Right to the Edge

In the narrative of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, we see that God lets Abraham arrive at the very moment when he is about to cut his son's throat, before sending an angel to command him to stop:

10. And Abraham stretched out his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
11. And the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham; and he said, Here am I.
12. And he said, Lay not your hand upon the lad, nor do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you did not withheld your son, your only son from me.

Why wait until the very last moment? A couple of possible reasons present themselves.
1) In order to verify that he actually meant to go through with it, so it would be as if he had done it, and shown the dedication and obedience G-d wanted.
Or
2) In order to have Abraham and Isaac undergo the most powerful and transformative experience possible, without actually going through the act of father sacrificing son.

Which one of the above is true would depend on the divine purpose of the Akeda. Perhaps both are true.

But what strikes me most, right now, is the demand from Abraham to pull back at the very last second. It is not at all easy to stop an action when the momentum is already in place. Yet Judaism sometimes demands precisely that.

A vivid example is on the wedding night. After merely one conjugal act, in the passionate heart of their first night together as a couple, the groom and his bride must part because she has become impure (this is assuming she was a virgin):

"Following the expenditures [of the wedding], he immediately goes in and has relations with her. But when she says to him, 'I saw [blood] like a red lily,' he immediately withdraws from her. Who prevents him from drawing close to her? What iron wall or pillar stands between them? What snake bit him, what scorpion stung him so that he does not approach her? [It is] the words of the Torah, which are as soft as a lily, as the verse states: 'You shall not approach a woman in the impurity of her menstrual flow.'" (Shir Ha-shirim Rabba 7:3)

As in the Akeda, Judaism sometimes has a way of bringing you to the very edge of something and then requiring you not to cross the line.
People have a tendency to keep away from cliff edges and from edges of all sorts, just in case one might fall off them. This is the reason why in keeping halacha, many are stringent and keep the law more strictly than necessary, fearing that if they walk along the very edge of what is allowed, they will slip over it.  

And yet, Judaism will not allow wholesale stringency and keeping far away from those liminalities, those risky boundaries. It challenges its adherents to come close, very close, yet not cross. "You can do this," it admonishes. "Be mature, be self-disciplined, do it."

A prime example is matzah, unleavened bread. Matzah, once it passes 18 minutes of exposure to moisture becomes bread, the food absolutely forbidden on Pesach. Were matzah not commanded, no one would eat it, for it is too risky that it might pass the forbidden 18 minute boundary. Yet the Torah demands that it is matzah of all foods that we eat on Pesach.

The Torah wants us to walk on the (right side of the) wild side, to stand in the risky zone, and to do it successfully.


I also think of how the rabbis commanded us to light two candles before Shabbat came in. This is also a risky custom, for lighting of fire is completley prohibited on Shabbat, from the Torah. If the person lights a minute after Shabbat comes in, instead of doing an admirable act, they have committed a prohibition. So the rabbis did their best to put a fence around this halacha, by adding "tosefet Shabbat", 20 or 40 minutes.

In the olden days,  the candles would have to be lit anyway to create llight in the house, so the custom caused them to be lit before Shabbat, which was good. But today, we light these flames solely because of the rabbinically instigated action.

And in fact I know people do light late, including people who aren't Shabbat observant but like the custom. So it really IS a risky proposition. That is why the calendar left by the Jerusalem municipality's religious department in my mailbox says in huge bold letters beneath lighting times: REMEMBER TO LIGHT ON TIME, FOR IT IS PROHIBITED TO BURN FIRE ON SHABBAT!)

And yet the rabbis did not just take the safe route and say, "You know what, never mind, you don't have to light candles. Just pretend, or make the blessing on an electric light." They won't allow us to be wholesale "machmir" and avoid risk always, even if it does say אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד.

Go rabbis!

Our Inner Sailors

And back to the story of Jonah, from which I cannot keep away.

A comment in a bibliodrama on Jonah chapter 1 led me to notice how we can read the story as symbolic of our inner processes.

The boat is akin to our psyche, our whole system. Jonah’s falling asleep in it represents repression and denial, two mechanisms that manage to keep us asleep even during powerful storms. They keep us blind to our own inner crisis, which then ratchets up, higher and higher, in a bid to get our attention.

The captain would normally have nothing to do with a passenger asleep in the bowels of his ship. However, he is thrown off kilter by the storm and – in an example of a topsy-turvy order of things, where those above descend below – he leaves his usual post to come down, find the offending sleeper and urge him (1:6): 

"What do you mean, O sleeper? Arise! Call upon your God! Perhaps God will give a thought to us, that we do not perish."

No answer from Jonah.
Symbolically, the captain is the superego, the voice of our conscience. When it sees that the boat, i.e. the psyche, the self, is cracking apart, it tries to take charge of the situation through the means with which it is familiar: rousing words, intstructions, and commands.
But this is not a language that the repressed awareness can even hear. It continues to sleep.

It is only when the sailors arrive, and plead (1:8):

"Tell us, we beg you, for whose cause is this evil upon us? What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?"

that Jonah finally responds, replying (1:9):

"I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."

He is connecting to his identity and to a higher power. This leads to his suggesting a solution. He is now in charge, and knows what to do. This is the healthy ego, the functional self that rejects both the id’s denial and the superego’s unbearable pressure, and listens to intuition that helps the divine voice to come through and give aid.

Our captain, the voice of reason, our adult voice, cannot actually speak to the parts of us that are in distress, that are childish, unreasonable, shut down. If we shout at a child acting from within emotional baggage, we may have all the reason in the world on our side, but they will not hear us. It was the sailors’ approach in a respectful manner, as equals, their actually showing interest in Jonah and his personal history, that successfully elicited a response. Their warmth of approach, their genuine humanity (expressed even more strongly when they do not want to throw him overboard, even to save their own lives) give him the space to wake up to his true self, connect to his identity, connect to God, and get back in the saddle.  

We need to find those sailors inside us – the compassionate voices of our inner loving parent, our inner kind therapist, coach and friend – that can hear us and want to understand who we really are, without judgment. It reminds me of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's story of the Turkey Prince, or (the Option method for treating autism), in which the wise adult figure descends “under the table” to the child's level, in order to genuinely understand and create an atmosphere of trust. This allows the prince to eventually come back up to sit at the table.

What Abraham Starts, Hannah Completes

On each of the two days of Rosh Hashanah there is one reading from the Torah and one from the Prophets.

The Torah portions are Gen 21:1-34 - the miraculous birth in Sarah's old age of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael; and Gen 22:1-24 - the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

The Prophetic readings are I Samuel 1:1-2:10, the story of childless Hannah who finally makes a vow to dedicate the son born to her to the service of God in Shilo; and Jeremiah 31:1-19, about the ingathering of the exiles.

A theme running clearly through the first three is the complex interplay between parents, their love for their children, the sacrifices they make and God's response. The fourth reading, Jeremiah 31, also contains the verses:

So says the L‑rd: A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, for they are not.

So says the L‑rd: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work, says the L‑rd, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

Unlike Hagar, Rachel is not "exiled" with her children. She remains behind, lamenting their absence.

I want to, however, speak of the other two and the connection between them. I have spent years wondering what went through Hannah's mind, what was the process that she went through as she wept bitterly for many years in her barrenness, before finally finding the way to pray in order to open her locked destiny as a mother.

Did you ever wonder if the later biblical figures had the stories of the earlier biblical heroes to draw upon? Surely Hannah knew the story of Abraham and the Akeda.

I imagine her drawing upon this story with its example of the ultimate sacrifice (that was not made in the end), whether conciously or uncosciously, in casting around to try to answer for herself what God's will for her could be, or what God might want her to do, in order to revert the harsh decree upon her. She hits upon the idea of doing a kind of Akeda - offering her son to God, in the best way she knows how. Not for death, but for life - for a life sanctified and elevated.

We see how once this idea arises in her, a calm descends upon her, and she finds the words and the way. Eli the priest accuses her of being drunk, but even that cannot shatter her calm, for she knows she has found the right path.

Ultimately God did not want Abraham to kill his son. God apparently only wanted to bring Abraham (and Isaac) to the very edge of religious devotion. The lesson for the world was: do not kill your children. This is not the way to serve God.

But it is in the Hannah story that this lesson reaches its culmination. God says, if you however wish to dedicate your child to Me (assuming it is the right child for it), then that is welcome. That is the evolved path. And it leads to the birth of the prophet Samuel.

From Abraham we learn the negative, what God does not want us to do. But from Hannah (inspired by the Akeda, perhaps) we learn the positive, what God wants us to do.
Most of us will not dedicate our children to temple service, and neither should we. But we can find a way to convey to our children that we are willing to let them go, however painful that is, if they need to evolve in ways that leave us behind.

Pointing to the Divine Soulmate

The talmud in Taanit 31a describes an incredible scene:

Ulla Bira'ah said in the name of R. Eleazar: In the days to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will hold a circle/dance for the righteous and He will sit in their midst in the Garden of Eden and every one of them will point with his finger towards Him, as it is said, And it shall be said in that day: Lo, this is our God, for whom we waited, that He might save us; this is the Lord for whom we waited, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation (Isaiah 25:9)

There is something so striking about this image of the righteous dancing in a circle and pointing at God. The word for "this", zeh, in its essence implies pointing, according to the rabbis. In the first commandment of the Torah, החודש הזה לכם = this month shall be for you the head of the months, the word hazeh (this) is taken by Rashi to mean that God is pointing at the moon.

Similarly in the second chapter of Genesis, when Adam, after searching in vain for his helpmate amongst the animals, finally awakes from his slumber and sees Eve, he exclaims (Gen 2:23):

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

His use of the feminine word for this, zot, implies he is pointing to and identifying the woman, sensing viscerally that she is his true soulmate.

Just as Adam points to and identifies his beloved, so too the righteous dancing in the circle point to and identify God as their true "soulmate" so to speak. (The reference to God sitting in the Garden of Eden also helps us make the connection between the two disparate texts).

For anyone who goes beyond superficial worship, and is truly authentic about it, relationship with God is complex. But this is the work of faith, to come to recognise God as your soulmate with tremendous clarity: as clear as the moon in the sky.

Often it takes many years of wandering, lost, in various wrong directions before such a thing can occur. Just as it was Adam's time spent fruitlessly trying to find a match amongst the animals that led him to his clarity when finally meeting Eve, it is precisely this wandering that leads eventually to finding the path of truth, and feeling the absolute clarity of the discovery.

And if you are looking for an even higher level of spiritual functioning:

Michael Attias has pointed out that in a dance you move into the place occupied by your friend a moment ago. Thus, each of the dancers described in the talmud gets to see what God looks like from his friend's perspective.

So I would add to this: in this dance, we get to understand how God is a soulmate for another person, in a way different from our own. This is challenging. It truly is work on an elevated spiritual level. For this, someone can be called "righteous".

The Seder's Wise Child - Missing the Point?

Of the four children at the seder, the answer to the wise child is the only one not taken from the biblical verses. Instead, we teach this child a law, that

one does not eat anything after the Pesach sacrifice (afikoman).

While we hold the oral law in high esteem, the fact remains that for whatever reason (and many reasons are offered for this anomaly), this child is set apart from the other three, in that the educational words explicitly laid out by the Torah itself are not given over to this child. The child is willy-nilly “poresh min hatzibbur”, separated out from the community of children and deprived of the original words of the Torah.

Could this in some subtle fashion result from the fact that this child is not whole-hearted (is not tam)? is too involved with his or her own intellect, the minutiae or casuistry, to be listening to the other children’s questions with any interest, due to undervaluing the place of fresh and innocent questions? Does this child perhaps not want to be lumped with the others, and is trying very hard to talk on an adult level – and has therefore forefeited a place with the children, the central feature of the seder, and the biblical verses given to them as a gift?

Ultimately, the child is included in the four children, of course, but we cannot but notice this fact setting him or her apart.

My advice would be, do not let the wise child grow up too quickly. Help these children stay connected to their genuine childish nature and educate them not to look down on the other children for fear of missing Gd’s revelation in the verses, that comes marked with a big sign marked “CHILDREN ONLY”.