Spiritual Sunday
Is there a more horrifying story in the Bible than that of Abraham and Isaac, today’s Old Testament reading? Other stories feature more bloodshed (Noah’s flood) and raise comparable challenges (God allowing Satan to torment Job), but the intimacy of Abraham’s supposedly God-ordered sacrifice of his son sets it apart.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, host of The Velveteen Rabbi, imagines Abraham as a faulty interpreter of God’s word. Abraham, she notes, has a mixed history. On the one hand, he is a force for life: he has dug wells and has pushed back against God’s determination to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He also has a violent streak, however, such as when he smashed idols. Barenblat wonders why he doesn’t consult Sarah in this instance. How does he know God’s voice is actually God’s voice?
Barenblat’s Abraham sounds like an abusive parent in the way he suddenly switches from violence to remorse. His terrible punishment is that “God never spoke to him again,” which provides the poem with its title:
Silence Abraham failed the test. For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued but when it came to his son no protest crossed his lips. God was mute with horror. Abraham, smasher of idols and digger of wells was meant to talk back. Sarah would have been wiser but Abraham avoided her tent, didn’t lay his head in her lap to unburden his secret heart. In stricken silence God watched as Abraham saddled his ass and took Isaac on their final hike to the place God would show him. The angel had to call him twice. Abraham’s eyes were red, his voice hoarse he wept like a man pardoned but God never spoke to him again.
Barenblat appears to be calling for humility when it comes to what we think God is telling us. Far too many of us impose our own agendas on God rather than engaging in dialogue with God’s voice. As a result, throughout history God’s will has been invoked in countless acts of horror.
If we genuinely want to hear from God rather than our own egos, we must listen with our minds, our hearts, and our souls. We must also turn to others to help us hear.
Further thought: Last week I shared a Thylias Moss poem that imagined God changing once His divinity took on human form. Put another way, our vision of God becomes more humane as we evolve so that He (and now She) is no longer the avenging punisher that shows up in many of the Old Testament stories. Along these lines, the story of Abraham and Isaac has sometimes been seen as capturing Israel’s evolution from human to animal sacrifice.
Put another way, the bigger we become, the bigger God gets, something Jesus understood in a foundational way. To cite today’s Gospel’s reading,
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple– truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:40-42).
Previous Posts on Abraham and Isaac
—Haim Gouri: Born with a Knife in the Heart
—Rumi, Wilfred Owen: Be Wide as the Air to Learn a Secret
—Anthony Trollope: Reveling in Isaac’s Self-Sacrifice
Previous posts on Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
—Yom Kippur: Thirsting of Disordered Souls
—Rosh Hashanah: How to Make It New
—Esther, Just an Ordinary Woman