The mist was rising ever slowly from the damp ground as Abraham and Issac approached the base of the strange mountain. They had been travelling for three days. Abraham was drawn to this place. Isaac was his passenger, an unaware partner in a terrifying journey. As they approached the rocky crag, there was an eerie calm. There were no sounds, not an animal moved. You could hear each heart beat as they approached. The echo of each step vibrated off the face of the rock. Were they alone?
The task was to make a sacrifice. Abraham had told Isaac that was the goal. They had left days ago to make this possible for God. Abraham knew what was at stake. Isaac was unsure. Faith or future. Those were the two choices. Which to choose. The ramifications of each choice were life altering.
Isaac knew that something greater was on his father’s mind. Few words were spoken along this part of the journey. And Abraham had ordered the servants to stay back. How strange given the work needed to build and altar and prepare a sacrifice. But there was no animal to slaughter. Where was the sacrifice father? Who is the offering? Where is this God to whom you march?
They climbed the rocks. Wood and fire and knife in hand. They came to the summit and still no animal for sacrifice. Does awareness set in for Isaac? Can he see the terror in his father’s eyes? Slowly, methodically Abraham built a mound and arranged the rocks for an altar. Isaac helped, remarkably at peace with what he imagined would happen. Suddenly a flash, a rope, tieing of hands, laying of wood, the bearing of a neck, a raising of a knife and a voice booming from nowhere! Abraham, Abraham!
Such a powerful story we read each year on this day of the New Year. The concept of personal sacrifice fills our lives at this time of year. The message is all about growth and change and the encounter with our past so that we can move on into the New Year. Like the Israelites of old, we stand gazing at the promised land that lay just beyond our reach. The only way we can grasp it is to make whole our past so that we can move towards our future. This is the theme of these holy days and the message of its liturgy.
And so we are Abraham and we are Isaac, both parent and child, leading and being led towards some precipice. Do we have something to offer? Is our heart in the right place? Can we bring together our faith and our future? On this first day of this new year, do we have something to give to make this year better than the last.
Rabbi Hayyim of Zans used to tell this parable: Once a king’s son sinned against his father, the king. His father expelled him from his house. So long as the prince was near the palace, people knew he was the king’s son. They befriended him and gave him food and drink. But as he traveled farther into his father’s realm, no one knew him, and he had nothing to eat. He began to sell his clothing to buy food, and he hired himself out as a shepherd. As a shepherd, he needed nothing. He would sit in the hills, tending his flocks and singing all day. He forgot that he was the king’s son.
Now it was the custom of shepherds to make themselves small roofs of straw to keep out the rain. But the king’s son could not even afford to buy straw. So he did what was customary in those times – when the king made his annual circuit through the provinces, subjects could petition the king for relief. So the shepherd wrote a note, asking for a small straw roof. The king recognized his son’s handwriting, and was saddened to think how low his son had fallen that he had forgotten that he was a king’s son, and felt only the lack of a straw roof. Rabbi Hayyim concluded: “It is the same way with our people: we have forgotten that we are children of the king, and what we really lack.”
It’s not a conventional ending. If this were just some new age story about the value of pastoral simplicity, the prince’s way of being would receive only praise. But that’s not the message here – the prince’s forgetfulness is not valued. He has fallen short of his potential. He yearns only for a straw roof – he has forgotten what he can be.
It is what Rabbi Dannel Schwartz calls “the trance of ordinary life.” He tells the story of Senator David Rice Atchison. When President-elect Zachary Taylor refused to be inaugurated on the scheduled date of March 4, 1850 because it was a Sunday and the Christian Sabbath, he moved his inauguration to the next day. This would leave the nation without a president for 24 hours, because Taylor’s predecessor, President James Polk, was leaving office as scheduled on Sunday at noon. The rules of succession left Senator Atchison in line to be president for that one day. Unfortunately, Atchison, fond of food and drink, overdid things at the inauguration parties on Saturday night and into the wee hours of the next day, and left strict instructions not to be awakened at all on Sunday. By the time he woke up, it was Monday afternoon. He had slept through his entire presidency.
We forget that we are the children of the king. We sleep through great possibility. It may be more a result of our busy-ness than our laziness, but we are in a trance nonetheless. We forget that though not always great ourselves, we are connected to a greatness beyond ourselves, the potential that God gives us to yearn for far more than a roof over our heads or even a new i-Phone.
We forget that we are the sons and daughters of royalty, and that we should have spiritual and ethical ambitions to match our noble lineage. We forget whenever we release ourselves from the responsibility to use our gifts to bring healing to God’s world. The problems are too big we say – I am but a poor shepherd in the hills. Darfur is too far away – Iraq is a quagmire – poverty is inevitable – Israel will always be at war – racism is ineradicable. I wish I could have coffee with a friend who is hurting, but I’m just too stressed to take on anybody else’s tzurus right now. I know the new kid in school could really use a new friend. But I’m just a shepherd. I can’t do anything about it.
And it’s no less true closer to home: in the relationships that shape our lives and our days. We convince ourselves that we can’t be any kinder, or more compassionate, or less angry, or more understanding. But we come to Temple during these holy days to challenge a year’s worth of resignation, a year’s worth of underestimating our own power and potential, a year’s worth of missing the mountain before our very eyes. We spend a year forgetting that we are children of the Holy One – or worse, we treat ourselves as princes and princesses, but only in the sense of thinking what we are entitled to, not what we are capable of. But then come these days of awe and their emphasis on God’s sovereignty. Well guess what – if God is sovereign, then we are children of the sovereign, with all of the dignity and possibility and promise that our relationship brings.
Rabbi Hayyim is not asking the shepherd to be flawless. What Rabbi Hayyim laments is not the shepherd’s failure to be perfect, but his failure to want to be more than he is. Maybe all Abraham wants is for Isaac to become more than he appears to be.
We are here because we are flawed, and because we possess the radical freedom to be better. It is the freedom that rejects the tyranny of the status quo, the freedom that in a quiet moment in the sanctuary pushes back gently against our fear of being different than we are. True, our freedom is neither absolute nor unbounded. It exists in the context of our own mortality, of physical limitation, of the reality of the different strengths implanted within different human beings. But precisely within those limitations, we are created in the image of God, the children of the Holy One, with a reach we too often fail to realize. In the words of Rabbi William Cutter, “We live with a circumference around us, inspired to reach for more, in pursuit of God.” We should praise the shepherd for his lack of material greed – but we should be cautioned by his low estimation of the impact his own life can have.
Tifkach eyneynu, adonai eloheinu – open our eyes, dear God, even when the world seems a living hell – when the smoke is blinding and real screams compete with the angel’s voice – when bombs land in Israel, when hatchets fly in Darfur, when soldiers come home in caskets, when people starve to death on our city streets, wherever terror strikes. Especially then, help us to see the power of one human deed, of one humane act. Help us to spend less time lamenting what we lack. Help us to use what we have for good.
Open our eyes to our own humble possibilities for holiness. Help us see the mountain that rises before our eyes. Help us see the sacrifice that we must make and the hope-filled lives that it creates.
Tifkach eyneynu, adonai elohienu – in this new year 5769, open our eyes, dear God - to all the desert cries, to all the mountains of potential, to the urgency of our promise and the greatness of our responsibility. We are children of the Holy One. Bless us as You blessed Abraham and Isaac - with courage and with vision and with hope. In a new year bright with Your goodness and blessing – give us Your blessing!
Amen.
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