Marc Gafni: Tears of Angels: Marc Gafni
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To retell Abraham’s tale
So let us now help Isaac let go of his anger towards Abraham by telling another small piece of the Abraham story. We need to return to the point of trauma, the story of the Binding of Isaac. This story is a climatic episode in the biography of our love word ra’ah. It is in this chapter where Abraham breaks through to the other side and is able to see with the eyes of God.
Recall that Abraham hears the voice of the spirit saying, “Do not harm Isaac; God will show you a ram in his stead.”
In the very next verse: “Abraham sees a ram.” But didn’t we just say God would see? The deep resolution has occurred — Abraham and God have collapsed into one wave; Abraham sees with the eyes of God. Abraham has crossed to the other side. He has become a lover. As Isaiah says, “Abraham my Lover.” (Isaiah ch. 40)
That is all very nice for Abraham but, as we have seen, Dad’s success story left Isaac deeply scarred from the trauma. Only much later in life must Isaac go and retell the story in order to transmute his anger into love, in order to be a lover in the world. So let us, with Isaac, revisit that episode in the biography of ra’ah and see what happened.
Are you Certain?
Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Here I am.” And He said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love — Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” (Genesis 22)
The traditional understanding of this story is that Abraham received a clear unequivocal command to sacrifice his son. At first blush that is unequivocally what the story appears to be saying. One of the proponents of this view, Maimonides, asks rhetorically: “Who would agree to sacrifice a son unless they had radical certainty about the command!?”
Sorry Maimonides, but I just can’t agree with this interpretation. It is the paradigmatic overriding of the ethical for the sake of a higher call. I do not believe that there is any call which is higher than ethical integrity.
So I turn with you to the Zohar, wellspring of Hebrew mysticism, to unpack a much more radical reading of both this story and our lives. The Holy Zohar writes: “The word of God came to Abraham in ‘aspeclaria de la nahara’ – a prism that was not clear.” Radical uncertainty !
The Zohar opens us up to the depths. According to what I understand to be the Zohar’s perspective, God did not actually want Isaac to be sacrificed by Abraham. In reality, had Abraham sacrificed Isaac, he would have failed the test. It may have sounded like God’s voice, but no, the prism was not nearly so clear.
You may think this is ridiculous — if the text says, ‘God said’, then ‘god said’! But for the careful reader that is not necessarily the case.
More than once in the Torah, we will see a biblical verse which reads “God said,” only to be informed by a later text that it was not really God talking at all. It was rather people projecting their own needs and drives onto God. There is a great story later in the Torah which reads, “God says to Moses, ‘Send twelve spies to spy out the land of Israel.’” Sounds pretty clear right?
Sending spies was the will of God. A few chapters later in recalling the story of the spies, Moses tells the people, “God was angry that you did not trust him and needed to send spies.”’ Whoa, says the reader!? We just read a few pages ago that sending spies was God’s idea. After all, the verse reads, “God said to Moses ‘Send Spies!’” That is, of course, the point. It is not what God said, it is what the people heard. The text is not God talking — it is the people thinking that this is God’s will because sending spies is what they deeply want to do. So they projected their will onto God.
The same thing, the Zohar suggests implicitly, is true in our Abraham story. God never said, “Sacrifice Isaac.” There is some internal pressure in Abraham which is pushing him to sacrifice Isaac. He identifies this pressure as no less than the voice of God. If he sacrifices Isaac, he will have failed miserably the test. It will be the end of the biblical myth. The test is passed not by obeying God and sacrificing Isaac. The test is passed by realizing that the voice is not God! It is you, Abraham; it is your internal drives that you call God!
Radical uncertainty. A distorted prism. Cloudy voices. A cacophonous calling. Abraham cannot identify which voice is God’s. Abraham sensed a powerful divine calling to sacrifice his son. The need to sacrifice all — even our children — is one of the most powerful religious impulses to course through the blood of humanity. Abraham thinks this is the voice of God.
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The Drive to Sacrifice
One of the core ideas which I will, God willing, unpack more fully in a separate work is the human drive to sacrifice. Alongside Freud’s libido, Adler’s drive to power, and Frankel’s drive to meaning, I have argued that there is a powerful human drive to sacrifice ourselves. It is the ultimate libidinal expression. “Come, my darling, that I may die with you,” writes John Donne of the orgasm, which in the proverbial French is called Le Petit Mort – the little death.
In self-sacrifice, we find ultimate meaning. It may be in sex, it may be for a cause, or even for another person.
It is perhaps the most intense pleasure available to a human being. Yet, like any pleasure, we need to beware of counterfeit. And the more intense the pleasure, the more the danger of counterfeit lurks unsuspected. How many parents have sacrificed themselves and their children for causes that were evil? The seduction was often not the ideology itself but the call to sacrifice.
This is the play in the biblical narrative according to our reading of the Zohar. The voice of God calling for sacrifice is unclear. We are tempted to call it “God” because our perception is blurred, and so our love is warped. Yes, sacrifice — even the possibility of ultimate sacrifice — is an integral part of human existence and even human pleasure. One who has no value or person for whom he would make the ultimate sacrifice is in essence not alive, for his value becomes Life itself — a value which always defeats us. The race with immortality is the one race we all lose. And so we search for the ideal which will give us life by inviting us to transcendence.
So even if we lose, we win.
The voices of God issuing the invitation however are always uncertain. “Beware of counterfeit,” says the true voice. “Listen to me,” says the counterfeit call.
Ancient Repetition-Compulsion
What always blurs perception and makes us vulnerable to the counterfeit call is personal history. Abraham has a father. In fact, Abraham’s father, Terach, according to a biblical myth tradition, had attempted to sacrifice him. Terach went to sacrifice him to Nimrod, the Emperor/ Deity of ancient Mesopotamia. Terach in the story is also moved by religious impulse. To sacrifice Abraham is to confirm his loyalty to his God, Nimrod.
All of the sudden, the story becomes more clear. We so often do to our children what our parents do to us. Freud called this repetition-compulsion. Our love is warped by our blurred perception. We cannot see our children and so we often misidentify the unconscious internal forces driving us as the ultimate voice, the voice of God.
Abraham becomes a lover because he understood in the end that the voice telling him not to sacrifice Isaac is the true voice of God. He is not seduced by his past. He breaks the pattern of abuse in his family. He becomes Abraham the lover. Love is perception which creates emotion in its wake. What kind of perception? The kind that takes us out of our narrow lives and lets us see the grand vistas of being in which we participate. The kind that lets us see the other as beautiful; as an end and not a means to my full-fill-ment. The kind that lets us see with the eyes of God.
To love is to see with the eyes of God.
The End is Rooted in the Beginning
Let us follow the biography of love — the word ra’ah — perception — one more gentle step further. The first usage of ra’ah is at the beginning of Genesis; the creation myth. In biblical text, the first usage of a phrase is always the critical one. After each of the six days or stages of creation, the myth reads, “God saw and it was Good.” God saw, of course, means God loved. God saw his creations and loved them. So too, with our creations, our children, are we afforded a precious glimpse of something “good” we fashioned. To behold a child, truly for her own sake, is to love her. To see her is to love her.
To love is to become God’s verbs.
To love is to see as God sees, to peer with the eyes of God.
The end is rooted in the beginning, and the beginning is rooted in the end.
We return to the temple and the cherubs. Three times a year the pilgrims come to the temple in Jerusalem for the festivals of seeing. Now we understand more deeply. The pilgrim comes not merely to see and be seen.
S/he comes to learn to be a lover. To remember what it might mean — how it might feel — to see with the eyes of God. In the three love festivals the pilgrim learns how to see with the eyes of God. The model is the cherubs sexually intertwined atop the ark in the holy of holies. Only the priest is permitted to see them once a year during the mystery of the incense offering on the day of at-one-ment. Except!! Except for the three love festivals. On each of these three auspicious gatherings, the curtains guarding the holy of holies are gently opened and the people are invited to behold.
The word in the text: to behold — ra’ah — is to behold not just an external sight, but to behold that you are loved; and to see what it means to be a lover. The model for love, for erotic seeing, is the sexual. The intertwined cherubs transfix the people’s gaze. The sexual gaze which teaches the master is but the model. With it, you can only see the outside. Now look deeper — look on the inside. Become a lover. Learn the art of erotic perception and you will see beauty and experience pleasure far beyond even your wildest dreams.
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