going to be edited continually until Shabbat)

There are secrets in this life that we can’t hide. Sometimes our most outrageous and disgusting actions are on the cross-religious stage to be picked on, torn apart, degraded, analyzed, apologized for, scraped away, slammed, up-held, beloved, white-washed, scorned, discounted, mystified, demystified or simply thrown into a basket of petty archaic concerns and kept in a shut-tight ark for eternity.

This, one might say, is the predicament of Abraham.

If you want to see my mystical analysis of the Akeda, the attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac, please look at any of my other teachings.

Today’s focus is not going to be mystical.  It will end in the mystical. I promise you that. But the way we will get there is by marching through the basic facts.

First, we need to see quite clearly that Abraham is a product of his culture as well as the person or angel or prophet or holy messenger who placed this myth on the scroll. Sacrifice at the time of Abraham was the norm. The amazing transformation (we witness twice this year…on Rosh HaShanah and this week) was moving from human to animal sacrifice.  In other words, this is the story of the moral climb of mankind, not the downfall.  It's the story of the breaking-out of established norms and from any  destructive continuum of behavior, from the little box of home, from the expected and even the respected way of being. It's about even breaking away from God's expectations if our same Transcendent God has been scraped away from the Ethical God.  In a strange way Abraham is an ancient Huck Finn. Despite what the rest of the world is doing, he is going to see his relation to it and to God from a whole new paradigm. And he’s going to have the courage to act on it.

Next, we must honor but reject all of the excuses written about the  situation. So much has been written to exalt God through the patriarchs and I respect greatly all of the rabbis and scholars who have created midrash to excuse and support Abraham. However, when we begin to excuse we continue to excuse. The act of excusing becomes embedded in our genes. The beautiful mystical explanations that assure Abraham’s rectitude even in the shock and astonishment of the clearly (forgive my judgment) barbaric rite can carry into today's world.   This is why: The mere act of apologizing for our patriarch given that action rectifies the action of apologetics. Suddenly we are excusing the poor fragile elderly and horny King David for the rape of Bat Sheba,   excusing brilliant Jefferson for the enslaving of the Africans, excusing the pilgrims for the devastation of the Native American population, excusing any (male) super-hero who is born of our dual American/Israelite culture.

In short, by desperately reading the Akedah and desperately finding some tangential way to back-it-up we are not engaging in the Bible 101 lesson for which we all yearn. In fact, it’s closer to Sheol 101. Take the class and you know where you will soon be going. Murder, humiliation, adultery, and thievery will then become the Chekov-ian gun in Scene One. Trust me, by the end of your Life Play, that gun will be shot and if not at you than at someone with his or her back against the wall.  There won’t be a ram in the thicket. Finally, in backing it up in any way whatsoever we perform it.

Therefore, we need to understand the story from a contextual viewpoint historically, understand our fear/horror/shock at it and then see how we can metaphor the lesson in our personal lives.

Here are questions we can ask: Is anything happening today that seems to be the norm that we, as an individual or as a community, need to transform? Are people just going through the actions? Do we need to learn (again) how to pray?  Do we need to learn how to dig deep and intentionally through our most grotesque memories into our hearts to the real point-of-intimacy?  Do we need to say no just at the moment of absolute insane murderous satisfaction, the kind that only comes from blood and primal anguish? If so, what would we say no to today? 

Do we need to stop apologizing for our patriarchs and therefore stop creating a trajectory of apologetics that lead us straight to any political comment concerning Gaza?  A political comment that certainly will no longer be authentic?

A Christian man was telling me a story today. He said he was at a Bar Mitzvah a few years ago and the Torah was being taken around the congregation. He said when he touched it he could feel an electric shock in his arm. 

It was funny how this nice man in my class could impart such an important lesson during a badly needed break.

Torah, my friends, is not about apologetics for our patriarchs or self-excuses or self-righteousness for our culture as compared to theirs. It is simply about the electric shot running through the arm, something Abraham could receive while keeping his son…and his people.. spiritually and physically alive.