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September 2011/Tishrei 5772
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Inside
The Akedah
Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon
Abraham’s Attributes:
‘A Source of Strength’ . . 1
Penina Adelman, Arthur
Strimling, Shai Held, Peter
Pitzele, Huda Abu Arqoub,
Hannah Dresner, Marc
Bregman, Menachem
Creditor, Naomi Less &
Chana Rothman, Michael
Graetz, Julie Seltzer,
Naomi Graetz
Perspectives on the
Binding of Isaac. . . . . . . 2
Shaul Magid
Hasidism and
the Akedah . . . . . . . . . . 9
Joshua Holo
The Binding of Isaac
or His Sacrifice?
Christian and Jewish
Perspectives . . . . . . . . 10
Sharon Brous, Josh
Kornbluth, Dov Linzer,
Jeffrey Helmreich
Faith and Ethics:
A Roundtable on
the Akedah . . . . . . . . . 11
Discussion Guide. . . . . 15
Yael S. Feldman
The Land of Isaac?
From ‘Glory of Akedah’
to ‘Isaac’s Fear’ . . . . . . 16
Sarah Imhoff
Violence and Secrecy:
On Masculinity and
the Akedah . . . . . . . . . 17
Rachel Barenblat,
Matthew Zapruder,
Kathryn Hellerstein,
& Yerra Sugarman
So Avraham Took
the Ram . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Shaiya Rothberg,
Avi Killip, Mimi Feigelson,
Mike Comins
NiSh’ma . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Bryna Jocheved Levy
Rembrandt’s Akedah . . 21
Robert J. Saferstein
Sh’ma Ethics . . . . . . . 24
W
e begin a new year with what might be the greatest dramatic story of our people:
the binding of Isaac — in Hebrew, the Akedah. We’ve invited several creative thinkers
to share imaginative, midrashic perspectives on this story, recounted in the Book of
Genesis, in which God asks Abraham to bind his son on an altar on Mount Moriah. Offering
observations through the eyes and voices of the major figures, of course Abraham, Sarah, and
Isaac speak. But we also hear from the angel of God who stays Abraham’s hand, from
Abraham’s other son, from the knife that almost sank into Isaac, from the ram stuck in the
thicket that ultimately served as a sacrifice in Isaac’s place, from the wood that would burn,
from the mountain that Abraham and Isaac climbed, and, of course, from God. Read this as text
or bring it to life as biblio-drama — take a part and act out the scene with friends, and then
address the questions explored in our probing Roundtable on the tensions between faith and
ethics or in our discussion guide on page 14.
This issue also includes several essays on the binding of Isaac: how three 18th-century
Hasidic rebbes understood the Akedah; how the Akedah is evoked in contemporary Hebrew
literature; and how the themes of secrecy and violence, of fear, acceptance, and righteousness,
are embedded in the narrative. “Hineini” means “Here I am.” The phrase is first uttered by
Adam when God asks, “Ayeka?” “Where are you?” It is repeated by Abraham three times in the
story of the Akedah. It is also a prayer recited by the shaliach hatzibur, the emissary of the
congregation, just before the beginning of the Rosh Hashanah musaf. The leader chants the
prayer as a petition to God to accept the prayers of the congregants. Scattered throughout this
issue are short reflections on what it means today to say, “Here I am.”
Each year, our back page features an ongoing conversation on an ethical question. Our
ethics column this year will address social media — issues of privacy, connectivity, and potential
tensions between religious practice and technology. We launch the series with our online director,
Robert J. Saferstein, who has been instrumental in shaping our social media presence.
If you’re not a subscriber — but one of several thousand who are receiving Sh’ma as a gift
from your rabbi — please subscribe. We look forward to sharing conversations with you
throughout the year — in print and online — about the critical issues we face today as Jews.
Shana tova — wishing you a very sweet and healthy year.
—Susan Berrin, Editor-in-Chief
Abraham’s Attributes: ‘A Source of Strength’
ILANA GOLDHABER-GORDON
here was a time when I could not read the
story of the binding of Isaac without wishing for a different ending — that Abraham
would stand up to God, refusing to harm his son.
Some of my rabbinic colleagues redefine the
story, ignoring God’s words, “because you did
this thing and did not hold back your precious
son from me, I will bless you.” They claim that
Abraham failed God’s test because he mounted
his son on the slaughtering block.
Past generations were unabashedly proud
of this story; it was the pinnacle of Abraham’s
life. When the ancient rabbis played with the
T
ending, their inclinations were opposite to
those of my rabbinical colleagues. One midrash
imagines Abraham actually slaughtering Isaac,
and an angel bringing him back to life. In the
traditional view, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac earned their descendants a special
claim on God’s affections.
Let’s be humble for a moment. Let’s not assume that our ancestors loved their children
less than we do, loved violence more than we
do, or were more prone to fanaticism. Instead,
let’s assume that our ancestors knew something we have forgotten concerning how to
SHMA.COM
read sacred text.
Many of us today read the Bible in much the
same way we read history. We criticize Abraham the way we might criticize Winston
Churchill. We analyze the implications of Abraham’s actions outside the story line, or we ask
what someone else would have done in Abraham’s place. We’re asking the wrong questions.
And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his
son. Then the angel of the Lord called him from heaven: ‘Abraham!
Abraham!’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ And he said, ‘Do not raise
your hand against the boy, or do anything to him.’ (Genesis 22:10-12)
Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon,
who holds a doctorate in
biochemistry from the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, is a rabbinical
student at the Academy for
Jewish Religion in Los Angeles.
She is founder of Minyan
Shevach in Palo Alto. She
spent this past year learning
and teaching at the
Conservative Yeshiva in
Jerusalem.
Ironically, our sages — who believed that
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob existed in the flesh
— understood that their stories were not to be
read as history. They understood the patriarchs
as larger than life, archetypal symbols. No one
ever was nor ever will be like Abraham. But
every one of us carries something of Abraham
within ourselves.
Abraham represents a soul that accepts
death. That acceptance is elusive in our world
of penicillin, seat belts, and smoke detectors
(May their effectiveness only increase!). Most
of us have come to believe that every child born
has the right to a long life, and we demand that
right from God. And many of us are stunned
when death appears. Abraham was never surprised by death. He understood that life is but
a passing shadow, death its inevitable end.
Abraham is also ready to make sacrifices.
Many people are generous, but, for better or for
worse, true sacrifice is rare. Most of us donate
to charity, but few of us give enough so that we
feel pinched. If we give of our time, usually we
do so when it is most convenient, not necessarily when it is most needed. Abraham believed so deeply in God, he was ready to give
up the one thing he loved most in this world.
Finally, and above all, Abraham is ready to
obey God. A crucial premise of the story is that
Abraham knew whom he was obeying. Today,
nobody is privileged to receive personal instruction from the Almighty. Instead, we face a
hard, ongoing process to find the ways of righteousness. But in those moments when we see
the right thing to do, then we have a choice: to
indulge in endless analysis, self-doubts, or cynicisms, or to hush and obey.
Abraham represents each of these traits in
their rawest form, offering an intensity that we
should not imitate. Normal people who live in
utter obedience of God or another cause, willing to sacrifice everything for that belief, with
no fear of death, are not what we usually call
righteous. They are dangerous fanatics.
Yet when the sages read the story of the
binding of Isaac, they recognized Abraham’s attributes within themselves and saw them as a
source of strength. They knew that every person can work toward acceptance of death. We
can open ourselves to making true sacrifices for
our ideals. And, if we engage in self-reflection
in order to recognize the voice of righteousness,
then we can resolve to obey that voice at those
moments when we know we’ve heard it. By
channeling our Abrahamic attributes, we might
live our lives to the fullest and direct our actions with confidence toward godliness.
Perspectives on the Binding of Isaac
Sarah [ P E N I N A
hank You for waking me up again on another day of your creation. Thank You for Your
spirit that makes the air fresh. Thank You for lighting up the world with the sun and calling on the insects and the birds to begin their music. You infuse this day with possibility.
You breathe and blow into all that is. These old bones give thanks; these sinews and pores give
thanks; this skin gives thanks; these eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms, and legs give thanks. To You,
my awesome Creator, responsible for everything, I bow down. You are the only one.
As I rise from sleep, I remember some vague shimmers. A dream comes back to me. Help me
understand it:
Yom Kippur in the afternoon: We are all gathered on the hill above our encampment. Someone
has my baby, my little Isaac, in his arms and he’s about to toss him right off the high place, from
which he’ll certainly fall to his death on the rocky shelf below. I am beyond shocked — didn’t
Avraham and I leave all this behind? Eventually, the certainty that my child will die rises from my
gut like a scream and I awake.
Help push aside this foreboding that makes it hard to see or know or do. Take away this
T
Penina Adelman is a
psychotherapist and spiritual
director in Newton, Mass. She
is the author of Miriam’s Well:
Rituals for Jewish Women
Throughout the Year, the coauthor of The JGirl’s Guide: The
Young Jewish Woman’s
Handbook for Coming of Age,
and the editor of Praise Her
Works: Conversations with
Biblical Women.
[2]
ADELMAN]
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
paralysis lowering onto me, a poisonous cloud that refuses to lift. Restore the cloud of Your divine presence that usually rests right above me.
I call out “Isaac!” and then, “Avraham!” No answer. I smell breakfast on the fire or its remains.
They must have heated up some of the cakes of meal from yesterday. Isaac likes that for breakfast with butter churned from almonds.
I cannot tolerate people not saying good-bye. It reminds me of when Avraham and I left
Ur-Kasdim. Though he was in a hurry, I prevailed upon him to let me see my mother and father
and say good-bye. Oh, the deep pain in our hearts in that moment of leave-taking. But at least they
knew I was going of my own free will with the man I loved. They blessed me.
I rise slowly. My bones are stiff and I move slowly. I breathe deeply. Thank You for each
breath. Now, what must I do today? The endless tasks of the tent are waiting: Air out the bedding, wash the clothes, mend the sandals, milk the goats, take them out to graze, prepare the big
meal of the day.
Tell me, why didn't they wake me? They know I don’t like being left like that. Where have
they gone?
Please, remind me of my strength, like a tree of life, tall and eternal. Pour Your wisdom into
me like rain drenching the tree that is parched with waiting. I see that they brought Isaac’s favorite
goat, the one with the gray beard that makes him look like an old man. Isaac calls him saba. He
never knew his grandfathers.
Abraham [ A R T H U R
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STRIMLING]
hree days. Three days walking to Moriah … God asked; I obeyed. I did not look at the boy
once, only at God … The long look ... Three days. I thought, “This must be for the good.”
I thought, “We will get another baby.” I thought, “Ishmael! It must be Ishmael!” I thought
and thought, and when I stopped thinking, God showed me the mountain. And we climbed, Isaac
and I, silent and alone.
When Isaac asked that little question: “Where is the lamb?” I looked at him. For the first time,
I saw him for him, not as some implement of God’s plan. And after that God disappeared; I never
took my eyes off Isaac. I saw him change. I saw the long look come over him …
You don’t know what that is, the long look? I’ll show you. Stretch your left arm out straight
in front, and look at your hand. Like this. Do it! … Now, put your other hand close, right in front
of your face, fingers spread, so you can see the far hand through them. Like this. That’s it. … Now,
look through the front hand to the far one; put all your attention on the far one. See what happens to the near one? It gets all fuzzy, almost disappears. The far hand is God — God’s plan,
God’s commands, God’s every wish. The near one is life — your life, your wife, children, food,
flocks, friends, health, nature, all of it. All fuzzy, invisible, expendable, so you can keep your
focus long, on God.
That look came into Isaac’s eyes just as it left mine. In that moment, on that mountain, I saw
that he knew; that he wanted to go ahead with it. He could have stopped me with a word, a gesture. But no, Isaac helped me build the altar; he lit the fire; he climbed on; he demanded that I
tie him tight … He had the long look now. He could see only God.
But I could not stop seeing Isaac. For the first time I saw what was closest to me. The God
hand went up, but it was not my hand any more. The voice that cried out, “Abraham! Abraham!”
was not God’s voice, not an angel. It was the voice of my heart, saying, “Do not touch the boy.
Do not lay a hand on him.” I saved him; not God.
T
Issac [ S H A I
HELD]
don’t understand my father. He seems to love me so much: Whenever I call him, he says,
“Hineni,” here I am. And he’s so protective of me. As we walked toward this place, he had
me carry the wood but insisted that he would carry the fire and cleaver himself. He was worried that if I carried them, I might hurt myself.1 And yet here we are on this mountain, and he
is about to offer me up on the altar. I can’t actually bring myself to say the words — he is going
to sacrifice me — which means that he is going to kill me. Me, his son, his favored son, whom
I
Arthur Strimling is the Maggid
HaMakom of Congregation
Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn,
N.Y., and director of the Haym
Salomon Division of the Arts of
the Federation Employment
and Guidance Service, Health
and Human Service System, in
New York. A fuller version of this
piece is available on request
from art.strim@verizon.net.
Rabbi Shai Held is
the co-founder and Rosh
Yeshiva of the New York-based
Mechon Hadar
(www.mechonhadar.org),
where he holds the Chair in
Jewish Thought. He is one of
three recipients of the 2011
Covenant Award of the
Covenant Foundation.
1
Cf. Gerhard von Rad's
Commentary on Genesis.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[3]
SHMA.COM
2
3
Genesis Rabbah 58:5
Cf. Genesis Rabbah 60:14 and
Rashi to Genesis 24:62
Peter Pitzele has added
collage to his ongoing
exploration — in bibliodrama,
writing, and mask performance
— of biblical interpretation.
Huda Abu Arqoub is the coexecutive director of Abraham’s
Vision, a California-based
conflict-resolution organization
that explores social relations
among Jewish, Muslim, Israeli,
and Palestinian communities.
One of twelve children, she was
born in Jerusalem and raised
in Hebron. Prior to joining
Abraham’s Vision, she worked
as an educational consultant
for the Palestinian Authority’s
Ministry of Education.
1
The term aqeeda in Arabic means “the
strong free-of-doubt tie to a belief
system.” This reflects the connection
between what we believe strongly in our
hearts and our daily practices — from
the simplest action to the most
complicated. In the Qur’an, there is no
naming of the son that Ibrahim
(Abraham) takes to the mountain.
[4]
he seems to love. He loves me, but I guess he loves God more. How am I supposed to feel about
that? How am I supposed to feel about him? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to speak to him again.
I don’t understand God. My father has told me 100 times that the covenant God made with
him was about our “keeping God’s own way by doing what is just and right,” and yet by what
conceivable standard is what God is asking for here just or right? God wants my father to sacrifice me? I guess serving God is more difficult and more complicated than I could ever have imagined. What am I supposed to do — argue? I’ve seen my father do that in other circumstances.
Surrender my fate to God? That seems to be what my father thinks we both should do now. Maybe
he’s right; he’s older, wiser, and has had many conversations with God. But what if he’s wrong?
What if God never speaks to him again either?
What about my mother? Doesn’t God care about how she feels? For so long, my father acted
as if the covenant were between him and
God — as though she didn’t matter.
Now, neither God nor my father ask her
about the sacrifice. My mother has gotten an incredibly bad deal here, both
from her husband and from God. No
wonder she’s so unhappy. I can’t imagine she’ll survive when she finds out
what the two of them did to me.2
And what about Hagar? Poor Hagar.
My father cast her out — twice, each
time abandoning her to her fate (and the
second time God encouraged him). But
he didn’t just cast her out. No, he cast
her out with her little boy — my brother,
Ishmael. What if she had died? What if
Ishmael had died? I get it now: First he
abandoned his first son, and now he’s
going to end my life, too. And both times
because God told him to. What’s wrong
with him? What’s wrong with Him?
What’s wrong with them?! If somehow I
make it out of here alive, I am going to
go find Hagar and bring her home.3 I
think I know what she must feel like.
Maybe we could comfort each other.
Right now, all I know is that I just
Peter Pitzele “Abraham! Abraham!”
don’t understand.
A Son [ H U D A
ABU ARQOUB]
y strong belief that Allah must have a plan assured me that I should go with my father
Ibrahim up to the mountain. Both of us have such a strong feeling in our hearts about
our belief in Allah, we wouldn’t question the “vision” that my father had. Prophets have
visions — not dreams — but visions in their sleep. Ibrahim saw in his sleep that this was what
he was to do. Both he and I willingly agreed to walk toward the mount. I saw my father was anxious and I tried to ease his pain. I wanted to help him affirm his faith in Allah. We knew that our
deep strength of aqeeda,1 both in heart and in practice, was crucial for this action. We also knew
that the experience was a reflection of our relationship to one another; my father conveyed the
message of his vision and I helped him decide to fulfill it.
Where was my mother? Was she not present because she was too vulnerable to be drawn into
this decision of life and death? Was she with the women, who were relegated to a different sphere
of work and life — one that for centuries kept them apart from engagement with holy texts and
decisions about religious matters?
M
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
The Angel [ H A N N A H
DRESNER]
od, on high, commanded this last test of Abraham:
“Avraham!”
“Hineini; Here I am!”
“Aleh! Rise up to me on the flame of the fire-raising you make of your son Isaac!” And then
God retreated to the supernal sanctuary. Alone, and frightened, Abraham cried out:
“Ayeh, but where is the sheep for slaughter?”
This was his only external utterance, but I am the articulation of his silence:
“Ayeh? Where is the throne of Your glory?1 Where will I find Your holiness in this terrible act?”
I am the angel. I hear in the world of feeling; my voice flows from Abraham’s agony.2
Abraham had stepped into a void between God who surrounds all worlds, and God who resides deepest within. What could he argue in the face of that emptiness? So he spoke silence, the
language of longing and hope, the language of prayer and psychological process.3 Such was his
supplication:
“O Fountain of Blessings, how can I raise my son to You and rise on that raising without being
burned? How can I transform without being annihilated? How can I cleave to You without losing
everything?”4
Hearing this, I was aroused to enliven Abraham’s awareness of God’s still, small voice within
him. I had to call him twice, because he was fixated on sacrifice and I was whispering:
“Avraham! Avraham!”
“Hineini; Here I am. (Here I have been, in my fear, feeling so abandoned, and here I am, now,
suddenly awed to discover You so close, so much a part of me!)” And the rest we spoke together,
for in encountering the voice of God speaking through his own heart, Abraham was, indeed,
transformed, and knew what to do to raise Isaac, to raise his tzchok, his joy, in service of the
Source of All Life;5 he looked, and saw the ram, and burned it instead of his son.
Then I left him and returned to my Master. From the heavenly court, I blessed Abraham for
submitting to the test, for stretching past reason into faith, for sitting in silence with his Creator,
and for drawing God’s command through the fire of his soul so as to respond with his own humanly filtered torah.6 I blessed him for engaging in the holy dialogue that raises tzchok, bringing
pleasure to God who rejoices in the profundity of humankind.
G
The Ram [ M A R C
Hannah Dresner is pursuing
ordination in the rabbinic and
Hashpa’ah Program in Spiritual
Direction at the Philadelphiabased ALEPH: Alliance for
Jewish Renewal. Dresner, who
holds a master’s degree in fine
arts, previously taught in the
department of art theory and
practice and in the integrated
arts program at Northwestern
University. She thinks of her
rabbinic studies as an
extension of her work as an
artist.
1
Nahman of Bratzlav, as paraphrased
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg in The
Beginning of Desire: Reflections on
Genesis.
2
Adin Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled
Rose, pp. 4-12.
3
Nahman of Bratzlav, Liqqutei Moharan,
lesson 64.
4
Gaston Bachelard in Avivah Gottlieb
Zornberg’s The Murmuring Deep:
Reflections on the Biblical
Unconscious.
5
Yaakov Yosef of Polnoy
6
Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, Sfat Emet,
Emor, 5634/1874 p.16b.
BREGMAN]
all me Isaac.” Abraham named me after his son and made me the bellwether of his
flock. So I witnessed the whole affair. I’ll spare you the details. But, to tell the truth, the
real hero is me: Isaac, the ram!
The whole point of the story is that Abraham should make sacrifice to God, right? So who got
sacrificed in the end? Isaac, son of Abraham, or me, Abraham’s most treasured possession? I realize it may be hard for you people to accept that your Bible got it wrong. But your midrash got
it right. When the angel told Abraham not to send forth his hand against his son Isaac, who lay
bound on the altar ready to be sacrificed, the Holy One, blessed be God, called out from heaven:
“Let Isaac for Isaac come.” That was my cue. I rushed toward the altar to be sacrificed. But Satan
blocked my way. Trying to do an end-run around Satan, I got caught in a thicket by my horns.
Fortunately, I was already close enough to Abraham to stretch out my foreleg and tug at his tallit. He turned around, set me free and offered me up for a burnt offering instead of his son.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. If I was sacrificed, how can I now be telling the story? Well,
God resurrected me from the ashes of my burnt offering and I’ve been up here in heaven ever since.
Yes, we rams (and ewes, of course) have a paradise. We feast on the freshest, greenest grass
imaginable. And we don’t find particularly appetizing the idea of eating Leviathan and Behemoth,
like your righteous do in people paradise. But, like you, we have a heavenly yeshiva where we
study our version of Torah — including the full story of the Akedah. You can well imagine that
we have a rather different take on the pascal sacrifice, the scapegoat on Yom Kippur, and the rest
of the sacrificial cult.
By the way, the other members of my chevruta are the sheep that Jacob shepherded for Laban.
They’re still a rather spotty bunch, as you can well imagine. But that’s a story for another day.
‘‘C
SHMA.COM
Marc Bregman serves as the
Bernard Distinguished Professor
of Jewish studies at the
University of North Carolina in
Greensboro, where he heads the
program in Jewish studies.
Bregman has published widely
in both scholarly and popular
journals, including an
introduction and thematic
commentary to a novelistic
retelling of the famous talmudic
legend of The Four Who Entered
Paradise (Jason Aronson,
1995). He thanks Prof. David
Halperin for helpful stylistic
suggestions. A fuller version of
this piece, including references
to sources used in composing
this retelling of the Akedah, is
available on request from
marc.bregman@gmail.com.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[5]
Sermon of the Mount [ M E N A C H E M
SHMA.COM
Menachem Creditor is rabbi
of Congregation Netivot
Shalom in Berkeley, Calif., and
founder of ShefaNetwork: The
Conservative/Masorti
Movement Dreaming from
Within
(shefanetwork.blogspot.com).
He blogs at
menachemcreditor.org.
1
TB Shabbat 88a
2
TB Shabbat 88b
3
Genesis 4:10
CREDITOR]
A
t first I was frightened, but then I calmed down.1
When the blood touched me, I trembled, shaken by the unwelcome contact. Even when
they first climbed my most tortuous path2 with their ritual instruments, I knew something
was wrong. I had felt pounding like this before. Every footstep was too heavy, pressing down
new pain into the memories just inches below my surface. Since that very day I have witnessed
many burdened lives, but they all remind me of the steps that Abraham and Isaac, along with their
servants, took all those years ago. Those footsteps and that blood call out to be heard.3 But no
one remembers that part.
All I am is accumulated memory, layer after layer of experience — from earth’s core to surface gravel. Only through stories do people today even think to explore my depths. But even if
they do consider my hidden parts, they’ll never feel the roots of the shrub violently torn from
my hold, first by the ram and then by the man’s hand. They’ll never feel the altar shatter from
trauma, scattering shards and pebbles into the mix of my form. They’ll never know of the silence
after the boy died at his father’s hand. No one will hear the boy gasp for his second first breath,
or feel the father’s body convulse when his reborn son stared into his eyes.
People don’t know me. You don’t know me. You probably think you can buy, sell, claim, and
name me. I have no need for a name. I have been here, and I will always be here. This boy’s was
not the last blood spilled upon me, or for me. I have no need for that blood. If you would only
rest your head on me, listen to the quiet I’ve always held: There would be no more spilled blood.
The Ram’s Horn [ N A O M I
LESS & CHANA ROTHMAN]
somebody do something/anything soon/I know I can’t be the only/whatever I am in the
room/so why am I so lonely?/why am I so tired?/I need company/I need backup/I need to
be inspired —Ani Difranco “Face Up and Sing”
Naomi Less, Jewish chick
rocker, musical worship
specialist, and educator, uses
Jewish values-based edgy-pop
rock music to open hearts and
souls around the world. Less
passionately empowers young
and adolescent girls to find
their voices, pick up
instruments, and express
themselves. She can be
reached at
www.naomiless.com. Hear her
sing “HaYom” and “Ptach lanu
sha’ar” on shma.com.
Chana Rothman is an activist,
song leader, singer/songwriter,
and music educator living in
Philadelphia. Her approach to
music is collaborative and her
style fuses folk, reggae, hip
hop, and worldbeat for an
urban take on ancient
teachings. She can be reached
at www.chanarothman.com.
Hear her sing “One Stone” and
“Gates of Justice” on
shma.com.
[6]
t’s not that I don’t feel special; I appreciate my heritage. It’s just that, year after year, it’s the
same thing. Everyone talks about my sound: “The sound of the shofar reminds us to repent.”
“The ram’s horn is a powerful call to wake up.” “The shofar is the defining sound of the High
Holy Days.”
It’s kind of isolating. I’m like the Lone Ranger of Jewish fall holidays.
And just so you know, there’s a lot more to the story. I wasn’t always a symbol; I used to be
an everyday, run-of-the-mill ram next door.
Ever since that one crazy day so long ago, all anyone sees — or hears, rather — is my horn.
They think it’s enough to blow my horn and let me take the blame for their mistakes, year after
year. Well, maybe it is enough, but first I’m going to tell you my version of the story. Then you
can decide for yourself.
So, here goes. I saw them coming up the mountain. They were huffing and puffing, struggling
up the rocky hillside. I do see humans on this mountain from time to time, though mostly we
don’t; we just roam freely, basking in the sun and...ahem...procreating. Anyway, there was something different about these two. I couldn’t quite put my hoof on it.
Suddenly, just like that, the larger man tied up the smaller one, laid him down on some kind
of altar, covered him with wood, and took out a bright, sharp-edged object. When I’d seen this
before, they usually killed a ram or a goat — one of my kind.
I watched from a distance, knowing that something was very wrong. But I didn’t know what
to do. There were other animals around, but they just ignored what was happening; they tried to
act invisible, to not get caught in the bramble (so to speak).
At that moment, I felt a swelling inside. A forceful voice from inside took my normally soft
bleat and blasted it through the air: “STOP!”
The bigger one looked in my direction, then up to the heavens, then back at me, and dropped
the sharp object. The rest is history.
Ever since then I have become a symbol for all that is loud, stubborn, outspoken. Some say
I’m all ego: headstrong, confident, outgoing, and, yes, sometimes butting in more than my fair
I
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
share. I hear I’ve even come to represent a moon or sun sign, and people all around the world relate their personalities to me.
I can’t say why I was chosen to speak out. What I can say is that lately, I’ve been thinking
that I’m not the only one who can cry out and make a sound when something is wrong. I’m not
the only one who can sound the wake-up call. Sure, my voice is powerful, but, in all fairness, you
— men and women and children — have voices, too. Maybe if you were in my place on that day
on the mountain, you would have sounded your own horn. Or maybe you would have pretended
that you didn’t see.
Either way, you now know the whole story. I have never been the same since that day, when
a higher force called out through me and changed the course of history. This year, I invite you to
make a sound with me. Call out to your neighbor, to the heavens, to yourself. This year, when
you hear my voice, I can’t wait to hear yours calling back.
The Wood [ M I C H A E L
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GRAETZ]
ou would not believe what I have seen. When God created the seraphim, fiery angels, in
the heavenly kingdom, He placed them upright above His throne. The trees, created on the
third day, were also created upright, their limbs and branches to be used for sacrifices. I
am mentioned four times in the Akedah story, for it is a story of sacrifice, and one must have wood
for a sacrifice.
I first appear in the story when Abraham splits me. He’s preparing for the sacrifice. Though
old, Abraham was strong and able to split wood. God remembered this hard physical work when
he was inspired to split the sea for the Israelites when they left Egypt. I got a great kick out of being
the model for setting Israel free from the pursuing Egyptians.
On the other hand, I was saddened when Abraham placed me on Isaac’s back. Poor Isaac. He
was not the brightest candle in the candelabra. He was 37 years old, and even after trudging up
a mountaintop with me piled on his back, he didn't figure out what was going on. He looked like
a man carrying a burden of wood, like the staves that the Romans would make their prisoners bear
on the way to their punishment.
I hoped that when Abraham told his servants, “We shall return” he had some notion that
Isaac would be spared. For a while, I was happy; I thought Isaac’s burden would merely be carrying me up the mountain and no more. But then, when Abraham placed Isaac above me in the
position of the sacrifice, I became very agitated. What a relief to hear the angel’s voice calling out
to Abraham to spare Isaac. Tears fell upon me, making it impossible to set me alight. It was ironic
that Elijah used that same trick in his confrontation with the prophets of baal; he poured water
on the wood stacked in the same way Abraham had stacked me.
Since created on the third day, I have been used to burn many sacrifices. Always, I hope people will want to preserve me — not use me for destruction, even in the name of God.
Y
The Knife [ J U L I E
Rabbi Michael Graetz, one of
the founders of the Masorti
movement in Israel, served as
rabbi of Magen Avraham
congregation in Omer until his
retirement.
S E LT Z E R }
hough Yaakov is called yechid, the only, I, too, am a yechid. I was fashioned in this incarnation for the unique and sole purpose of playing “knife” in the binding of Isaac. I appear
just this once in the entire Torah, in this tenth and final test of Avraham’s faith. My presence heightens the tension: You sense that at some point in the play the knife will be used. Why
else would there be a knife onstage?
We all have our roles in life. This was mine. I came into being to play it, and vanished once
my job was complete. I am ma’achelet, “knife,” literally the One Who Consumes. When God tells
Avraham to take his son, his special one, to a yet unknown place and to sacrifice him, our forefather leaves early the next morning and doesn’t think to take a knife with him. (We might question his faith: Did he really think he’d be slaughtering his son?) I show up three days into the story,
and I want to explain how I got there.
I am sourced from a primordial sword, a weapon that is continually reshaped and reformed,
morphing into knives, swords, and spears for multiple scenes spanning thousands of years.
In the beginning of time, the Kadosh Baruch Hu, my Maker, formed me and placed me at the
T
Julie Seltzer is a scribe,
educator, and artist. Most
recently, she wrote a sefer
Torah as part an exhibit at the
Contemporary Jewish Museum
in San Francisco. She also
creates challah art, which she
developed while working as the
baker at the Isabella Freedman
Jewish Retreat Center in
Connecticut. Seltzer resides in
the Bay Area.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[7]
SHMA.COM
entrance to Eden. There I am called cherev, “sword,” and there I have the purpose of guarding
the Tree of Life. It’s eternal employment; occasionally, though, I leave my post to carry out other
important missions — like accompanying Avraham and Yitzchak on their sojourn. On another diversion, I blocked a prophet and his donkey from cursing Israel. I have also manifested as romach, “spear,” slaying an Israelite man and a Midianite woman, uniting their love for all time.
Here in the Akedah, I do not pierce any skin. When Avraham picked me up, though, I did experience a rush of terror. Yitzchak was tied down, and he seemed so ready, so willing. Father as
well as son. I knew how the story was supposed to end, but part of me feared: What if fate
changes course? Though I’m sentient, I cannot control my own movements. The ones who hold
me hold the power, and then blame me for the violence they bestow. But remember: I am just a
prop for other players.
God [ N A O M I
GRAETZ}
h my God (oops, that’s me)! What was he thinking? After all the trouble they put me
through to conceive this son, I can’t believe Abraham took my pronouncement seriously.
Okay, Abraham owed me big for saving him from Nimrod’s fire. Maybe when I said to him,
“raise your son for an olah,” he understood the phrase to mean, “to burn up,” as Nimrod had intended to do to him. Did he expect me to save Isaac, once he was up there? It was one thing
when he blindly followed my directions to leave home and go to a land that I would show him.
Naomi Graetz is an author. Her
I asked him to prove his love for me. I kept asking him to do all sorts of things: circumcise himbooks include S/He Created
self and his family; lend Sarah to Pharaoh and Avimelech; send Ishmael away.
Them: Feminist Retellings of
To each challenge I set before him, he always heartlessly chose me over his relatives. But I
Biblical Stories; Silence is
never
thought he would go through with the sacrifice. I fully expected him to stand up to me
Deadly: Judaism Confronts
as he once had at Sodom — although I should have realized his weakness when he abruptly
Wifebeating; Unlocking the
Garden: A Feminist Jewish
stopped arguing with me at the number ten. In fact, I would have thought that he would offer
Look at the Bible, Midrash and
himself up as an olah instead of his son (tahat beno).
God; and a mystery novel, The
Why do I continuously test Abraham? Partly, it hearkens back to my wager with Satan, who
Rabbi’s Wife Plays at Murder.
always
brings out the worst in me. He insinuated that Abraham really didn’t love me enough, and
After 35 years teaching at Bentempted
me to test him. I’ve done things like that before: I put temptation in the way of Eve and
Gurion University of the Negev,
Adam; I couldn’t resist when Satan was so sure that Job would curse me.
she recently retired.
Why would I cause such agony to
those who love me? What would I
have done if Abraham had not lisDiane Nash organized the second wave
tened to the angel? How would I have
of Freedom Riders after the first wave was
kept my promise to create a great naARYEH COHEN
stopped by violence in Anniston and
tion coming out of his seed? I would
ineini is the moment of crossing the Birmingham, Alabama. Even though most of
have had to intervene, which is
line, of making the decision, of claim- the first group ended up in the hospital as
something I don’t like to do with my
ing the path. Hineini is that moment of re- a result of racist violence abetted by the popeople. I like them to figure things
lice,
Nash
defiantly
organized
the
second
sponse to a situation in the world, to the cry
out for themselves. Thank God
ride
to
prove
that
massive
violence
was
not
of another person. There are many reasons
(that’s me again!), Abraham saw the
going
to
stop
the
nonviolent
campaign.
to ignore the cry. There is only one reason
That black-and-white photograph of the
ram and broke free of his need to
not to: the clear knowledge that it is for this
beautiful
20-something
organizer,
looking
please me.
reason that you are here, that responding to
determinedly
into
the
coming
maelstrom,
But, as my prophets espouse, I do
that cry is part of what it means to be a perscreams
in
its
silent
dignity
“hineini.
”
require
sacrifice. I will have to see
son created in the image of God.
what the next generation can do. As
I recognize this moment in a black-and- Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, a Sh’ma Advisory Committee
for Abraham, I’ve stopped talking to
white photograph of Diane Nash from member, is a professor of Talmud at the Ziegler
him. After all, I’m God. I’m omnipo1961. The snapshot shows Nash as a School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish
tent; I do bad things when I’m angry.
young, courageous civil rights organizer in University in Los Angeles. He is author of the forthcoming book, Justice in the City: Toward a
Nashville; she is looking straight ahead and Community of Obligation. In July 2010, he was arI’m working on anger management
her face is projecting both an understand- rested for civil disobedience while demonstrating
and when I figure it out, maybe I’ll
ing of what is ahead and an indomitable in support of Unite Here, the workers union fighting
stop being so destructive to the peothe Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp.
determination.
ple I love.
O
Here I am, Hineini
H
[8]
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
Hasidism and the Akedah
SHAUL MAGID
argely focusing on Hebrew scripture as its
foundation for presenting its views,
Hasidic literature views the Akedah as a
template for worship. While most modern readers critically view this story from a Kantian perspective — how a benevolent God who forbids
murder could command human sacrifice and
how Abraham could be a model for humankind
if he is willing to kill his son, even for God —
many Hasidic masters seem uninterested in
these questions. They generally do not focus on
what we might call the “ethical” implications of
the story. In some way, the story is itself superfluous; like other biblical episodes, it is merely
an occasion to illustrate a dimension of Hasidic
piety (avodas HaShem). Unlike classical biblical
exegesis, Hasidic literature is not primarily focused on solving problems in scripture. Rather
it uses scripture to promote its agenda. Below, I
offer three brief approaches to the Akedah from
three different Hasidic masters, who argue that
their interests are not in the problematics of the
story but in using the story for different ends.
In his Or ha-Meir, R. Zev Wolf of Zhitomir
(d.1797) has only one comment on the Akedah.
He focuses on the cutting of the wood for the
sacrifice (vayibaka eizei olah, Genesis 22:3).
This act, he suggests, tells the whole story. The
story presents us with the template for all future
worship. Abraham’s cutting the wood is really
about preparing the wood in the future Temple.
And since all actions by a tzaddik in this world
point to identical acts in the supernal realm,
Abraham’s real intent was not to cut wood to
sacrifice his son but to perform a preparatory
act (cutting wood for the future Temple) that
would initiate the sanctification of the Temple
in heaven. A few verses later we read
“[Abraham] took the wood.” After preparing the
wood for the Temple in heaven, he took that
wood “down” into the physical realm. Wolf suggests this represents the disclosure of the spiritual into the physical. The story for Wolf was
not about human sacrifice at all. It was about
the process of preparing to disclose the spiritual
in the physical by first cutting and then taking
the wood of the Temple in heaven and drawing
it down into the yet-unredeemed world.
In his Zera Kodesh, R. Naftali Zvi of Rupshitz (1760-1827) focuses on the same word —
cutting (vayibaka) — as the centerpiece of the
story. He notes, however that the word is
L
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comprised of the same letters as “Yaakov.” From
this he derives that Abraham saw that Yaakov
would emerge and would continue Abraham’s
work of revealing God in the world. Abraham’s
sole concern was focused on the emergence of
Yaakov. How could he then justify the commandment to sacrifice Isaac (Yaakov’s father)?
The “Yaakov” that Naftali Zvi had in mind was
a spiritual Yaakov and not necessarily the person we know by that name. For Abraham,
Yaakov was a concept. Naftali Zvi even makes
the somewhat startling suggestion that, “Abraham’s only thought was to produce a spiritual
heir to continue his work. If this could be accomplished by Ishmael, so be it, as we read,
‘And Abraham said to God, Oh that Ishmael will
live before you.’ (Genesis 17:18) This means
that Ishmael will be a tzaddik, for Abraham’s
only desire was that he should have an heir who
was a tzaddik …The real intention of Abraham
when he cut (vayibaka=Yaakov) the wood was
that there be a ‘Yaakov’ in the world and not
necessarily in the bodily form of [the biblical]
Yaakov.”1 In this reading, if it was God’s will that
Isaac needed to be sacrificed to produce a
“Yaakov” from elsewhere, Abraham did not
mind. In fact, he would have supported it.
In his Kedushat Levi, R. Levi Yitzchak of
Berditchev (1740-1809) suggests that the entire
story is about a superior way of acting toward
God that is void of any rationale. The test was
whether Abraham could so act. He writes,
“Before the angel stayed Abraham’s hand, it
could have been construed that this was not
such a test, since one could say Abraham knew
the reason why God requested this and thus he
agreed to it. If so, this would be an inferior form
of worship. But after the angel stayed his hand,
it was revealed that there was no reason all
along and hence Abraham’s willingness to do
so was a superior form of worship. If there was
rationale for the sacrifice, why did the angel
stay his hand?”2 There exists a kind of Tertullian
understanding — “It is true because it is absurd” — in Levi Yitzchak’s rendering: “If the
commandment has no reason it is the highest
form of worship.”3 The fact that the angel
stayed his hand showed, in retrospect, the commandment to sacrifice Isaac had no reason and
thus was the highest form of worship.
In all three cases, the classical dilemmas of
how God could ask such a thing of Abraham and
Shaul Magid, a member of
the Sh’ma Advisory Committee,
is the Jay and Jeannie
Schottenstein Professor of
Modern Judaism at Indiana
University/Bloomington. His
book, American Post-Judaism:
Identity and Renewal in
Postethnic America, will be
published next year by Indiana
University Press.
1
Zera Kodesh, p. 16b
2
Kedushat Levi, p. 13c
3
Kedushat Levi, p. 13d
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[9]
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how Abraham could agree are not at play. The
episode is not taken literally, or as real, but as a
spiritual metaphor for teaching the reader how
to serve God. Were these Hasidic masters disturbed by the “ethical” implications of the story?
We do not know. But we know that they read
this story as they read all other biblical stories
— as a guide toward serving God, avodas
HaShem. The details and dilemmas of the biblical narrative are left to non-Hasidic exegetes and
their readers. For better or worse, Hasidic masters mostly had other things on their minds.
The Binding of Isaac or His Sacrifice?
Christian and Jewish Perspectives
JOSHUA HOLO
he dense, taut style of the Akedah’s narration seems to reflect the religious tension of its content. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of the three monotheistic faiths picks
up on and plays into that tension to make very
pointed religious claims. Judaism and Christianity, in particular, interpret the story in such a
way as to expose the irreconcilability of their respective underpinnings. To be sure, both Christian and Jewish thinkers grapple with some of
the same, more or less obvious, difficulties:
God’s apparent cruelty, the suffering of the protagonists, the complexity of faith, etc. Ultimately,
however, Jewish and Christian thought diverge
on how to read the crux of the story, namely, the
struggle with and promise of child sacrifice.
By and large, Jewish thinkers treat God’s
position as fixed; Abraham undergoes the
drama. They reduce the sacrifice to an unrealized hypothetical question — a thought experiment — to test Abraham’s mettle without
implicating God in the ritual act. Meanwhile,
Christian theologians take the sacrificial part of
the story very seriously because, though unrealized, it presages the Passion, the suffering and
crucifixion of Jesus that defines the nature of
the Christian God. In short, Judaism reads the
story as a drama of the religious man, whereas
Christianity, in addition to reading it this way,
also reads it as part of the drama of God
Himself.
Only in light of the introductory verse, “and
God tested Abraham,” can Jews read beyond
the next verse, in which God instructs Abraham
to “take your son… and offer him there as a
burnt offering.” The story can imagine divine
blood thirst for human sacrifice, but only insofar as the opening verse dismisses that appetite
as a mere heuristic, a contrary-to-fact narrative
artifice. The story queries human theology, but
God’s nature is above question.
Without that initial disclaimer, the story cannot be Jewish. A God who so much as appears
T
Dr. Joshua Holo is the dean
and associate professor of
Jewish history at the Los
Angeles campus of the Hebrew
Union College–Jewish Institute
of Religion. His publications
focus on Medieval Jews of the
Mediterranean, particularly in
the Christian realm. His book,
Byzantine Jewry in the
Mediterranean Economy, was
published by Cambridge
University Press in 2009.
[10]
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
to desire — much less command — human sacrifice is a non-God, an unresolvable paradox,
hence a falsehood. In other words, the genuine
possibility that child sacrifice might actually be
on the right side of a moral dilemma simply belies the dilemma and deflates the Akedah’s narrative force for a Jewish readership. So, the
omniscient narrator reassures us, in an aside and
unbeknownst to Abraham: There is a lesson to
be derived from Abraham’s struggle, but only insofar as we all agree beforehand that God does
not really want the sacrifice.
In this manner, the medieval commentators
treat it as axiomatic that God has no interest in
Abraham’s actual sacrificing of Isaac. According
to Ibn Ezra, for example, some scholars (including Rashi) argue that Abraham misunderstood God’s meaning on account of his
unfamiliarity with the obscure idiom of
prophecy. Presumably, Abraham mistook the
command Ha’alehu to mean “Sacrifice him,”
rather than the more prosaic and harmless
meaning of “Take him up” to the top of Mount
Moriah. Some midrashim go so far as to imply
that Abraham failed the test; he failed to recognize the self-contradiction of God’s command.
In contrast, Christianity embraces — depends on — the redemptive power of child sacrifice, not in spite of the fact but because of the
fact that it comes from God. Traditionally, therefore, the Akedah can hardly avoid serving as a
model. In this manner, Christian thinkers have
argued — in parallel to Jewish interpretations
— that the story delegitimizes child sacrifice by
human beings. But they have, at the same time,
promoted an interpretive tradition that points
to precisely such a sacrifice by God.
Though Abraham did not, in the end, sacrifice his son, the Akedah prefigures the crucifixion, harking back to Hebrews 11: “By faith
Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac
as a sacrifice…. Abraham reasoned that God
could even raise the dead, and so in a manner
of speaking he did receive Isaac back from
death.” According to St. Augustine, Isaac represents Jesus in his willingness to go to the
slaughter, in his bearing the wood for the pyre
in the same way that Jesus bears his cross, and
in the expectation, attributed to Abraham, of his
resurrection. The ram, caught in the thicket like
the crown of thorns, also prefigures Jesus, actually undergoing sacrifice.
Is there any convergence or even some closing of the gap between the Jewish and Christian
readings? The late Rabbi Louis Jacobs reminds
us that various Jewish interpretations of the
Akedah do not necessarily reduce its lesson to
the argument that God abhors human sacrifice.
And more than that, Shalom Spiegel, one of the
20th century’s leading scholars of medieval
Jewish literature, argues that the Akedah’s
protestations constitute a “partial admission of
the vitality of pagan ways” among Israelites.
He even investigates ways in which Jewish
tradition toyed with the idea of Isaac’s metaphorical, partial, or even complete sacrifice.
However, when Jews have taken the sacrificial motif beyond the limits of the text, they
have done so as a consolation for their own persecution. That is, they read the Akedah to justify
their martyrdom as a negation, as a way to fend
off catastrophe and blasphemy, rather than affirmatively, as a propitious act of divine grace.
Thus, Christianity has inflected Jewish textual interpretation, but it did not penetrate its
DNA. Ultimately, Jacobs is right: Jewish interpreters do not necessarily argue that the
Akedah’s sole purpose is simply to prove that
God rejects human sacrifice. Rather more pointedly, they understand the text to take that fact
for granted. Christianity, meanwhile, offers a
new, promising view of divine sacrifice. This
difference resides, together with other factors,
at the very core of the two religions’ historical
divorce from one another.
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Also on:
Faith and Ethics: A Roundtable on the Akedah
Jeff Helmreich: Can you imagine God commanding you to do something terrible? Traditional
Judaic sources may, at times, offend us morally.
For example, we might take offense at the
biblical treatment of homosexuals or civilian
Amalekites. How do you reconcile these morally
challenging sources with continued reverence
for tradition and Torah — if you do revere Torah?
Josh Kornbluth: I’m more of a neophyte, just
beginning to study Judaism. I am just starting
to engage and grapple with Judaism’s commandments and laws. I find this commandment, to do the worst possible thing that I can
imagine, so bracing. But it activates me, and
that's important.
Dov Linzer: Grappling with it is the first
show of reverence. Josh, you’re not dismissing
it but engaging with something that horrifies
you. Contextually, the key to the question is:
Which part of the story do we emphasize — the
beginning or the end? I emphasize the end —
that God makes it clear that God did not want
Isaac to be sacrificed. Part of what we learn is
that God’s commands and commandments will
be fully respectful of the sanctity of human life.
The other part is Avraham’s willingness to or
ability to hear the angel telling him to stay his
hand. Avraham could have said, “Well, an
angel is an angel. God trumps the angel.” But
Avraham was able to hear the angel, which
speaks to the human role in hearing God’s
voice. We never just listen. We are always
choosing how to listen, how to interpret what
we heard. Avraham chose to hear the angel's
voice not as a contradictory one to be dismissed, but as a voice that could allow for a
deeper understanding of God's will. This points
to the idea of the oral Torah, the role that humans play in hearing and interpreting and applying God’s voice. We have to take
responsibility to hear the angel’s voice and to
understand how to interpret God’s words. In a
beautiful midrash, Rashi relates that when God
said to Avraham, “Put him up” (“Ha’alehu
l’ohlah”), God meant only to put him up and
not to slaughter him. In this midrash, God —
not the angel — is (re-)interpreting God’s own
words, but regardless, it shows the central role
that interpretation plays in our tradition. This,
in the end, is what the oral tradition is about:
interpretation and our role in that process.
Josh Kornbluth: It feels as though there’s
something else going on. Is it a creation of civilization to identify beyond my family, beyond
my loved ones, in this case as a Jew, as a member of a larger group? This seems like a lesson
about going beyond our cave. It seems like this
story engages the strongest bonds we have,
challenging me to consider a larger bond, a
bond that would appear artificial to me, and
yet to consecrate it through the willingness to
sacrifice.
Rabbi Sharon Brous is the
founder of IKAR, a Los Angeles
community that makes
manifest the connection
between political and social
engagement in the world and
religious life. Josh Kornbluth is
a comic monologist living in
Berkeley, Calif. His most recent
performance piece is called
“Andy Warhol: Good for the
Jews?” Rabbi Dov Linzer is
Rosh HaYeshiva and Dean of
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah
Rabbinical School in New York.
Jeffrey Helmreich moderated
the conversation. He is
completing a doctorate in
philosophy and law at the
University of California at Los
Angeles, and spending this
year as a research fellow in
Harvard Law School’s Program
on Negotiation.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[11]
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Upcoming
in Sh’ma
■ Philanthropy &
Tzedakah
■ Jews & the U.N.
■ Finding a Jewish
Practice
■ Igniting &
Sustaining Curiosity
■ Jews & Disabilities
■ What Is a Soul?
■ Jews & American
Islam
What Jewish conversation would you like to
have? Send suggestions
for future Sh’ma topics
to SBerrin@shma.com.
[12]
Jeff Helmreich: Where does the talk of
grappling with God leave the virtue of faith?
Couldn’t we say, instead: “Wow, what an
incredible display of emunah, of faith”? Here is
a biblical hero acting against all reason and all
values that he might personally have. Isn’t
there something to admire in that, too, and
don’t we have a tradition of celebrating it?
Sharon Brous: I’m so fundamentally opposed to that notion. The Avraham I celebrate
is the Avraham of Sodom and Gomorrah, or
the Avraham of “Lech L’cha.” It’s one thing to
act with pure faith and do something that’s
completely counter to reason, which is the
“Lech L’cha” Avraham, when that action doesn’t hurt anybody else. But I can’t accept acting
with pure faith when it means taking the life of
an innocent person. Killing an innocent because God says so is not a religious value. The
text comes to teach us that there is value in
seeing failure in Avraham, and in trying to
build lives in which we don’t make the same
mistakes that he made. I think this kind of
blind faith-brutality is presented to teach us to
resist it, defy it, cry out against it, to teach us
how not to behave.
Josh Kornbluth: Are you saying the story is
meant to teach us not to have blind faith? Yet it
seems, intuitively, to be teaching at the very
least both lessons: first, the lesson that you
abhor, and second, the lesson that you are
drawing. It seems as if the original teaching was
to say, “Bow down and do whatever it is that
God tells you to do because God is a big deal.”
Sharon Brous: We have to contend with the
fact that God disappears at the end of the story
and an angel takes the place of God. If one were
to look at the story without the benefit of thousands of years of commentary, what is that ending about? If God is actually proud of Avraham
for his faith, for stepping forward and being
willing to sacrifice his child, why wouldn’t God
say at the end, “I bless you for this”? Why is an
angel sent instead? That’s the hint that
Avraham doesn’t pass the test in the end, that
this is a story of failure on all fronts.
Of course people have walked away from
this story reading exactly the opposite of what
I’m suggesting. That’s what’s beautiful about
being engaged in an interpretative tradition, that
people will read it differently over the course of
time and they’ll read it through the lens of their
own experiences as parents or as children.
They’ll read it through the lens of whatever is
happening socially and politically in their world.
This is part of what it means to be a part of the
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
rabbinic tradition. The fact that it need not be
read that way does not mean that it cannot be.
Dov Linzer: The question is: What do we
mean by ultimate acts of faith? Do we mean acts
that trump morality, which is how Kierkegaard
has read this, or do we mean acts that demand
we give up the things that are most dear to us,
which is what the Torah is saying. For us today,
the Akedah reads as a question of morality versus faith, but in the time of Avraham, who
knows? Giving a child as an offering to God
might not have seemed a moral issue at all — an
act of murder, as Kierkegaad would have it. It
might rather have been exactly as the text
frames it, a question about giving what is most
dear. That’s certainly how it is commemorated
in the liturgy and in Jewish memory. In Jewish
memory we never say, “From Avraham, we
learn that listening to God trumps morality.” We
say, “From Avraham, we learn about giving up
everything for the sake of God.” What we say in
our prayers is: “The same way Avraham was
willing to give up what is most dear to him, you,
God, should transcend your own sense of justice
and do kindness to us.”
Martyrdom is an application of this. If we’re
asked to convert and deny our faith, deny God,
deny our relationship with God, we are enjoined
to give up our life, give up what is most dear to
us for God. Here, however, is also the danger of
the story. In a very troubling historical footnote
to martyrdom, we must acknowledge that in the
Middle Ages, in Ashkenazi communities, there
are a few recorded incidents of Jews who were
afraid that they and their children were going to
be converted, and who slaughtered their own
children before taking their own lives. In doing
so, they invoked the memory of the Akedah.
This is the danger that the story presents — that
some may read only the first half of the story,
which can lead to those types of actions. This
is a very rare exception, but we should think
about how the story has been read and interpreted traditionally.
Jeff Helmreich: Even if there are ways to
reinterpret Abraham — or other biblical figures
— sooner or later will we not come to stories
that can’t be presented in a positive, moral
light? Are there not aspects of tradition —
commandments to slaughter every man,
woman, and child of certain Canaanite nations
or more contemporary issues such as that of
the agunot, or chained women — where we
seem to be presented with a version of
Abraham’s test? How do you manage that
confrontation?
Dov Linzer: Sometimes people refer to those
types of confrontations as “my personal
Akedah.” Here’s a case where I am being asked
to follow my sense of obedience to tradition
and God even though it goes against my morality. There are many examples — for instance,
how do we understand that a Kohen can’t
marry the person he loves if she is a grusha, a
divorced woman? While we can say, “The mitzvah to kill Amalek or other such mitzvot have
been traditionally understood in ways to minimize such moral conflicts,” there are cases
when we have to say, “This act, although
counter to my sense of morality, is what is demanded from us, or from me.” Of course, I
would also offer that we have done much to
counter what seems abhorrent, and that our
mandate is to hear God’s voice through the lens
of the end of the story. And yet, there will be a
few cases that ask for our own personal akedot.
Jeff Helmreich: I want to return to something
that Sharon had said earlier — suggesting that
maybe we don’t have a personal Akedah
because part of our engagement with tradition
is to resist the parts of it that challenge our
morality — that in such cases, engagement
requires that we not abide by what’s being
commanded. Is that a heretical response, or is
it an acceptable way to address these cases?
Dov Linzer: While I definitely understand
that response, it is not a response that I, from
my traditional standpoint, can say is ever condoned. There is one theoretical exception.
There is a passage in the Gemarah with a discussion about the concept, gedolah aveira
lish’ma: “Great is a sin done for the right purpose.” Because of the antinomian nature of this
statement, and the potential for abuse, it understandably was never incorporated into our
legal literature. It should also be noted that the
context here is not about resisting an immoral
demand, but rather suggesting that sometimes
circumstances require the performance of an
aveirah, of a local sin, so that a much greater
benefit can be realized. That is, that sometimes
the ends might justify the means.
We are asked why Avraham argues on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah but he does not
argue with God when told to sacrifice Isaac.
With Isaac, he’s making his own sacrifice, and
to resist would have a self-serving element to it.
In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, other people are suffering, and his resistance is more obviously of a selfless nature. From the traditional
standpoint, there is the idea of resistance, but a
resistance that works within the process of the
oral tradition to find the best way possible to understand and apply the law; but to resist the law,
that’s not within the traditional context.
Josh Kornbluth: Sharon’s comments about
the duty to resist the things that aren’t right are
very compelling. That’s the only kind of
Judaism with which I could engage. I’m also
reminded when you speak, Dov, that although
I act according to my life, according to my
morality, there are other people who are acting
according to their morality and they may be different, so their morality may be different. This
is an important corrective.
Sharon Brous: Dov, I am moved by the way
you read the text, and yet I read it very differently. In our tradition, I read an imperative to
object, to decide, to cry out against what is unjust — whether it is happening on the street or
in the law, from the legislature and courts or
from the word of God. All over rabbinic literature, the rabbis identify elements of the law that
do not reflect the kind of world that they would
want to live in. They make it their work to dedicate every ounce of intellectual and spiritual
power to move those laws out of the practice, to
make them utterly impossible. They work so
hard at this because their moral intuition would
render it impossible to say to parents, “If your
child defies you, you bring him to the center of
town where your neighbors will come and kill
him.” We can’t live in that kind of world — and
yet this is precisely what the Torah instructs us
to do. The only way to respond is to act in defiance of God’s will and God’s word to make it
a legal impossibility that such a thing could
ever occur. These acts of defiance are deeply
rooted in the tradition. The rabbis don’t read
Torah as the authoritative word of God that
must be obeyed literally and unquestionably,
nor do they say that the law is immoral and unethical and therefore we should obliterate or ignore it. We learn, rather, to wrestle, to use every
ounce of the strength that God has given us in
order make this reflect the reality that we believe is the reality that God wants for us in this
world — even if it directly contradicts what the
text says, because we hold God and Torah to a
higher standard.
Dov Linzer: Sharon, that was extremely eloquent and actually exactly what I was trying to
say. The oral tradition is about how we hear
God’s voice — that is, how we hear God’s voice
based on the end of the story. I was responding
to the question, “Is there ever a place for civil
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[14]
disobedience beyond our role in interpreting
and applying the Torah?” At the end of the
story, Avraham hears the voice of the angel. We
have a firm understanding of what God demands of us and how we are to interpret and
apply and listen to the word of God. But there
are times when we can’t do that, when we’re
left with a contradiction. We’re left with
God/Torah demanding from us something that
we feel is unconscionable. Then, what do we
do? Do we resist? Do we engage in civil disobedience or do we, in the end, submit? That’s
the question I was responding to, but I fully
agree with how you’ve eloquently expressed
the divine-human partnership and our role in
objecting and raising the voice of conscience
and in hearing and grappling with God’s words
and interpreting and applying them.
Sharon Brous: What is clear from the text is
what would have happened had the angel
come one moment late. The reality is: the
Avraham of Sodom and Gomorrah is not the
Avraham of the Akedah. This is not a man who
is driven by a sense of moral purpose, who feels
bound by the good and the right. If it’s not
enough that Avraham nearly murdered his own
child, I wonder how we’d feel toward him if his
faith sent him up that mountain to kill someone else’s innocent child — because God said
so. Why are we reluctant to see a fundamental
flaw in the character of a person so willing to
commit murder to demonstrate love and faith?
Dov Linzer: I focus not on how unconscionable it was that Abraham was prepared to
sacrifice Isaac but, rather, in the end we’ve
learned that God will never ask this and we always have to hear the angel’s voice. Rather
than take the lesson from the beginning of this
road, we should take the lesson from the end:
what God will demand from us and what we
will be able to hear in God’s command. You can
say that that’s not fair, that I am looking at the
end of the story and not the beginning. But
that’s my role as an interpreter of the story —
deciding what I choose to hear as the message
of the story.
Josh Kornbluth: To me, your reactions to this
story are like the voices of angels. Hearing you,
I feel that if the angel hadn’t come at that time,
you would have come up with a different way
to save the boy.
Sharon Brous: I can only hope I would not
have brought my son up the mountain in the
first place (but as my friend, Rabbi Brad Artson
suggests, there’s a reason God didn’t ask
Sarah…). I have been arguing for a posture of
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5771
defiance when confronting morally compromising commands. But a critical point here is
that Torah was the central organizing principle
of the rabbis’ lives when they wrestled with an
eye-for-an-eye and the stubborn and rebellious
child. Challenging from within the tradition is
very different from challenging from outside it.
Humility is built into the system; we know that
we don’t ultimately know the deepest truth, so
we fight for what we believe to be true, knowing that we may not be correct.
I want to go back to something Dov said
earlier — that you give more weight to the end
of the story than the beginning because the
story comes to teach that God won’t ask that of
us again. But part of the challenge here is that
God has asked that of people of faith again.
How many people blow up cafes because they
believe that God is asking them to kill innocents
as an expression of their faith? This is why we
must grapple with what it means to resist what
we perceive to be the call of God. In the end,
it’s not enough to say the angel will stop the
faithful before the knife goes into the child’s
heart or before the explosive belt detonates. As
Jeff asked, mustn’t we differentiate between
blind faith that calls us to deny ourselves or
make ourselves profoundly uncomfortable —
like sitting in a dark room on Shabbat because
we forgot to put the timer on — and blind faith
that calls us to murder innocent people?
Religion is not about ease or comfort or convenience and I actually like that there are elements of my religious life that don’t feel good.
Dov Linzer: Part of our religious responsibility and part of what makes religion important is
not convenience but rather what religion demands of us. We approach sacrifices differently
when they are personal inconveniences or when
they raise moral questions that affect others.
I did want to comment on Sharon’s point
about people who kill innocents in the name of
God. David Shatz, a philosopher and friend of
mine, said that we have to be careful that the
Akedah doesn’t become Al Qaeda. On the one
hand, that is exactly how Judaism is different
from some other faith traditions — that we listen and interpret the word of God, bringing a
moral sense to it as opposed to a message of
blind obedience. I know that many Muslims are
not fundamentalists, but I think that one important way that Judaism differs from Islam is
on the centrality of interpretation and the divine-human partnership. Complete obedience
and submission are a central part of the message of Islam. In contrast, we have a strong oral
tradition where humans are partners who bring
their moral sensibilities to God’s word. It is
much harder to be fundamentalist and to call
for the death of innocents when humans are
enjoined to bring their moral sensibilities into
the conversation.
Jeff Helmreich: Can you offer an example from
your own life where you find yourself feeling
some tension about having to do something,
but you do it anyway because that is what
Jewish tradition seems to dictate?
Josh Kornbluth: I’m new to all this. I
haven’t, for the most part, been faced with that
tension. I’ve largely inhabited the secular
world; I was raised by atheists. But one of the
biggest things that I’m grappling with, as I prepare to go with my family to Israel for my bar
mitzvah, is that I do not want to be separated
from my wife — who is not Jewish — or my
son, who technically isn’t Jewish either. I do
not feel nor do I want to convey in any way that
because I’m studying Judaism, I am pulling
myself away from them or suggesting that there
are qualities, a certain humanness, that I have
and they don’t have. As I study and become
more Jewishly attuned, I don’t want to sacrifice
the relationships with the people dearest to me.
God shouldn’t even think about asking me to
bind my son. I’m clinging to my humanity, and
generally it supersedes my Jewishness.
Dov Linzer: As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has
said, “You know, I don’t have any problems
with the tradition. I’m a white male Kohen
rabbi, heterosexual.” Of course, he meant that
ironically, and he went on to address the challenges that everybody who does not have those
benefits faces. I find myself, personally, in a position of privilege. As it is, while I grapple with
issues philosophically, religiously, and ethically,
these challenges remain less immediate for me
than they do for others.
Jeff Helmreich: If we’re not talking about the
word of God challenging us personally, what
about the work of God? This has been a year
of terrible natural disasters, and whether it’s a
tsunami or a tornado, it’s hard for a believing
person not to attribute those natural disasters
to God. Is it, then, a personal challenge to
continue revering and worshiping a God whose
hand is in all of that?
Dov Linzer: I know people who are very
challenged theologically by natural events.
Personally, I’m not. God created a world; He
has set the laws of nature. Are natural disasters
an expression of God intervening with and micromanaging these laws? I don’t know. But
what I do know is that the Jewish response is
not “How did God let this happen?” but rather,
“How am I to respond? Where does my responsibility lie?” When I first met Rabbi Avi
Weiss, I was in his office and saw a little sign.
One person says, “I want to ask God how He
allows poverty and injustice and suffering and
so much tragedy in the world.” The other person says, “So why don’t you?” And the first person answers, “Because I’m afraid that God will
ask me the same question.” So while we have
natural disasters, we don’t know all that we’ve
done to contribute to them. For example, in
New Orleans, we had disastrous weather as
well as a tremendous amount of human negligence. God has created a world and now it is up
to us to figure out how to take the forces of nature and to be the most powerful moral and religious agents that we can be in that world.
Sharon Brous: Of course there is a political
analysis in which we must assess our behavior
to see how human beings are contributing to
freak weather conditions, why we aren’t doing
more to protect the most vulnerable. But there
is also the theological or spiritual response. The
question is not, “How did God let this happen?”
but, “How are we called to respond to tragedy?”
Tragedy calls us to a radical reassessment of the
way that we live, knowing that the world could
change dramatically in an instant and everything
that we love could be gone. How does that
knowledge impact how we live in the world
now? In the language of Yom Kippur, it’s teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah — repairing relationships, recognizing that there is something greater
than us at work in the cosmos, and doing acts of
justice in the world. Rather than asking, “How
could God do this to people?” I prefer to ask,
“What must we learn from these tragedies?” It
seems to me that the answer is very clear. For
Jews, it’s about love, humility, and working toward a more just and peaceful world.
Discussion Guide
Bringing together a myriad of voices
and experiences provides Sh’ma
readers with an opportunity in a few
very full pages to explore a topic of
Jewish interest from a variety of
perspectives. To facilitate a fuller
discussion of these ideas, we offer the
following questions:
1. Why did Abraham argue with God
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at Sodom but not argue when told
to sacrifice his son?
2. Why would God ask Abraham to
sacrifice his son? Was the binding
of Isaac a test of Abraham?
3. How do you reconcile morally
challenging religious texts with
continued reverence for tradition
and Torah?
4. What does it mean to you to say,
“Hineini, Here I am”?
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[15]
The Land of Isaac?
SHMA.COM
From ‘Glory of Akedah’ to ‘Isaac’s Fear’
YAEL S. FELDMAN
he latest Israeli anthology devoted to
“biblical” poems (edited by Malka
Shaked) harbors a statistical surprise:
Isaac, traditionally considered the least heroic
of all biblical figures, “stars” in more Hebrew
poems than do Abraham, Moses, or King
David. This is quite a revelation for a culture
emanating from a tradition known as the
“Father religion” (as opposed to its younger sibling, the “Son religion”).
Indeed, the persistence of the so-called
“sacrifice” of Isaac in the Israeli mind is well
known to Israelis, but less so to outsiders. The
fact is, however, that more than any biblical
narrative, this story has become a focal trope in
Zionist thought and Hebrew letters. Most
Israelis appreciate the binding as the metaphor
for national sacrifice, and hence Isaac naturally
stands for Israel’s fallen warriors.
Moreover, whereas in the early days of the
Zionist revolution, the Exodus from Egypt and
the journey in the wilderness may have been serious contenders, these themes clearly lost the
race in the wake of World War II and the struggle for independence. Since the 1940s, the
Akedah has become a key figure in Hebrew literature. Paradoxically, it came to represent both
the slaughter of the Holocaust and the national
warrior’s heroic death in the old-new homeland.
The latter was not, however, the invention
of the 1940s. The military appropriation of
Isaac was the product of the pioneers in Jewish
Palestine in the early 20th century. Determined
to exchange the role of the traditional Jewish
victim (korban) for the role of a willing self-sacrifice (also korban in Hebrew!), these young
survivors of the East-European pogroms and
their aftermath were willing to give up their life
on the altar of the motherland. Moreover, since
most of them were fatherless — some literally
orphaned, others miles away from the parents
they’d left behind in Europe — often there was
no “Abraham” in their reworking of the scene
(nor was there an angel to stop the act). As a result, they did not necessarily identify with the
biblical Isaac. The Isaac of Genesis 22, of the
twice repeated “and they walked together,” was
apparently too passive; he was an obedient follower of his father.
Their model, rather, was the post-biblical
T
Yael S. Feldman holds the
Abraham I. Katsh Chair of
Hebrew Culture and Education
at New York University, where
she also serves as a professor
of comparative literature and
gender studies. Her pioneering
study, No Room of Their Own:
Gender and Nation in Israeli
Women’s Fiction (Columbia
University Press), was a
National Jewish Book Awards
finalist in 2000; its Hebrew
version won the Friedman
Memorial Prize for Hebrew
Literature in 2003. Her new
study, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s
Sacrifice and National
Narrative (Stanford University
Press) was a National Jewish
Book Awards finalist in 2010.
[16]
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
Isaac, the son who often volunteered for his
own immolation, sometimes even “joyfully, ” as
in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Targums, Josephus,
Medieval liturgy, and the Crusade chronicles
(not to mention the New Testament…). In my
book Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and
National Narrative, I trace the modern reinvention of this willing Isaac to Berl Katznelson, who
in 1919 coined the paradoxical expression “osher Akedah” (the bliss/glory of self-binding) to
describe the zeal and excitement felt by those
who first volunteered for the British Army’s
Jewish Legion in the First World War. The next
step, taken up by the pioneer-poets of the 1920s,
is best expressed in Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem
“Akud” (Bound): “… But this is not me, a different Isaac was there./ Different was the
binder, and different the binding./ I did know
where I was being led to/ nor was it God who
commanded my going for a test./ I myself so
loved the journey/ that I didn’t even inquire
about the lamb…” (Emphasis added).
This volunteering position is the target of
S.Y. Agnon’s irony in Only Yesterday, his monumental 1946 paean to the pioneers of his
youth in the “Land of Isaac.” Soon enough,
however, Agnon’s “Isaacs” were followed by a
different brand of literary willing Isaacs.
Populating Israeli literature of the 1940s and
’50s, these new Isaacs naturally represented the
sacrifices made by the young in the War of
Independence. By then, however, the contemporary writers qua Isaacs were not orphaned
anymore. Their “Abrahams” were right there,
available to be typecast in the unsavory role of
the one commanding the sacrifice. In the corpus of that generation, Isaac was still a willing
self-immolator, but not his own agent: he volunteers to go along with his father’s plans,
ready for the slaughter if needed. However, center stage was given — paradoxically perhaps —
back to the father. It is the contemporary
Abraham who was now imagined not only as
the source of the command but also as the one
who either “volunteers” to take the blame or is
blamed by the “son.”
This sense of guilt or blame can be quite
tempered, as in Yigal Mossinsohn’s 1949 play
“In the Negev Plains,” or in Haim Gouri’s iconic
poem, “Inheritance.” It can also be ferocious,
as in Moshe Shamir or S. Yizhar’s unprecedented fictional encounters, in which fathers
feel guilty or are blamed [respectively] for
choosing to sacrifice the other — especially the
next generation — over sacrificing themselves.
It was this indignant moral judgment, sounded
shortly after the Sinai Campaign (1956), that
soon captured the imagination of the younger
generation. In the 1960s, that peer group offered a new fictional spin on the old story. In
their narratives, not only had the Akedah completely morphed from “binding” to “blood sacrifice,” it had also moved from the realm of
traditional biblical/Jewish psychology to that
of its neighboring culture, classical Greek
drama. In contrast to the harmonious walking
together imagined in Genesis as well as
throughout premodern Jewish history and
even in some of the cultural products of the
1940s-50s, the Akedah now began to be reinterpreted as the Hebraic equivalent of the
Oedipal scene, and especially as a Freudian
Oedipal scene. Although this oedipalization of
the Akedah was first introduced in Hebrew
drama in the early 1940s, the violent potentiality of this turn came to the fore only in the
1960s, in the work of the young A. B. Yehoshua
and Amos Oz, among others. Much attention
has been lavished in particular on Yehoshua’s
special blending of the Akedah with the
Oedipal conflict, which peaked in his 1990
masterful novel, Mr. Mani, as well as on Oz’s
popular story “The Way of the Wind.” In both,
the “Isaacs” of the narrative ultimately meet a
violent though unheroic death: Oz’s protagonist directs his aggression against himself not
in euphoric glory (osher) but rather in protest
and despair over his Laius-like, overdemanding, father; Yehoshua’s “son” seems to seek
out an end to a life of psychological and
ideational frustration, and is finally murdered
without resistance by the “Ishmaelites” on the
Dome of the Rock, while his disapproving father watches nearby without intervention.
This oedipalized Akedah is still with us
today, though it is often less aggressive and
more desperate. In 1990, Yehoshua openly declared a “vendetta” against the Akedah, insisting that we must try to “undo it by acting it out”
— as he himself did in the narrative of Mr.
Mani. We must strive to extinguish the mesmerizing magic of this story, he insisted, because one can never be sure that “the knife will
continue hovering in midair and not strike home
instead.” A different means for the same end
was suggested by author Shulamith Hareven.
Urging women to exercise their special “talent
for sanity,” she called upon them to counter the
primal scene of filicide shared by all three
monotheistic [and Freudian] traditions and create a different, maternal narrative, as she herself did in her biblical novella After Childhood.
This call for resistance seems to have dissipated by the 2000s. While David Grossman’s
recent fictional “mother” expresses her protest
by fleeing “To the End of the Land,” some of
the younger authors appear to have given up
the fight altogether. Rather than rebelling
against the constant demand for self-sacrifice,
they merely replace the Akedah with another
biblical metaphor of quite a different order:
Pachad Yitzchak, Isaac’s Fear, that ancient God
that evokes not heroism and military courage
but rather fear and trembling.
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launching a new blog to
deepen and broaden the
monthly discussion in our
print journal.
Over the course of each
month, blog contributors
and readers will focus on
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in the print journal.
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Violence and Secrecy:
On Masculinity and the Akedah
SARAH IMHOFF
iblical scholars explain that the story of
the Akedah marks a turning point from
ancient Near Eastern cultural traditions
that include human sacrifice to a strikingly illustrative polemic against human sacrifice. Do
not sacrifice your son, God tells Abraham. But
ironically, the very acts that mark this watershed cultural transition away from violence are
violent in themselves. In this story of terrifying
duty, the threat of violence still lingers for this
father and son. And as much as both of them
B
would surely like to forget the harrowing
episode, it was a defining part of the process
that made each one into a man of God. Even at
its most perplexing moments, the narrative also
resonates with contemporary questions about
what it means to be a man. Gendered issues are
contextual, not timeless, but Abraham, Isaac,
and the incident on Mount Moriah raise two
crucial themes about modern masculinity: violence and secrecy.
Violence and sacrifice are not identical, and
Sarah Imhoff is a visiting
assistant professor in the
Borns Jewish Studies Program
and Religious Studies
Department at Indiana
University, Bloomington. Her
teaching and research
interests focus on gender and
Jewish history.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[17]
SHMA.COM
Elul Teachings
To help prepare for Rosh
Hashana, each day during
the month of Elul (the
month leading up to the
new year), shma.com will
post a drasha, a teaching
or sermon, on the topic of
the Akedah. We lead off
with a drash by Rabbi
Elliot Cosgrove.
the ancient Israelites who told the story may
well have seen it primarily through the lens of
sacrifice and merciful escape. The modern
reader, however, does not live in a world where
her neighbors may participate in human sacrifice. For us, the specter of violence in the
Akedah is inescapable. Instead of relief that this
God does not ultimately demand child sacrifice,
we are horrified and confused that God’s request for murder and Abraham’s complicity
were ever real possibilities. Although Abraham
never completes the act of stabbing Isaac, the
act of tying Isaac down and raising the knife are
nevertheless violent.
Wrestling with violence continues to be an
inescapable part of modern masculinity. Few of
us would endorse it as a valuable social norm,
and yet taking a stance on interpersonal violence is an oft-repeated ritual of defining manhood. Just ask any boy who has been bullied or
has watched another student be bullied. To engage modern masculinity, encountering and
taking a stand on violence, aggression, or physical prowess are unavoidable. The body builder,
the hipster, the intellectual, the self-identified
computer geek — all must identify themselves
vis-à-vis violence and the body. And in many
situations, a “right” answer is complicated.
Compounding the issue of violence is
Abraham’s secrecy and silence. Isaac was
grown; rabbinic tradition holds he was 37, and
in any case he was certainly old enough for a
long journey. Why didn’t Abraham tell Isaac
what he knew? Perhaps it was to spare him the
anxiety, or perhaps he worried that Isaac would
be less than enthusiastic about the plan.
Although Abraham’s love for his son is apparent
to God, who calls Isaac “your favored one” and
“the one whom you love,” and is likewise apparent to the reader who hears God’s instructions to Abraham, he never tells Isaac that he
loves him. After God commanded Abraham to
sacrifice his son, Abraham took Isaac on a
Here I am, Hineini
ELIE KAUNFER
henever God spoke to Moshe,
the midrash tells us, God said:
“Moshe, Moshe.” And Moshe always responded “Hineini.” (Sifra 1:10-11) Imagine living a life responding to every utterance of your name with “Hineini.” True
W
[18]
presence and focus begin with the call of
the other, the beckon of the mysterious
divine. What if that life wasn’t reserved
only for our ancestors? Striving to be
present and remaining open to the divine
call, even when challenging and difficult,
is my attempt to walk in Moshe’s path.
Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is executive director of
Mechon Hadar (www.mechonhadar.org).
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
wordless journey. Abraham faced an impossible
choice, and instead of sharing the burden and
duty of worshiping God with his son, he guards
the divine communication as secret. Rather than
imagining Isaac as a participant in the sacrifice,
Abraham treats him as the object. Envisioning
himself as the main agent in a world of passive
objects, Abraham enacts his masculinity
through his assumption of the mastery of the
world around him. Abraham expresses his love
for Isaac by enacting violence (tying down), but
stopping before the ultimate violence (murder).
It seems that Isaac internalizes his father’s
penchant for silence. After the near murder, the
boy who had asked his father, “Where is the
ram?” no longer asks questions. On the way up
Mount Moriah, the two of them twice “walked
together,” but after Abraham raised the knife to
his son, they don’t appear to speak to each other
and Abraham returns alone to his servants.
Abraham fashions himself the strong, silent
type. For a man who was willing to negotiate
with God about saving Sodom, he is remarkably quiet when it comes to saving his own
son. Moreover, Abraham has a spotty record
when it comes to secrecy and self-fashioned
solo missions in general: Lying about his relationship to Sarah has already landed Abraham
in sticky situations with both Pharaoh and
Avimelekh. Even after God instructs Abraham
about the sacrifice, God does not demand silence, though Abraham seems to assume that
he should bear the secret alone. (Kierkegaard
had a similar interpretation.) Both Abraham
and Isaac respond to the trauma and near-death
experience with separation and silence, respectively. No discussion, no mutual support, no
crying out at God.
Today, as women are statistically more
likely to seek out therapy, offer verbal support
to others, and “talk about their feelings,” masculinity is sometimes fashioned as the inverse
— handling problems alone. Whether modern
men embrace affective dialogue or attempt to
uphold quiet autonomy, the issue of communication constitutes another significant pillar of
masculine self-fashioning.
The secrecy and the violence of the Akedah
are part of what gives the narrative its long hold
on the religious imagination, but there is no
clear moral when we read the story as one
about masculinity and identity. It only suggests
what we knew all along: The construction of
masculinity is never simple, and the way requires difficult choices.
So Avraham Took the Ram
“So Avraham took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son.” (Genesis 22:13)
R AC H E L B A R E N B L AT, M AT T H E W Z A P R U D E R ,
KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN, & YERRA SUGARMAN
In this collaborative poem, each poet uses the biblical verse from Genesis 22:13 as
inspiration and bases his or her writing on the final line of the previous stanza.
I want to think Avraham had no intention
of sacrificing his son — he dawdled on the hike,
let his knife linger til the angel arrived
my firstborn plays in the corner of the sanctuary
hands smudged sticky from wedges of apple
dipped in wildflower Torah
SHMA.COM
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was
ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance
for Jewish Renewal in January
2011, on the same day when
her first book-length poetry
collection, 70 faces: Torah
Poems, was released by
Phoenicia Publishing. She is
author of four poetry chapbooks
and since 2003 has blogged as
The Velveteen Rabbi. She lives
in Massachusetts with her
husband and son.
Matthew Zapruder is the author
of three collections of poetry,
most recently Come on All You
Ghosts. The recipient of a 2011
Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives
in San Francisco where he is an
editor at Wave Books. Zapruder
is a member of the permanent
faculty at the UCR Palm Desert
Low Residency MFA program in
creative writing in Riverside,
Calif..
he doesn’t yet know this story, though
if I had to I’d protect his wriggling body
with my own ribcage, my beating heart.
This morning my heart sounds to me
like the low voices of people
I heard arguing last night in my dream.
I was hovering above, like a cloud
or a being, waiting for something
to be decided. Someone must
be kept alive, or die, I can't remember,
and I want to sleep again so I can wake
and know what I have to do.
Kathryn Hellerstein is an
associate professor of Yiddish at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Her books include a translation
of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s
poems, In New York: A Selection
and Paper Bridges: Selected
Poems of Kadya Molodowsky.
Hellerstein also co-edited
Jewish American Literature:
A Norton Anthology. She has
published many poems,
translations, and articles, in
Bridges, Kerem, Nashim, and
Prairie Schooner. Her new book
and anthology are forthcoming
from the Stanford University
Press.
I unbind the boy and hold him, trembling, close.
He blinks in the smoke that brings tears to my eyes.
I cannot see. What have I almost done?
Whatever in the world could bring my God
To ask such a thing of me? The child pulls free
From my arms and wriggles to the ground. He stands
There, facing the flames of sacrifice, then turns
Toward me, the favored father of the son
Who would have burned for my obedience,
Holding in his smudged hand the knife I dropped.
I cross the threshold and enter the house of Isaac’s mind.
But tell me, God, how does father know the ache of another?
And my lariat had already burned rope-marks there; my altar’s cypress
spears had pricked the soft tissue of his brain with their splinters and etched themselves
on the walls of his skull. Seal me with how he knows, God.
Hear the ram’s wavering bleat and something else trapped in the bushes ⎯
blue as the veins curling underneath the skin of a girl’s chin
something rainless closing in on itself like a long, brittle date palm’s leaf
that scars its own tree trunk. His wizened palm leaf grazes me now. This is how I know.
Yerra Sugarman is the author
of two collections of poems
published by The Sheep
Meadow Press: Forms of Gone
and The Bag of Broken Glass.
She is the recipient of a 2011
National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a
Canada Council for Creative
Writers Grant, the 2005
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for
poetry, and a Discovery/The
Nation Poetry Prize.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[19]
etaphors are windows through which we despite the pain and alienation of the passing year,
glimpse God. The image offered by the Zohar and return with Me to our sacred ‘Chamber of Love’”?
In this reflective relationship between God and
on Pinchas is that of an embodied God. This overtly masculine God plays the role of the heroic, het- Knesset Yisrael, faith and trust are not givens. We grow
erosexual lover, whose power is both frightening and in our faith, trust, and love toward God. We pray and
yearn that God grows in
comforting. When this God
God’s love, trust, and faith
raises His arm, we take
Come see! Behold, the union of all things at once:
in us. A living relationship
pause, unsure whether to
“The Lord has made bare His holy arm...”
calls for forgiveness from all
brace for a blow or ease
(Isaiah 52:10): This is the [left] arm of salvation, those engaged. We, too,
into a supportive caress.
The fear in this critical mo- of vengeance, of redemption. Why? To raise Israel have desires and yearnings
from the dust: to bring Her to Him… And when
when entering into a new
ment is real. Even if we
this [arm] is raised to receive Her, fear engulfs
year. We, too, look back at
have never been hit before,
the world; until He places that arm under Her
the year that has passed
we are reminded that this
head…as is written (Sg 2:6), “His left arm is
with questions.
God is powerful and we are
under my head...”; then justice rests and sins
Thus, I believe, every
vulnerable.
are forgiven.
year God approaches on
Viewing God as that
Later, His right arm embraces Her, and joy engulfs Rosh Hashana, and we foronce-accepted image of a
the world, and all faces shine.
give on Yom Kippur. We indominant male lover raises
vite God to our humble
concerns about the way
Later, they make love…the completion of All,
sukkah erected in love, and
we understand our fall holthe joy of All, for they are united...
make love. United. Whole.
iday cycle. Like the male in
Zohar Pinchas (2:214a)
—Mimi Feigelson
this metaphor, God is capable of causing harm. Like
tory within story: This mythic lovers’ dance is a tale
the female, we are vulnerholeness has a story.
spun by Rabbi Elazar for Rabbi Hiyya as they rest
able. Even if we have surIt is achieved, lost,
vived every Yom Kippur from the desert sun under the shadow of a great stone. achieved again.
until now, the fear of the Elazar goes on to explain his tale: The Shekhinah lies
The paradox of many a
in
the
dust
of
a
broken
world.
The
Holy
One
raises
His
day is real. But this love stoJewish mystic: One must
ry is not as simple as it once left arm to strike down evil and release Her from its insist that dualism is real,
was. We no longer accept a grasp. The shadow of that arm is the fear of Judgment the right and left arms, as
man who sometimes stikes, Day — Rosh Hashanah. But then Her head, raised from wholeness can only be
the dust, rests upon Him, igniting love that flows from achieved by overcoming
so how do we relate to a
its hidden source above onto His head and down His
God that does?
dualism. The Zohar, says
arm and into the world, forgiving sins on Yom Kippur.
—Avi Killip
scholar Tishbi, is inconsisOn Sukkot, the two embrace and joy abounds. Finally,
tent: at times gnostic, seeon the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, they make love and
ing evil as independent, at
n eternal God stands
wholeness prevails.
other times proclaiming
again, in prayer and in
And so these festivals of awe and joy, whose revethat all is One. Which is
celebration, before the glolation upon a burning mountain marked the holiest of
right?
ry of His people…
ancient tales, themselves lay bare another story. Each
I follow the holiday/ritThe Isbitzer Rebbe destory is a prism within a prism, and from their depth a
picts God as One who light shines forth projecting drama upon the sky: Lovers ual story of my people to
stands in prayer, seeking to are torn apart and cleave together, sin and atonement, understand my own story.
be seen and understood slavery and redemption. An ancient people stands again, I recognize good and evil.
I acknowledge my sin and
by His creation (Mei in prayer and in celebration, before the glory of God.
seek atonement. I progress
Ha’Shiloach II, B’chuko—Shaiya Rothberg
and regress. Only dualism
tai). And so, every year the
Creator lifts His left hand, the hand of the feminine, does justice to my ethical struggle for wholeness.
But there is a place — before, behind, and beyond
the hand of Knesset Yisrael, to beckon us in His likeness to our vulnerability. He shows up every year not story — that is always whole: the place of emptiness
knowing, “Will my lover rest her trusting head in my before God. I feel it best in wild nature, where fear
extended hand, or will I carry its weight alone in si- and love are always intertwined and language has litlence?” He questions, “What if my extended hand tle use. I surrender to awe, offer my story as a sacreminds her of Rabbi Yochanan’s extended hand and rifice, and listen deeply.
What makes for teshuvah? I must analyze my life.
his question: ‘Are your sufferings favorable in your
eyes?’” What if she answers: “Not them, nor their It sets the stage. But replacing one dualistic story with
reward!” (B’rachot 5b) The Creator wonders, “Will another hasn’t helped me much. Tasting wholeness has.
—Mike Comins
my beloved recognize my naked hand and desire,
emun M
LET US HEAR
SHMA.COM
Shaiya Rothberg holds a doctorate
in Jewish thought from the Hebrew
University and a bachelor’s degree
in Jewish philosophy and Talmud
from Bar-Ilan University. He teaches
Bible and Jewish thought at the
Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem,
where he lives with his wife and
three sons.
Avi Killip, a Wexner Graduate Fellow,
is entering her third year at the
Hebrew College Rabbinical School
in Boston. She holds bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in Jewish studies
and women’s and gender studies
from Brandeis University. When not
in the beit midrash, Killip writes and
records dvar Torah podcasts for
Yeshivat Hadar; interns for the
Mayyim Hayyim community mikveh;
helps run the Washington Square
Minyan; and spends time with her
husband, Robert.
Reb Mimi (Miriam Sara) Feigelson
is an Israeli Orthodox rabbi, an
international teacher of Hasidut
(modern Jewish mysticism), and a
storyteller. She is the Mashpi’ah
Ruchanit (spiritual mentor) and
lecturer in rabbinic literature and
Hasidic thought at the Ziegler
School of Rabbinic Studies at the
American Jewish University in
Los Angeles. See
www.zieglerpodcasts.com.
Rabbi Mike Comins is the founder
of TorahTrek — The Center for Jewish
Wilderness Spirituality
(www.TorahTrek.org) and the author
of Making Prayer Real: Leading
Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why
Prayer Is Difficult and What to Do
about It (Jewish Lights Publishing;
www.MakingPrayerReal.com) and A
Wild Faith: Jewish Ways into
Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into
Judaism (Jewish Lights Publishing;
www.AWildFaith.com).
Dig Deeper
SKYPE interviews with
commentator and
respondents on
www.shma.com
[20]
S
A
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
W
Rembrandt’s Akedah
BRYNA JOCHEVED LEVY
SHMA.COM
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
n 1914, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who
would later become the first Ashkenazi chief
rabbi of the State of Israel, visited the
National Gallery in London. His aesthetic sensibilities were aroused by the artistic grandeur
that he encountered there. He was particularly
transfixed by Rembrandt’s paintings: “…the
light in his pictures is the very light that was
originally created by God Almighty.” (Jewish
Chronicle of London, September 13, 1935)
Rembrandt van Rijn’s prodigious activity in
painting biblical scenes reflects his love of and
intimate knowledge of the Bible. His biblical
scenes are not merely an exercise in historical
painting, they contain his own passion and intensity as well as a remarkable degree of his
innovative biblical interpretation.
I
“Sacrifice of Isaac”
Oil on canvas. 193 x 132 cm
Holland, 1635
Consider the play of hands in this canvas
painting. The helpless hands behind Isaac’s
back render him a passive sacrificial offering.
As for the hands of the angel of the Lord — one
hand dramatically arrests the violent act at the
critical moment, and the other knocks the knife
from Abraham’s hand.
But what is Rembrandt communicating
through Abraham’s left hand? Why does he cover the face of his child? Does the murderous hand
asphyxiate the boy and position his neck for
slaughter? Or does Abraham cover Isaac’s face
to spare him the sight of his father committing
an unthinkable act? Or could it be that at the moment of terror, Abraham, the compassionate father, utterly dedicated to upholding the divine
commandment to slaughter Isaac, is nonetheless
unable to look his beloved son in the eye?
Abraham’s face displays everything we
would expect: confusion, shock, and total lack
of comprehension. Having girded himself for
this death march, he is taken aback when
called to a sudden halt. How did Abraham reconcile this withdrawal of the divine command
with the original directive? If it was not to be
consummated, what then was the purpose of
this difficult and perplexing ordeal?
© 2011 STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
And Abraham stretched forth his hand,
and took the knife to slay his son. Then the
angel of the Lord called him from heaven:
‘Abraham! Abraham!’ and he answered, ‘Here
am I.’ And he said, ‘Do not raise your hand
against the boy, or do anything to him.’
(Genesis 22:10-12)
Here I am, Hineini
HADAR SUSSKIND
ineini” means “here I am” but
the power of the phrase is far
greater. It is the acceptance of a charge;
taking on a task or responsibility.
Hinieni. I was enveloped by it as I stood
‘‘H
Here I am, Hineini
ERICA BROWN
n a world full of distractions, the proper
way to translate “Hineni” today is “I am
fully present.” I am fully present in my life.
I am fully present with my children. I am
fully present in my job. I am fully present
when I am in conversation with you. I am
fully present as a servant of God. This
means paying closer attention to the
I
Dr. Bryna Jocheved Levy, a
Bible teacher in Israel, was the
first woman awarded a
doctoral degree in biblical
studies by Yeshiva University.
Levy is a leader in the
movement for women’s Torah
studies, and the founder and
dean of the Joan and Shael
Bellows Joint Graduate
Program in Bible and Biblical
Interpretation at Matan: The
Sadie Rennert Women’s
Institute for Torah Studies in
Jerusalem. She is the author of
Waiting for Rain: Reflections at
The Turning of the Year. Levy
curated and wrote the online
exhibit “Scripture Envisioned:
The Bible through the Eyes of
Rembrandt,” featured on
www.judaicaru.org/rembrandt_
eng/. Permission to adapt this
article was given by George S.
Blumenthal and the Center for
Online Judaic Studies 2003.
For more information, contact
www.brynalevy.com.
guard in Beaufort in Lebanon, buttressed by it as I rose to speak as a delegate at the World Zionist Congress,
inspired by its ancient call as I walk the
halls of Congress. Like my ancestors before me, I am here. Hinieni.
Hadar Susskind is vice president of policy
and strategy at J Street.
sacred duties I assume and trying to live
on higher ground. I am fully present as a
Jew. I am fully present as a citizen of the
world, partnering in its perfection. Being
fully present today — with the challenges
of technology — cannot be assumed. It
is hard work; an aspiration.
Erica Brown, scholar-in-residence at the
Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, is
the author, most recently, of In the Narrow
Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks
(OU/Koren).
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[21]
SHMA.COM
3 Mishnah Rosh Hashanah and
Shulkhan Arukh, Orah Hayim, 589.9.
4
Shulkhan Arukh, Orah Hayim, 55.
5
Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, “Wired to
the Kadosh Barukh Hu: Minyan via
Internet,” (New York: March 13, 2001).
6
As related to the Icon, Index, Symbol
and photographic representation
described by semiologist Charles
Sanders Peirce (1839–1914).
7 Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the
End of Forgetting,” The New York Times,
July 21, 2010.
Ethics continued from page 24
hearing the shofar or the Megillah in passing.3
His main argument against virtual minyanim
was that “The ten [members of the minyan]
must be in one place and the leader with
them.”4 In requiring the quorum, rabbis clearly
wanted to ensure that the community would
come together instead of fulfilling one’s obligations in isolation. In the end, Reisner concluded,
“One location remains the rule for constituting
a minyan. Once a minyan is in existence, however, even one who is not in the minyan, but
simply overhears, may respond and fulfill obligations thereby.”5 In 2008, using the teshuvah’s
ruling, Winnipeg’s Shaarey Zedek Synagogue
Here I am, Hineini
MOTY CRISTAL
vraham stood ready to act with no
doubts about the need to fulfill a
mission. “Hineini” is an answer to a call,
and with regional winds of change that
could turn into promising reality, spirits,
or a devastating storm, “Hineini” for
young Israelis today is a call to engage:
constructively engage with our neighbors in order to support the democratic
A
powers; enthusiastically engage with
Jewish communities around the globe
in order to shift how Israel is perceived
— not a “shelter” but a “magnet” for
Jews around the world; and critically
engage with the Jews in Israel who are
tampering with the delicate balance of
a Jewish and democratic state.
Moty Cristal is an expert on complex
negotiation and crisis management, and
an active participant in global Jewish
conversations.
Kanfer Family Foundation; Carol Brennglass
Spinner; Bruce Whizin; Marilyn Ziering
Donations to Sh’ma are tax deductible.
SHMA.COM
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Sh’ma Partners: Hebrew College Rabbinical
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[22]
© 2011 Sh’ma Institute. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 0049-0385 SEPTEMBER 2011. With all
sponsorhsips, Sh’ma reserves complete editorial
control of content.
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
became the first synagogue to allow users to access a live audio broadcast of its services (set
up to record before Shabbat).
However, the teshuvah on virtual minyanim
is far from complete and raises many more
questions than it answers. In a society that now
predicates its existence on a virtual hyper-reality, does online communication destroy a sense
of community, or does it help create it? As the
prospect of a global wireless network increasingly becomes a reality, can the entire world be
considered “one place,” enclosed in some form
of virtual eruv? Is the relationship between an
individual and his/her video-image representation merely that of an icon and index to its object,6 or is it possible for the video-image
representation to be counted as a member of a
minyan? If so, can the individual and his/her
avatar be counted as two separate entities existing in two distinct minyanim?
The sheer breadth of information now available to us means that thousands of Jewish texts
and arguments are no longer reserved for the
exclusive study of members of select yeshivot.
But does that democratization of knowledge reduce the authority of the learned rabbis? What
does it mean to learn with the context of study
being online rather than in a beit midrash? Can
we have content without context?
In a 2010 New York Times article, “The Web
Means the End of Forgetting,” Jeffrey Rosen discusses the misuse of content and “how best to
live our lives in a world where the Internet
records everything and forgets nothing —
where every online photo, status update,
Twitter post, and blog entry by and about us
can be stored forever.”7 From a Jewish perspective, this raises the question of forgiveness and
self-growth. According to Judaism, forgiveness
is possible if one seeks it. Yet, in today’s world
filled with digital reminders of past transgressions and lapses in judgment, can one ever really “move on?” Perhaps, society should place
limitations on how long information can be
stored online. And also, perhaps, we should use
a little more discretion about what we volunteer online — otherwise are we not partially
complicit if such information is decontextualized and used against us?
With the evolution of new technologies,
these sorts of questions will continue to expand in complexity. Over the course of this
year, Sh’ma will examine these issues; we invite you to join the conversation on our new
blog at shma.com.
Sh’ma
— An independent “think
tank” of diverse ideas and conversations
published online and in print to incubate
issues of significance to Jewish community
conversations.
Our Vision
Each month, Sh’ma creates a “conversation” —
in print and online. It brings together an array
of voices that cross the spectrum of Judaism:
secular and religious, communal and nonpartisan, engaged and dispassionately scholarly.
We raise relevant questions thoughtfully and
wrestle lovingly with Jewish concerns as we attempt to navigate the intellectual, communal,
and spiritual challenges of contemporary Judaism. Our focus is on ideas — their complexity, their range, and their power. Sh’ma is a vibrant intellectual arena that hosts intelligent
and creative conversations about ideas that reside outside of any particular institution. Our
readers open Sh’ma to find what they cannot
find elsewhere — the concise, accessible, informative, and intelligent discussion of Jewish
issues. Sometimes focusing on personal belief,
other times on communal policy issues, we
look to Sh’ma for incisive articles that illuminate a range of opinions.
Who are Sh’ma Readers?
“They are deeply committed to Jewish tradition and Jewish continuity; spiritually curious
and at times adventurous; at home, at least to
some extent, with the world of Jewish texts
and the texture of Jewish rituals; appreciative
of the many genuine intellectual, ethical, and
political benefits of secular modernity, though
not unaware of its fraught relationship with
Jewish life; people for whom their Jewish
identity is a vital component in an ongoing
process of self-creation and expression by the
light of their understanding of morals, community, and spirituality, a process they share
with other families of humanity, and with concerned individuals everywhere.”
Yehudah Mirsky, fellow at the Jewish
People Policy Planning Institute
Are You One of Our Readers?
Join a growing number of informed Jews —
rabbis, philanthropists, federation directors,
educators, lay leaders, students — who read
Sh’ma each month to view the world through
a Jewish lens that is inclusive, expansive, and
thought-provoking.
Subscribe online at shma.com
Coming
October 2011
Tzedakah, Philanthropy,
and the Innovative Spirit
■
Larry Moses, Don Abramson, Lucy Bernholtz, Rachel
Levenson, Yehudah Kurtzer, & Sara Paasche-Orlow on
differences between philanthropy and tzedakah
■
Amy Rabino on helping donors do their best
■
Noam Zion on understanding tzedakah
■
Daniel Nevins on a tzedakah “tax”
■
Toby Rubin & William Foster on scaling innovation
■
Seth Cohen, Jessica Liebowitz, Yoni Gordis, & Will
Schneider: A Roundtable on collaborative philanthropy
■
Shawn Landres on the “impact economy”
Author’s Correction: On the “NiSh’ma” page of the June edition, I misattributed
a quote to a “chassidic saying.” The quote comes from a poem, “A Rebbe’s
Proverb” (below), written by Danny Siegel, published in And God Braided Eve’s
Hair (United Synagogue of America, 1976). My apologies to Rabbi Siegel, to
whom these powerful words should correctly be attributed. I thank him for
bringing his original rendition to my attention. Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz
A Rebbi’s Proverb
(From the Yiddish)
If you always assume
the person sitting next to you
is the Messiah
waiting for some simple human kindness —
You will soon come to weigh your words
and watch your hands.
And if the person chooses
not to be revealed
in your time —
It will not matter.
Suggested Further Reading
■ A classic on the Akedah: The Last Trial by Shalom Spiegel
■ The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis by Avivah
Gottlieb Zornberg
■ Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice And National Narrative
by Yael S. Feldman
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
[23]
September 2011/Tishrei 5772
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Judaism 3.0
ROBERT J. SAFERSTEIN
Ethics
Sigi Ziering
This year, our Sigi Ziering
column focuses on ethical
issues arising from new
trends in social media.
Each month, an esteemed
guest columnist will wrestle
with what Jewish texts and
our interpretive tradition
teach us about privacy,
connectivity, experimentation, and much more. This
column is sponsored by
Bruce Whizin and Marilyn
Ziering in honor of Marilyn’s
husband, Sigi Ziering, of
blessed memory. Visit
shma.com to view the
series and responses.
Robert J. Saferstein is the online
director for Sh’ma. He holds a
bachelor of fine arts degree in
photography and imaging from
New York University’s Tisch School
of the Arts, and specializes in online media, photography, music
composition, and film production.
He is represented by Smart
Magna photo agency (www.smartmagna.com) and Paradigm literary agency. This past June, his
musical, “The Zegend of Lelda,”
won four awards at the West
Village Musical Theatre Festival,
including one for “Best Musical.”
And his musical “Oedipus for
Kids” will have productions in
both Phoenix and Orlando
this fall. His website is
www.robertjsaferstein.com.
[24]
oday, as our reliance on technological innovation continues to grow, certain
questions arise: What are the consequences of engaging with the world in seclusion and through virtual means? How do
changes in the ways in which we communicate
affect our right to information and our right to
privacy? Should expiration dates exist for online content, or are we to be forever shackled to
our pasts? To what extent should one volunteer
information in an increasingly open source environment? Does content now matter more
than context?
An innate tension between technology and
religion has always existed. While some viewed
technologically-driven innovation as a violation
of the Almighty, others saw our ability to improve the world, through technology, as a natural extension of divine will. Not only was the
invention of Guttenberg’s printing press in 1440
an easier way to print and publish books, but it
was also a way to spread the word of God.
Surely, there is no better example of this in the
Jewish world than the ways Chabad harnesses
technology and the Internet to educate and
share the word of HaShem.
As the technologies of an increasingly modern world became more commonplace, the organizational structures of Jewish communal and
religious life began to shift. Arguably, the three
most important inventions that impacted Jewish
communal life were the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane. Suddenly, it was possible
to live where one wanted, communicate with
other Jews all over the world, and fly to Israel
with relative ease. Jews could finally have their
kosher meat and eat it, too. When the Internet
and social networking were introduced, this
“global Jewish community” was fully realized.
T
SEPTEMBER 2011 | TISHREI 5772
With the integration of each new technological invention into modern life, discussions
surrounding the halakhic nature of their usage
started cropping up — a majority of which revolved around what is and is not permissible on
Shabbat and Yom Tov. In response to suburbanization, the Conservative movement’s
Committee on Jewish Law and Standards
(CJLS) issued a responsum, or teshuvah, in 1950
permitting the use of automobiles on Shabbat
for the purpose of driving to synagogue. In response to the increasing use of sensors and
human-triggered devices (e.g., lights in refrigerators, automatic doors, electronic hotel keys,
etc.), the Zomet Institute was established to invent Shabbat- and Yom Tov-friendly technologies that are in accordance with the strictest
views of Orthodoxy. And new technologies —
for example, scanners that check for mistakes in
Torah scrolls1 — are improving the way halakhic
supervision is conducted. But do more precise
techniques render everything before “less”
kosher? (The general consensus is no, and there
is no need to utilize these technologies until
such practices become commonplace.2)
In the 1990s, the popularization of video
and audio conferencing by the masses forced
rabbis to confront the question of virtual
minyanim. Finally, in 2001, Rabbi Avram Reisner
and the CJLS addressed this issue in a teshuvah
entitled, “Wired to the Kadosh Barukh Hu:
Minyan via Internet.” Reisner’s main argument
in favor of virtual minyanim was the notion that
a person has fulfilled the mitzvah simply by
continued on page 22
1
Manfred Gerstenfeld and Avraham Wyler, “Technology and Jewish Life,” Jewish
Political Studies Review, 18:1-2 (Spring 2006), www.jcpa.org/art/jep-gerstenfeldwylie-s06.htm.
2
Ibid.