By:
Rabbi Sue
Levy
member of the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Isaac’s Bar Mitsvah
Some time afterward, God put Abraham to
the test.
God said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I
am.’
And God said, ‘Take your son, your favored one, Isaac,
whom you love, and go 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 22:1-2)
I
just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
(Anonymous e-mail posting)
Our ancestors
inherited a story about their ancestor Abraham and his son Isaac. According to
the legend, Abraham took his son up to a mountain top with the intention of
sacrificing him. They knew that Abraham somehow, changed his mind and didn’t go
through with the sacrifice because Isaac lived to see another day. Now a story
like this is too powerful to go explained. Like so many other tales that we
find in the Torah, the events of the past made sense to those who heard them
only in relation to a God who, they believed, had willed it all to occur. It’s
human nature to try to make sense out of the things which we don’t understand,
and our ancestors did their best.
My best guess is that some things were forgotten over the years;
things which would have helped our ancestors understand this story better.
In the early 1980s an extraordinary film called
The Emerald Forest
sold a lot of popcorn. The film rivets
our attention on the destruction of the rainforests of Brazil and on the
wholesale destruction of the native peoples who lived there and the cultures
which nourished them. There is one graphic episode in the film which depicts
the trial by ordeal in which a boy becomes worthy to be considered a man. After
the tribal puberty ritual, the next five minutes of the film show us the young
man’s wedding. He is no longer a boy.
For many primitive peoples the privileges of adulthood had to be
earned, and there were rites of passage for them even as there are today. No
caterers. No embossed invitations. No tuxedos or evening gowns. I suppose that
our children consider four or five years of Hebrew school to be enough of an
ordeal to get them through. It is, after all, what their parents expect of
them.
So why do we have no story of Sarah saying goodbye to her son? Why
is there nothing that tells of her anguish? Women’s feelings were not entirely
overlooked in the Torah. One chapter before this one, we have the poignant
story of Hagar’s pain at the prospect that her son Ishmael will die.
I think Sarah knew that Isaac would come back. I believe that
Abraham was doing what all good fathers did for their sons in that time. He
took him into the wilderness and frightened him half to death to see if he had
the courage to be considered one of the men of his tribe. And, finally, he left
his son there to find his way home alone. It feels altogether right that Isaac
should have been allowed to go it alone. Some parents never do learn how to let
go.
The Jewish tradition calls this chapter of Torah,
Akedat Yitzhak/The Binding of Isaac
,
but I find it important to remember that it is also the story of a father
unbinding
his son when the time was right.
The very first thing we learn about Isaac after his “peak
experience” is that Abraham sends his servant to find Isaac a wife.
If my father had bound me to a rock and then stood over me with a
knife I suppose that I would have grown up pretty quickly. A boy went up to the
mountain top with his father. A man found his way home alone; only days older
but very much wiser.
We all have experiences which test us. Growth experiences. Usually
unpleasant. Life changes us most profoundly at those times, and we grow whether
we want to or not. Where is the rock upon which you lost your childhood once
and for all? Perhaps as the years go by, the bitter experiences can
become bittersweet if they have changed us for the better. Perhaps the memory
can be imbued with holiness because you survived and moved on with your life.
Some years after I saw
The
Emerald Forest
my husband and
I visited the holiest shrines of our Muslim cousins in Jerusalem. At the top of
our own Temple Mount are the two mosques, El Aksa and the Dome of the Rock. The
Quran teaches that it was from this rock that their prophet Muhammad ascended
to heaven. The Muslim tradition teaches also that Ibrahim/Abraham took his son
Ishmael/Ismail there for a sacrifice. There has been contention between our two
peoples over which son, precisely, was tied down to that rock. As our Arab guide
told us his holy story it dawned on me, suddenly, that we are all right.
Abraham would have done the same thing for his older son that he did for Isaac.
They each had a Bar Mitzvah there. It is a very holy rock, indeed.
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Some time afterward, God put Abraham to
the test.
God said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I
am.’
And God said, ‘Take your son, your favored one, Isaac,
whom you love, and go 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 22:1-2)