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Rabbi Karp's Sermons ... ROSH HASHANAH MORNING As
is my custom, once again I wish to spend this morning's sermon looking at
our Torah portion, the Akeda, the
story of the Binding of Isaac . It
never ceases to amaze me that each year I can come back to this text and
find yet another insight to share with you.
If there is anyone who questions whether or not the Torah is an
eternal document, my ability to do this, and the ability of all my
rabbinic colleagues to do this, should more than adequately quell their
doubts. As
we listened to the reading of the Torah this morning, we heard how Abraham
was commanded by God to take “his son, his only son, his beloved son,
Isaac” out into the wilderness, to a place where God would show him, and
there to offer him up as a sacrifice.
We heard how Abraham awoke early the next morning, and went about
the process of doing all that was necessary in order to fulfill God’s
command. We heard how, after
a three day journey into the wilderness, Abraham spotted God’s
designated place, Mount Moriah. We
heard how Abraham commanded his servants to remain at the foot of the
mountain while he and Isaac ascended to make their offering.
We heard how Isaac questioned his father about the offering, and
how Abraham elusively responded. We
heard how Abraham built the altar, arranged the wood on the altar, then
tied up Isaac and placed him on the altar, and was just about to plunge
the sacrificial slaughtering knife into him when an angel of God
interceded. We heard how
Abraham, relieved of the responsibility of sacrificing his son, offered up
a ram in Isaac’s place. We
heard how Abraham and his son left the mountain top and headed back home
together. And
so our Torah story ends, or does it?
Perhaps there is more. As
Paul Harvey, the radio commentator, says, “And now, my friends, for the
rest of the story.” The rest of the story? What
rest of the story? Well,
the rabbis felt that the story actually went beyond where it ended in the
text. The Torah portion
immediately following this story is entitled “Chaye Sarah,” and it
deals with the death and burial of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, Isaac’s
mother. According to the most
famous of all biblical commentators, Rashi, the placement of the account
of Sarah’s death in the Torah text, immediately following this morning’s
Torah reading, is anything but coincidental.[1]
Citing a midrash from the text PIRKE de RABBI ELIEZER[2],
Rashi tells us that the reason Sarah died was because HaSatan - Satan -
came to her and told her about what Abraham was planning to do with Isaac,
and in fact told her that Abraham had indeed sacrificed Isaac. The shock of hearing this was so great for Sarah that she
died on the spot. Nor
for the rabbis, does the story end there.
Later in the book of GENESIS, in Torah portion “Toledot” - the
Torah portion which tells of the early lives of Jacob and Esau - in the
telling of how Jacob stole the blessing from Esau, it states that “Isaac
was old and his eyes were too dim to see.”[3]
Some of the rabbis of the midrash attribute Isaac’s blindness to
nothing less than his experience on Abraham’s altar.
The literal translation of the Hebrew text is not that Isaac’s
“eyes were too dim to see,” but rather that Isaac’s eyes were “dim
from seeing.” In midrash
GENESIS RABBA, the rabbis attempt to answer the question “dim from
seeing” what? Among the
possible answers presented are two which relate back to this morning’s
Torah portion. The first is
that Isaac’s eyes were dim, not from what he saw, but rather from what
the Ministering Angel saw. For
when the Ministering Angel saw that Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac,
the angel cried, and those angelic tears fell into Isaac’s eyes, dimming
them. The second explanation
is that as Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, Isaac, laying on his back
on the altar, looked up into heaven and saw the Shechinah,
the Presence of God, which is something that no human being, not even
Moses, has ever been permitted to see.
The sight was so overwhelming that it dimmed Isaac’s eyes.[4] As
you can see, for some of the rabbis, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac
does not have that happy ending that we read this morning.
It does not end with the sacrifice averted, Isaac liberated, and
father and son reunited. It
goes beyond that point. It
goes to Sarah suddenly dying because of this sacrifice, and Isaac going
blind because of this sacrifice. Not
a very happy ending at all. The
rabbis may not have been interested in creating a happy ending for this
story, but they were concerned about creating an ending which was more
true to life. The rabbis understood that Abraham was a human being like the
rest of us. And like the rest
of us, all of Abraham’s actions had consequences; consequences which
Abraham and his family would have to live with.
There was no way that the rabbis were going to permit Abraham to
perform such an outrageous act as attempting to kill his son, and then let
him get away with it unscathed. That
outrageous act brought with it its own wake of destruction for Abraham’s
entire family. That act
negatively influenced the life of that family literally for years to come;
for generations to come. Because
of it, Abraham lost his wife; Isaac lost his mother.
Because of it, Isaac would never be a whole person, both physically
and spiritually. We know
about Isaac’s physical disability, his blindness, but he was spiritually
disabled too. After this incident, he never really amounted to much.
Nothing unique in our heritage is attributed to him.
It is as if he was just there to create the bridge between
Abraham and Jacob. The text says that his eyes were dimmed.
But his behavior indicates that it was more than his eyes that were
dimmed. He was traumatized.
And the one thing that he did do, raising Jacob and Esau, he did
not do very well. Their
behaviors, especially Jacob’s, are the behaviors of spoiled children.
Could it have been that having had a father who almost killed him,
Isaac chose to be a father who was overly indulgent?
And look what that got him. More
family strife. More family
discord. One son threatening
to kill the other. One son
abandoning his family. When
Abraham went to Mount Moriah to perform the sacrifice, he probably did not
fully consider the ramifications of his actions.
He understood that Isaac was going to die.
He understood that Sarah would not be happy with that.
He understood that he himself would have to bear the heavy burden
of his own sadness and guilt the rest of his life.
But that was probably about it.
He probably had no idea that his actions would touch the lives of
people who were yet to be born. He
probably had no idea as to how profoundly his actions would touch the
lives of those he loved. But
he was wrong. How
often each and every one of us suffer from Abraham’s shortsightedness.
We, too, go through our lives performing all sorts of deeds, and we
think primarily about how our actions will impact upon us and our lives,
and hardly and rarely about how they will impact upon others and their
lives. When we consider our
actions and what will result from them, we tend to focus on the immediate
results, the results that we can see and hear and feel and touch right
afterwards. How often do we
look to their long range implications? We
can never afford to forget that our lives are not just our lives.
There is a piece of our lives which belongs to many, many other
people. Whatever we do,
in one way or another, touches those people.
It can touch them for the better, or it can touch them for the
worse. Some of those people
we know very, very well, and some of those people we know neither their
face nor their name. But our
deeds touch them nonetheless. How
much more so is this true in this day and age when the electronic
revolution has transformed our planet into such a small community.
This past Summer, the TODAY show planned the wedding of one couple.
They invited their viewers to vote on every aspect of the wedding,
from the bridal gown to the reception menu, from the flowers to the rings,
from the invitations to the honeymoon and the honeymoon night sleep wear.
To the actual wedding, there were about 200 people who were
invited, but thanks to the Internet, on each item, well over 100,000
people voted. That means that
well over 100,000 people - mostly complete strangers - touched the lives
of this one couple and had their lives touched by this couple.
And as for the wedding itself, 6 million viewers were “in
attendance,” myself included. That
is astounding! Granted that
this wedding is an extreme example, and that it was artificially contrived
to reach all those people, still the principle holds.
As the lives of this couple touched so many others who they did not
know, so do our lives touch so many others whom we may not know. Yet
for the most part, we continue to live our lives as if our actions only
mattered to us. We make all
sorts of decisions - big decisions and small decisions - only considering,
“what will this do for me?” But
our logic is faulty. Rabbi
Simeon ben Yohai spoke to that point beautifully when he gave one of my
favorite rabbinic illustrations. He
compared that type of thinking to two men sitting in a boat, one of whom
takes out a drill and starts boring under his seat.
When the other says, “What do you think you are doing?”, he
simply responds, “It’s none of your business, for I am drilling under
my own seat!”[5]
We are all in this boat together.
We cannot afford to think that our actions are solely our actions
and have nothing to do with others. This
was never made clearer to me than several years ago, when my family
suffered a great tragedy. My
brother-in-law - my sister’s husband - committed suicide.
Now before then, I sometimes wondered why suicide was a crime.
After all, it is something that the person does to him or her self.
Shouldn’t we have the right to decide how we treat our own bodies
and our own lives? Well, once
my brother-in-law committed suicide, I saw the matter from a totally
different perspective. My
brother-in-law was a manic depressive.
On October 8, 1991, while in one of his depressions, he was sitting
alone at home, in his family room, waiting for one of my nephews to pick
him up to go to work. He sat
there with the lights off, and then he put a gun in his mouth and pulled
the trigger. He was found by
my eldest nephew, Alan. I
cannot imagine what a shock that must have been for Alan; probably
somewhat similar to the shock Sarah must have felt when she learned of
Abraham’s plans to sacrifice Isaac. But that death was not the end of the matter.
It was not an end to suffering.
It was only the beginning. While
my brother-in-law was probably focusing on the ending of his suffering, I
suspect that he had no idea as to the suffering he was creating.
My sister was so traumatized that she could not physically leave
the house for several weeks. As
far as my nieces and nephews were concerned - I have four of them, two
boys and two girls - the anger and the guilt and the pain born of their
father’s death was more than they could handle.
They began to argue among themselves, bitter, harsh arguments.
The girls distanced themselves from their mother, the eldest
cutting off all contact with everyone in the family but her sister.
It has only been within the last year that all four children have
reconciled with their mother. They have yet to completely reconcile among themselves.
And this is nine years later.
When my brother-in-law pulled that trigger, he was thinking only of
himself - what it would do for him - and not what it would do to
his family. His suffering may
have ended, but his family’s suffering just began.
Suicide is not a victimless crime.
The survivors are the victims. We
need to ask ourselves, will our actions create victims?
Who might those victims be, and how might they be victimized?
This is a heavy responsibility, for it can be very difficult for us
to think of more than just ourselves. Nor
should we fool ourselves into believing that we need only be concerned
about our momentous decisions, our major actions.
Throughout our lives, we tend to leave more victims in our wake
through what we consider our insignificant decisions and deeds.
A minor slight, a thoughtless remark, an inappropriate laugh all
have the power to hurt. They
can be as cutting as the sharpest knife. When
the Cantor and I lived in California, we used to attend the annual meeting
of the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis.
Now this particular region of our rabbinic body is a very large
one, and their conferences are like mini national conventions - very
impressive. Like most Reform
rabbinic regional bodies, they meet in January.
I will never forget the last such meeting I attend, not because it
was so good, but because of one incident that happened there.
The last evening was the banquet, and that banquet, like the
banquet in most of these meetings, had some form of entertainment.
Well, the master of ceremonies was a colleague known for his quick
wit. As one of his shticks, he sang a parody on “Shalom Rav,”
dedicating it to all the rabbis who were leaving the region.
I happened to be one of those rabbis.
I knew I was leaving Los Gatos, but at that time I had no idea as
to where I was going. And
that song really hurt. It
struck at all my professional insecurities and self doubts.
It was demeaning. Now this rabbi did not write this song to hurt anybody.
His intention was simply to be funny.
As far as I was concerned, he failed and failed miserably.
A simple parody. A
significant injury. He did
it. We all can do it, and all
too often, we do do it. I
have always found it disturbing that when God told Abraham of His plans to
destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued with God.
But when God instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, there was no
argument. Classical rabbinic
commentaries attribute this to the depth of Abraham’s personal faith.
But perhaps it wasn’t that Abraham was so faithful as much as it
was that he was so self-involved. As
Abraham saw it, the sacrifice was all about him. It was about his faith.
It was about his relationship with God.
It was about what he had to do to stay in God’s good graces.
But Abraham was wrong. It
wasn’t just about him. He
should have questioned God. He
should have argued with God. He
should have been concerned about the well being of those around him. And
you know what? When it comes
to the decisions we make and the actions we take, so should we. Amen |
