There is evening, and there is morning. One day turns into another.
And yet, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I’m still standing before an open rectangle cut into the ground. I see the clods of earth, there, where I shoveled them over my father’s coffin. I hear that sound. The thud of earth falling … And part of me falls with it.
What does it feel like to lose someone?
To lose someone… feels like falling.
At least, for me it does. And I wonder, will I be able to rise at the end of this year—the traditional Jewish year of mourning for a parent? I wonder, will I again be able to get mixed-up in the lives of those around me? Will I always feel removed, as I do so often now—suspended, wandering aimlessly?
What does it feel like to lose someone?
For me, it’s like being Isaac. Isaac who walks, alone, at twilight.
When Sarah dies, Abraham turns his grief outward. He comes לספד לשרה ולבכתה, lispod l’Sarah v’livkotah, “to eulogize Sarah and bewail her” (Genesis 23:2). And then he is able to move on: ויקם אברהם מעל פני מתו וידבר..., va’yakom Avraham mei’al p’nei meito vay’daber, “And Abraham rose from beside his dead, and he spoke…” (3). Abraham gets up and gets going: he negotiates for the Cave of Machpelah as a burial-place; he fills his time with concrete tasks; he even looks toward the future, planning a marriage for Isaac.
In stark contrast, his son, who disappears from the Torah’s narrative after Mount Moriah. Isaac is conspicuously absent at his mother’s burial. Three years after his mother’s death, Isaac still mourns.1 Not active, not vocal, not like his father, Isaac is passive and pensive. ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out לשוח lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Alone, in a field, as the darkness descends, what does Isaac do? How should we translate that rare verb, לשוח lasuach?
Traditional commentators offer several interpretations: a שיח siach is a bush or a shrub, so Isaac went out to walk in nature, or to work in the fields. 2 A שיח siach is a conversation, so Isaac went out into the field to meet up with friends. 3
Perhaps the most pervasive traditional interpretation is that Isaac went into the field to pray. The Midrash identifies Psalms as a source for our tradition of prayer three times a day: ערב בבקר בצהרים אשיחה, Erev va’voker va’tzohorayim asichah, “Evening, morning, and noon, I plead” (Psalms 55:18). According to this midrash, we pray in the afternoon to imitate Isaac, who walked out into the field at twilight—that strange mix of day and night—lasuach, to pray mincha, the afternoon service. 4
I guess he began with Ashrei, the opening prayer? “Happy are they who dwell in your house, O God”? …. But, no. He couldn’t have.
As a mourner, I can only imagine Isaac’s שיחה, sichah, out there in the field as night began to fall.
It’s three years since she died... Why can’t he shake off this darkness? Why can’t he eulogize and cry, and then “rise up,” like his father Abraham? Isaac lingers in his grief. He can’t return to routines. He pours out words, but they’re not like Abraham’s neat and purposeful sentences. Not rational. Not a linear presentation of thoughts and wishes. Rather, a lament—as Rachel Adler describes: “contradictory rather than emotionally consistent.” 5
Whatever Isaac voices out there, in the field, at twilight, it is not a siach—not a conversation where Isaac says “X” and God replies “Y,” but rather lament’s “tumultuous and disordered language.” 6 At least, that’s how I imagine it. Unruly.
Because the world just doesn’t make sense anymore. Language fails… “How are you holding up?” Am I holding up!? What do I have to hold up? What’s holding me up?
It’s dark. And I’m falling.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ער, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Isaac went out to pray in the field at twilight… Perhaps. We might read לשוח lasuach as לשתחוות lishtachavot, which means “to bow”—in prostration and deference. Va’anachnu korim u’mishtachavim u’modim, we bend and bow and give thanks before God. 7
(But) How difficult it is to bow to God when I am already bent in grief.
What if Isaac bends not in prayer, in thanks, in acknowledgement of God? What if it is Isaac’s emotion that bends him? He sinks down to the earth in unremitting sorrow. So, don’t read לשוח lasuach but rather: ויצא יצחק לשוחה בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak la’shuchah basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to a pit8 in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62). In the depths of despair, Isaac wanders to a shuchah, a gaping hole in the earth, a reminder of his mother’s burial in the deep dark ground, a landscape that reflects his own low feelings. How could he carry on with life when his mother has been lowered into the dust?
Isaac walks into the field at evening-fall to bow… not in prayer, but in despair. Shachoach: to lower, to incline downward, to be bent, to be oppressed. 9 To lower his body toward the ground—because his soul is already lowered. From Psalms: כְּרֵעַ כְּאָח-לִי הִתְהַלָּכְתִּי כַּאֲבֶל-אֵם קֹדֵר שַׁחוֹתִי, K’reah, k’ach li hithalachti, ka’avel eim koder shachoti, “I behaved as though he had been my friend, my brother; like one who mourns for his mother, I darkened with grief and bowed low” (Psalms 35:14).
Isaac can’t get up and get going like his father Abraham. Instead, he walks into a field, alone, at evening’s-fall, and he drops to the ground in despair and in grief.
What does it feel like to lose someone? What does it feel like to mourn?
Philosopher Judith Butler describes mourning in her recent book, a post-9/11 reflection called Precarious Life. She writes, “[O]ne is hit by waves. […One] starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen” (Butler 21).
You fall. Darkness descends.
What is the significance of Isaac’s wandering precisely as evening falls? He is crossing into a time that is neither here nor there.
ערב, erev, evening, is a time for עירוב, eiruv, for mixing.
Isaac walks in the field לעת עירוב, l’eit eiruv, at the time when boundaries blur. Neither day nor night, but something in-between. Neither day nor night, but a mixing of the two.
When we think of the Shabbat עירוב, eiruv,10 we might think of a boundary. A line that marks the farthest one can travel. A marker of the limits of the public realm, the outside. But an עירוב eiruv is also a way to extend the inside. What is an עירוב eiruv if not a plea that I might carry a little farther, that I might blur the boundary between the safety of my home and the risk of the wide, wide world? 11 Perhaps, for Isaac, the ערב erev represents an עירוב eiruv for his grief: he wants to linger there, to carry on a little further. To wander out into the field and fall sobbing to the ground as darkness falls around him.
Love and loss topple us from our careful plans and our automatic routines. Some of us recover quickly, like Abraham. We weep and we mourn and we rise up. And some of us run from the messy work of mourning—we run because we don’t want to fall. If we keep moving, maybe we won’t notice how off-balance we are. And some of us are like Isaac, and we can do little but go out lasuach.
We can ask, as Judith Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability […]? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for […] one another?” (Butler 30).
Because, when we wander into evening, we are turning not only to the despair of ending. We are wandering into the time for mixing. It’s a tricky time, an in-between time, a liminal time.
And so with Isaac. Walking out into the field, bent low in his grief, Isaac enters the realm of the liminal.
Anthropologist Victor Turner notes that, in the liminal, one is “betwixt and between” 12—not this and not that. Isaac, too, is betwixt and between: A boy who has lost his mother. A man not-yet a husband. A person walking alone in a tribal society. Like an initiate in a rite of passage, Isaac walks in the wilderness, בשדה, basadeh, in darkness, לפנות ערב, lifnot arev.13
And in the darkness, boundaries blur. When we walk into the liminal, we risk the breaking of some ties, and the building of others. As critic Richard Schechner writes, the point of liminal space is “to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so that they are open to change.” 14
Liminality represents potential. In a liminal state, we might become anything. Truly anything. That kind of transformation is frightening and risky. No particular result is guaranteed. And yet, we walk out into the field, lowered. We walk at twilight, vulnerable.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But not just evening… ערב erev. Jewish-time. Evening not as ending, but as beginning. First, there is evening. And then, there is morning.
There’s a line in Freud’s famous essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he makes a peculiar observation about mourning—a phenomenon he can’t explain through psychoanalysis. It’s what he calls “the regular amelioration” of grief that happens “toward evening” (Freud 589). How remarkable. Mourning eases at twilight. As if our bodies know that dawn will come.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to despair in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But the story continues: וישא עיניו וירא והנה גמלים באים, va’yisa einav va’yar, v’hinei! G’malim baim! “And he lifted up his eyes, and behold! Camels are approaching!” (Ibid.). Isaac wanders, hunched over in the field, and only then can he lift up his eyes – נשא nasa – an action that leads to נשואין nisuin, a marriage, a love, a turn from the past and from death to the future and to relationship.
Because it is Rebecca approaching there, in that caravan. It is Rebecca, and, like Isaac, her transformation begins as darkness falls.
When does Eliezer the servant first meet Rebecca? לעת ערב לעת צאת השאבות, l’eit erev, l’eit tzeit hasho’avot, “At evening-time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11).
And now, in the caravan, approaching the field, ותשא רבקה את עיניה ותרא את יצחק, va’tisa Rivka et einehah va’teireh et Yitzchak, “Rebecca lifted up her eyes and she saw Isaac” (Genesis 24:64). Saw him there, sunken in grief. Saw him there, betwixt and between. Saw him there, as he lifted up his eyes to new possibilities. ותפל מעל הגמל, va’tipol mei’al hagamal, “And she fell from her camel” (Genesis 24:64).
Like the sudden miracle of love, she falls into Isaac’s life.
So Isaac meets Rebecca at twilight, the liminal time. And, out of this ערב erev, out of this עירוב eiruv, emerges love and comfort and hopefulness:ויבאה יצחק האהלה שרה אמו ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה וינחם יצחק אחרי אמו, va’y’vi’e’hah Yitzchak ha’ohalah Sarah imo va’yikach et Rivka va’t’hi lo l’ishah, va’ye’eh’ha’ve’hah, va’yinachem acharei imo, “And Isaac brought her toward the tent [of] Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).
How do we know we’ve found our comfort? Though I have turned, eagerly, to traditional Jewish mourning customs, I don’t expect my comfort to come all at once at the close of eleven months. In his classic work on Jewish mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes, “Twlight is neither day nor night, or perhaps it is both day and night. The law, however, must be clear.” 15 The laws of mourning are neat and clear and measured. They can give shape to the overwhelming messiness of grief. But what if we can’t help but linger, like Isaac? The practices of shiva and sheloshim and yarzheit offer a way for the mourner to move, as Rabbi Lamm puts it, from darkness to light. 16
But some of us find ourselves in the twilight. What can we do? We can take the risk to truly experience that in-between. If we can be willing lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, perhaps we too can look up from our dark place and be transformed.
Because, like Isaac, we are never the same. Love and loss change us. Love and loss hurl us down into the pit. We walk out into the evening, fallen.
You see, the bad news is that our relationships leave us vulnerable.
But the good news is that we might, through falling, manage to lift up our eyes and see the caravan approaching. היני! Hinei! Behold! We know something is about to happen to us—but we don’t know what. We lift up our eyes and we see an Other walking toward us in the field. וניפול מעל הגמל Va’nipol me’al hagamal, and we fall from the camel. We know our lives are different—but we don’t know how we will be forever changed.
What does mourning feel like? It feels like falling. But, then again, so does love.
1 Radak on Genesis 24:62.
2 Ibn Ezra on Genesis 24:63; Rashbam on Genesis 24:62.
3 Ramban on Genesis 24:62.
4 Bereshit Rabbah 68:9, cf. Rashi on Genesis 24:62.
5 Rachel Adler, “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture, The Chronicle, Issue 68 (2008): 10-15, p 11.
6 Ibid.
7 Evan-Shoshan’s Biblical Concordance.
8 Evan-Shoshan. See Jeremiah 2:6; 18:20, 22; Proverbs 22:14; 23:27.
9 Evan-Shoshan.
10 Under traditional Jewish law, carrying an object from the private sphere into the public sphere is prohibited on Shabbat. An eiruv, usually a string suspended on poles, even telephone poles or street signs in modern neighborhoods, links neighboring houses in a community into one big “private realm.” This symbolically enlarges the private realm, allowing people to carry objects during Shabbat in their own neighborhood.
11 Wendy Zierler, “Feminist Voices,” My People’s Passover Haggadah, Volume 1: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing): 2008, pp 104-105; and Zierler’s conversations with this writer in preparation for writing and delivering the sermon.
12 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction): 1969, p 95.
13 Ibid.
14 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge): 2003, pp 57-8.
15 Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, Inc): 2000, p 82.
16 Jewish mourning customs are extensive, and offer stages for the mourner to move from the shock and isolation of hearing the news of the death of a loved one to the embrace of the community and a return to normal routines. During shiva, the first seven days, mourners remain at home, sitting on the floor or on low stools; it is the most intense period of grieving. The first thirty days, sheloshim, represent a mix between sadness and return to routine. A yarzheit is the anniversary of a death; Jews end the strict mourning practices for a parent (like not attending public celebrations or not cutting one’s hair) one year after a person’s death (sometimes measured as eleven months). We also mark the anniversary of a death each year.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
K’sharim, Ahava (Relationships, Love)
So, I wrote this whole other sermon for this morning. It was something about Facebook and Twitter and how we speak to and about one another in public forums and via social media. Perhaps someday I’ll give a version of that sermon. But, this morning, I’m giving a different sermon. I’m giving a different sermon because I decided I couldn’t ignore two crucial facts: (one) the mounting tension between Israel and Palestine over the new “roadmap to peace”… and (two) you.
One: Israel and Palestine. Let me assure you that I’m completely uninterested in telling you what to think about the recent Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN, the merits of the proposed Quartet peace plan, Netanyahu’s position on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or any other aspect of what is known in the Middle East as “the conflict.” I’m not going to stand here and talk to you—many of you politics majors who know more about international relations than I do!—about the details of the peace plan itself. I want to talk about something related… but different. I want to talk about what our Jewish tradition teaches us about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to fact two: you. When I was here at Bates during Rosh Hashana, I learned a little bit about how some of you navigate expressing and exploring your Jewish identities on a campus with a relatively small Jewish presence. The choices you each make about your Jewishness, your faith, and your identity are not exactly parallel with the choices Israeli and Palestinian leaders face in figuring out how to express both their national identities. But Jewish Bates College students do make myriad decisions about how to relate to non-Jews and about how to relate to an institution that runs counter to the Jewish calendar. On the first day of the Jewish New Year, many of you faced the difficult choice of whether to attend services or go to class. Some of you had tests and assignments. Many of you wondered, what’s the point in going to services if I’m not even religious? Some of you may have felt disappointed that the services weren’t more “traditional” or familiar. Some of us, together, were chastised for performing the tashlich ritual in the Pond—something we might want to reimagine for next year! And then suddenly it was parents’ weekend—a raucous, joyful, and maybe even stressful time, smack in the middle of what was supposed to be, for Jews, a period of intense introspection and soul-searching.
What could I do with these two facts—the tenuous peace process in the Middle East and the decisions you make as Jewish students of Bates College?
I remember standing here on Erev Rosh Hashana, ready to pray the Aleinu at the end of the service, and panicking for a moment. Did I really want to say the line “she’lo asanu k’goyei ha’aratzot”—“that you have not made us like the other nations of the earth”? I was acutely aware of the fact that my hosts here at Bates include the Multifaith Chaplaincy Office and the Dean of Intercultural Education. I was acutely aware of the fact that, here at Bates, Jews and non-Jews explore one another’s culture and worship. And yet we pray in thanks to God for making “us” different from “them.”
What does Jewish tradition say about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? To say the least… it’s complicated.
It’s really a shame we’re not going to hear the traditional Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading. In it, we are charged to pursue justice and to eschew revenge, to share the fruits of our harvest and to deal kindly with the disadvantaged. How do we become holy? By providing food for the hungry. How do we become holy? By conducting our business honestly. How do we become holy? By judging the privileged and the poor equally. How do we become holy? By refusing to hold a grudge. How do we become holy? By letting go of hatred.
Sure, some of these guidelines to holiness refer only to how Jews must treat other Jews. But many of them are universal. We learn how to be holy in our interactions with others: K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Not only are we enjoined to treat the stranger as a citizen, but we are commanded to love the stranger as we love ourselves.
Is this really from the same Torah that also instructs, Rak me’arei ha’amim ha’eileh asher Adonai elohecha noten l’cha nachala, lo t’chyeh kol neshma, “But of the cities of these nations which the Eternal your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not allow any soul to live” (Deuteronomy 20:16)?!
So, which is it? Are Jews the holy people who are supposed to love the stranger, welcome the disadvantaged, live peacefully with other nations? Or are Jews the people who are commanded by God to kill entire peoples—down to every last man, woman, and child?
The thing is, we can look to the Torah and to the broader field of sacred and rabbinic literature and argue either way. There are verses that support war and destruction and verses that urge justice and mercy. There are interpretations that restrict how we read inspiring passages like “Love your neighbor as yourself” to one meaning: Love your fellow (and I kinda do mean “fellow”) Jew as yourself. Whatever your personal political position on the conflict between Arabs and Jews in that tiny strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, you can probably cite a Bible verse or a passage from the Talmud in your favor.
So I’m not turning, this morning, to any of those passages about “us” and “them.” I’m not going to offer a comprehensive—if that were even possible!—overview of what “Jewish tradition”—as if there were such a monolith!—says about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews. I’m turning to something much smaller in scale. I’m turning to something much more intimate. I’m turning to a relationship. I’m turning to the relationship between Abraham and Hagar.
On Rosh Hashana, didn’t read the traditional First Day Torah reading, the story many refer to as “the birth of Isaac”—a story chosen for the holiday because of its association with birth (Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world) and with God’s remembering us (God remembers Sarah and gives her a son in her old age). But the Torah portion of Isaac’s birth is also the story of another boy, another son of Abraham. It is the story of Ishmael. And the tale of how God remembers Sarah is also the story of another woman, another beloved of Abraham. It is the story of Hagar.
Isaac and Ishmael have come to stand iconically for Judaism and Islam, for Jew and Arab. In the Biblical story, Ishmael is born first. He is the son of Abraham’s concubine and slave, Hagar. Ishmael is born because Abraham’s wife Sarah is barren and fears she will never be able to give Abraham children. And somehow, Abraham is to be the father of many nations. On the first day of Rosh Hashana, we read that, finally, Isaac is born to Sarah, in fulfillment of the promise of the two angels who visited Abraham and Sarah in their tent. In the span of one verse, Isaac grows up and is weaned, and Abraham throws a huge celebration. Suddenly, we read that Sarah “saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham playing” (Genesis 21:9). We’re not precisely sure what the Torah means by “playing,” but Sarah certainly doesn’t think it’s a good thing. We read next, “And she said to Abraham, ‘Banish that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave-woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac’” (21:10). The Torah says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes, because of the matter of his son”—that is, because Ishmael is his son and Abraham does not want to banish him (21:11). Despite that emotion, despite the bond between Abraham and Ishmael, God orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. At the story’s end, Ishmael languishes in the desert, nearly dying of thirst. Hagar weeps some distance away so that she does not have to witness her son die, when suddenly “God heard the voice of the lad” and saved them by showing them a nearby well (21:17-19).
This complex story of a blended family gives just one tiny indication of how Abraham might have felt at the prospect of sending a woman with whom he had fathered a child, along with his first-born son, into the desert—never to see them again. The Torah only says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes” (21:11) because of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, his flesh and blood. But did Abraham weep over Hagar? Did he hesitate to send her into the desert? At the moment of banishment, the Torah tells us nothing whatsoever about the relationship between Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and “Hagar the Egyptian.”
For more than a thousand years, Jewish commentators have seen troubling gaps in this text. They have been troubled by the relationship between Abraham and Hagar, and troubled by Abraham’s apparent lack of concern for this woman with whom he shared a bed. Did Abraham really care so little for Hagar? Did the father of Judaism really treat as expendable the woman who would later become a beloved mother in Islam? Surely not! Despite the banishment, despite the fact that Abraham’s blessing is handed down only through the line of Isaac, despite Sarah’s suspicions about Ishmael—despite so many indications that Hagar was “only” a concubine, a slave-woman—Jewish tradition asserts that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar was marked by love.
In the Midrash, we find imaginative retellings of Biblical stories. In one expanded version of the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga, the author hints that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar exceeded the commercial bounds of an owner-slave arrangement. In this version of the story, when Sarah urges Abraham to exile Hagar, she says, “Write a get and send that slave-woman and her son away!” (Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer 30). What is a get? It is a bill of Jewish divorce—a document one gives not to a slave but to a wife.
Even further, this midrash imagines a lasting connection between Abraham and Hagar, even after the banishment to the desert. In the Torah story, Abraham places something on Hagar’s shoulders before sending her off as Sarah had ordered. What was it? It was a large barrel, says the Midrash, or a long, trailing piece of clothing. What is the significance of this? Abraham sent Hagar off into the desert dragging behind her an object that would leave a trail. A trail he could follow. A trail that would allow him to see his beloved Hagar and Ishmael again.
In the Torah, at several crucial points in Abraham’s life, Hagar and Ishmael are absent. Perhaps they don’t matter very much to Abraham. The Midrash disagrees. Hagar and Ishamel are never far from Abraham’s heart. At the moment when God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son—the Torah reports God’s words thus: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him up as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Your only son!? The Midrash imagines instead a conversation between God and Abraham: “‘Take, please your son.’ But he replied, ‘I have two sons.’ So [God] said, ‘Your only one.’ But he replied, ‘This one is the only child of his mother, and the other one is the only child of his mother.’ So [God] said, ‘The one whom you love.’ But he replied, ‘I love both of them.’ And God said, ‘Isaac’” (Bereshit Rabbah 45:7).
In the Midrash, the relationship between Abraham and Hagar does not end in the desert. After the story of the binding of Isaac, when Sarah has died, Abraham busies himself with the burial and with trying to find a proper wife for Isaac. But Isaac himself wanders out in the field, pouring out his fears and his grief in prayer. And where has Isaac been all this time, after his ordeal on the mountain? We read in the Torah that Isaac was returning from a place called “Be’er Le’hai Ro’ee” (Genesis 24:62)—the very same place where Hagar and Ishmael heard the voice of an angel of God, rescuing them from their thirst in the desert. And why did Isaac travel there? To find Hagar and bring her to his father Abraham so that they could be married (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14).
And indeed, just a few verses later in the Torah, we read that Abraham did remarry: “And Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah” (Genesis 25:1). The rabbis link the name “Keturah” to precious incense, katoret. And they link the name “Keturah” to the verb katar, to tie up. Keturah, says the Midrash, is none other than Hagar (Bereshit Rabbah 61:5). Hagar is “Keturah” because, like incense, she is pleasing. Hagar is “Keturah” because she “tied herself” only to Abraham—keeping chaste all those years between her banishment and her reunion with her beloved.
In Hebrew, the word for “relationship” is kesher—linked to a verb that also means to tie or to bind. Abraham tied a burden to Hagar’s shoulders so that she would leave him a trail to follow. Hagar tied her faithfulness to Abraham, despite the fact that he sent her and her son into the desert alone. To tie oneself to another demonstrates devotion and, indeed, love.
As we think about the relationship between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and non-Jews, it can be all too easy to look only at the level of institutions and nations and generalizations. And yet, when the rabbis of our Jewish tradition looked at the iconic rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael—between Sarah and Hagar—they saw more than the struggle between one nation and another. Admittedly, our tradition includes some pretty disturbing instructions on how to maintain the division between “us” and “them.” But Judaism also includes the Midrash: stories that reconcile the divide between Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar, by looking for those relationships where there had to have been love.
We do not relate to one another solely as representatives of big categories. When Abraham banished Hagar into the desert, he might have been acting as “Father of the Jews” toward “a Mother of Islam.” But he was also a man who loved a woman. Imagine his anguish, standing at the opening of his tent, watching them enter the desert with just a loaf of bread and a canteen of water.
And, though we don’t necessarily face life-and-death consequences, it’s like that for us, too. Our daily lives are not, when it comes down to it, about “Bates College” and “Jewish students,” but about you and your professor, the one who was willing to give you some extra time on that assignment because you told her about the conflict between the academic calendar and the Jewish holiday. And, when you think about it, “Israel” and “Palestine”—symbolic and overdetermined as those categories have become—are really just collections of relationships, one person to another.
We will achieve nothing of peace and mutual understanding by thinking and strategizing only at the level of the nation, the icon, the generalization. We will achieve peace only if we look to individual relationships. The authors of the Midrash knew, in their heart of hearts, that banishments and birthrights and blessings were not the only story. There was also the tugging pull of love, the trail cut deep across the desert, leading one person to his beloved.
[I gave this as the Yom Kippur sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there for a wonderful experience! I thank my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen, for his reflections on the Midrashim about Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in his Introduction to Midrash course at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.]
One: Israel and Palestine. Let me assure you that I’m completely uninterested in telling you what to think about the recent Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN, the merits of the proposed Quartet peace plan, Netanyahu’s position on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or any other aspect of what is known in the Middle East as “the conflict.” I’m not going to stand here and talk to you—many of you politics majors who know more about international relations than I do!—about the details of the peace plan itself. I want to talk about something related… but different. I want to talk about what our Jewish tradition teaches us about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to fact two: you. When I was here at Bates during Rosh Hashana, I learned a little bit about how some of you navigate expressing and exploring your Jewish identities on a campus with a relatively small Jewish presence. The choices you each make about your Jewishness, your faith, and your identity are not exactly parallel with the choices Israeli and Palestinian leaders face in figuring out how to express both their national identities. But Jewish Bates College students do make myriad decisions about how to relate to non-Jews and about how to relate to an institution that runs counter to the Jewish calendar. On the first day of the Jewish New Year, many of you faced the difficult choice of whether to attend services or go to class. Some of you had tests and assignments. Many of you wondered, what’s the point in going to services if I’m not even religious? Some of you may have felt disappointed that the services weren’t more “traditional” or familiar. Some of us, together, were chastised for performing the tashlich ritual in the Pond—something we might want to reimagine for next year! And then suddenly it was parents’ weekend—a raucous, joyful, and maybe even stressful time, smack in the middle of what was supposed to be, for Jews, a period of intense introspection and soul-searching.
What could I do with these two facts—the tenuous peace process in the Middle East and the decisions you make as Jewish students of Bates College?
I remember standing here on Erev Rosh Hashana, ready to pray the Aleinu at the end of the service, and panicking for a moment. Did I really want to say the line “she’lo asanu k’goyei ha’aratzot”—“that you have not made us like the other nations of the earth”? I was acutely aware of the fact that my hosts here at Bates include the Multifaith Chaplaincy Office and the Dean of Intercultural Education. I was acutely aware of the fact that, here at Bates, Jews and non-Jews explore one another’s culture and worship. And yet we pray in thanks to God for making “us” different from “them.”
What does Jewish tradition say about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? To say the least… it’s complicated.
It’s really a shame we’re not going to hear the traditional Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading. In it, we are charged to pursue justice and to eschew revenge, to share the fruits of our harvest and to deal kindly with the disadvantaged. How do we become holy? By providing food for the hungry. How do we become holy? By conducting our business honestly. How do we become holy? By judging the privileged and the poor equally. How do we become holy? By refusing to hold a grudge. How do we become holy? By letting go of hatred.
Sure, some of these guidelines to holiness refer only to how Jews must treat other Jews. But many of them are universal. We learn how to be holy in our interactions with others: K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Not only are we enjoined to treat the stranger as a citizen, but we are commanded to love the stranger as we love ourselves.
Is this really from the same Torah that also instructs, Rak me’arei ha’amim ha’eileh asher Adonai elohecha noten l’cha nachala, lo t’chyeh kol neshma, “But of the cities of these nations which the Eternal your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not allow any soul to live” (Deuteronomy 20:16)?!
So, which is it? Are Jews the holy people who are supposed to love the stranger, welcome the disadvantaged, live peacefully with other nations? Or are Jews the people who are commanded by God to kill entire peoples—down to every last man, woman, and child?
The thing is, we can look to the Torah and to the broader field of sacred and rabbinic literature and argue either way. There are verses that support war and destruction and verses that urge justice and mercy. There are interpretations that restrict how we read inspiring passages like “Love your neighbor as yourself” to one meaning: Love your fellow (and I kinda do mean “fellow”) Jew as yourself. Whatever your personal political position on the conflict between Arabs and Jews in that tiny strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, you can probably cite a Bible verse or a passage from the Talmud in your favor.
So I’m not turning, this morning, to any of those passages about “us” and “them.” I’m not going to offer a comprehensive—if that were even possible!—overview of what “Jewish tradition”—as if there were such a monolith!—says about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews. I’m turning to something much smaller in scale. I’m turning to something much more intimate. I’m turning to a relationship. I’m turning to the relationship between Abraham and Hagar.
On Rosh Hashana, didn’t read the traditional First Day Torah reading, the story many refer to as “the birth of Isaac”—a story chosen for the holiday because of its association with birth (Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world) and with God’s remembering us (God remembers Sarah and gives her a son in her old age). But the Torah portion of Isaac’s birth is also the story of another boy, another son of Abraham. It is the story of Ishmael. And the tale of how God remembers Sarah is also the story of another woman, another beloved of Abraham. It is the story of Hagar.
Isaac and Ishmael have come to stand iconically for Judaism and Islam, for Jew and Arab. In the Biblical story, Ishmael is born first. He is the son of Abraham’s concubine and slave, Hagar. Ishmael is born because Abraham’s wife Sarah is barren and fears she will never be able to give Abraham children. And somehow, Abraham is to be the father of many nations. On the first day of Rosh Hashana, we read that, finally, Isaac is born to Sarah, in fulfillment of the promise of the two angels who visited Abraham and Sarah in their tent. In the span of one verse, Isaac grows up and is weaned, and Abraham throws a huge celebration. Suddenly, we read that Sarah “saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham playing” (Genesis 21:9). We’re not precisely sure what the Torah means by “playing,” but Sarah certainly doesn’t think it’s a good thing. We read next, “And she said to Abraham, ‘Banish that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave-woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac’” (21:10). The Torah says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes, because of the matter of his son”—that is, because Ishmael is his son and Abraham does not want to banish him (21:11). Despite that emotion, despite the bond between Abraham and Ishmael, God orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. At the story’s end, Ishmael languishes in the desert, nearly dying of thirst. Hagar weeps some distance away so that she does not have to witness her son die, when suddenly “God heard the voice of the lad” and saved them by showing them a nearby well (21:17-19).
This complex story of a blended family gives just one tiny indication of how Abraham might have felt at the prospect of sending a woman with whom he had fathered a child, along with his first-born son, into the desert—never to see them again. The Torah only says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes” (21:11) because of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, his flesh and blood. But did Abraham weep over Hagar? Did he hesitate to send her into the desert? At the moment of banishment, the Torah tells us nothing whatsoever about the relationship between Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and “Hagar the Egyptian.”
For more than a thousand years, Jewish commentators have seen troubling gaps in this text. They have been troubled by the relationship between Abraham and Hagar, and troubled by Abraham’s apparent lack of concern for this woman with whom he shared a bed. Did Abraham really care so little for Hagar? Did the father of Judaism really treat as expendable the woman who would later become a beloved mother in Islam? Surely not! Despite the banishment, despite the fact that Abraham’s blessing is handed down only through the line of Isaac, despite Sarah’s suspicions about Ishmael—despite so many indications that Hagar was “only” a concubine, a slave-woman—Jewish tradition asserts that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar was marked by love.
In the Midrash, we find imaginative retellings of Biblical stories. In one expanded version of the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga, the author hints that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar exceeded the commercial bounds of an owner-slave arrangement. In this version of the story, when Sarah urges Abraham to exile Hagar, she says, “Write a get and send that slave-woman and her son away!” (Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer 30). What is a get? It is a bill of Jewish divorce—a document one gives not to a slave but to a wife.
Even further, this midrash imagines a lasting connection between Abraham and Hagar, even after the banishment to the desert. In the Torah story, Abraham places something on Hagar’s shoulders before sending her off as Sarah had ordered. What was it? It was a large barrel, says the Midrash, or a long, trailing piece of clothing. What is the significance of this? Abraham sent Hagar off into the desert dragging behind her an object that would leave a trail. A trail he could follow. A trail that would allow him to see his beloved Hagar and Ishmael again.
In the Torah, at several crucial points in Abraham’s life, Hagar and Ishmael are absent. Perhaps they don’t matter very much to Abraham. The Midrash disagrees. Hagar and Ishamel are never far from Abraham’s heart. At the moment when God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son—the Torah reports God’s words thus: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him up as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Your only son!? The Midrash imagines instead a conversation between God and Abraham: “‘Take, please your son.’ But he replied, ‘I have two sons.’ So [God] said, ‘Your only one.’ But he replied, ‘This one is the only child of his mother, and the other one is the only child of his mother.’ So [God] said, ‘The one whom you love.’ But he replied, ‘I love both of them.’ And God said, ‘Isaac’” (Bereshit Rabbah 45:7).
In the Midrash, the relationship between Abraham and Hagar does not end in the desert. After the story of the binding of Isaac, when Sarah has died, Abraham busies himself with the burial and with trying to find a proper wife for Isaac. But Isaac himself wanders out in the field, pouring out his fears and his grief in prayer. And where has Isaac been all this time, after his ordeal on the mountain? We read in the Torah that Isaac was returning from a place called “Be’er Le’hai Ro’ee” (Genesis 24:62)—the very same place where Hagar and Ishmael heard the voice of an angel of God, rescuing them from their thirst in the desert. And why did Isaac travel there? To find Hagar and bring her to his father Abraham so that they could be married (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14).
And indeed, just a few verses later in the Torah, we read that Abraham did remarry: “And Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah” (Genesis 25:1). The rabbis link the name “Keturah” to precious incense, katoret. And they link the name “Keturah” to the verb katar, to tie up. Keturah, says the Midrash, is none other than Hagar (Bereshit Rabbah 61:5). Hagar is “Keturah” because, like incense, she is pleasing. Hagar is “Keturah” because she “tied herself” only to Abraham—keeping chaste all those years between her banishment and her reunion with her beloved.
In Hebrew, the word for “relationship” is kesher—linked to a verb that also means to tie or to bind. Abraham tied a burden to Hagar’s shoulders so that she would leave him a trail to follow. Hagar tied her faithfulness to Abraham, despite the fact that he sent her and her son into the desert alone. To tie oneself to another demonstrates devotion and, indeed, love.
As we think about the relationship between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and non-Jews, it can be all too easy to look only at the level of institutions and nations and generalizations. And yet, when the rabbis of our Jewish tradition looked at the iconic rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael—between Sarah and Hagar—they saw more than the struggle between one nation and another. Admittedly, our tradition includes some pretty disturbing instructions on how to maintain the division between “us” and “them.” But Judaism also includes the Midrash: stories that reconcile the divide between Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar, by looking for those relationships where there had to have been love.
We do not relate to one another solely as representatives of big categories. When Abraham banished Hagar into the desert, he might have been acting as “Father of the Jews” toward “a Mother of Islam.” But he was also a man who loved a woman. Imagine his anguish, standing at the opening of his tent, watching them enter the desert with just a loaf of bread and a canteen of water.
And, though we don’t necessarily face life-and-death consequences, it’s like that for us, too. Our daily lives are not, when it comes down to it, about “Bates College” and “Jewish students,” but about you and your professor, the one who was willing to give you some extra time on that assignment because you told her about the conflict between the academic calendar and the Jewish holiday. And, when you think about it, “Israel” and “Palestine”—symbolic and overdetermined as those categories have become—are really just collections of relationships, one person to another.
We will achieve nothing of peace and mutual understanding by thinking and strategizing only at the level of the nation, the icon, the generalization. We will achieve peace only if we look to individual relationships. The authors of the Midrash knew, in their heart of hearts, that banishments and birthrights and blessings were not the only story. There was also the tugging pull of love, the trail cut deep across the desert, leading one person to his beloved.
[I gave this as the Yom Kippur sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there for a wonderful experience! I thank my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen, for his reflections on the Midrashim about Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in his Introduction to Midrash course at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.]
Monday, October 3, 2011
We Will Be What We Never Always Were
If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the sheer childhood joy of back-to-school shopping… and I don’t mean the new shoes. I mean the trip to the stationery store: all those pencil sets with matching erasers and sharpeners, all those empty folders waiting for labels and stickers, and, best of all, the blank notebooks full of promise. Each page clean.
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
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