Tears of Angels: Part Ten: Marc Gafni

First a recap of weekend blog torah..and then a really big post for today…

:)

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.” (*Note that the word used for God will show you is – ra’ah — as in ‘God will see for you’) 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 the test miserably. 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.

continued tomorrow…

marc gafni
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