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Rosh Hashanah Morning - Akedat Yitzchak - 5765

I am sure he was never the same again. After that trip up the mountain, not knowing, then knowing that it was he who was the intended sacrifice. It would be hard for Isaac ever to forget. Having your father lift a knife above you to slit your throat is the kind of thing that stays with you, sticks in your gut, and gets replayed in the recesses of your memory for the horror and betrayal it was. The way the Torah tells us about Isaac’s life is much like how an impressionist artist goes about making a painting- not by using broad brush strokes which shape and create outlines and definition. The Torah reserves that technique for Moses. No, we truly see Isaac only when we stand back from the collection of bits and hints of what happened to him at different stages of his life and discover the image which emerges. Central in Isaac’s portrait is the moment on Mount Moriah, we read this morning, and its corollary portion of betrayal and trauma, the banishment of his brother, Ishmael. It must have occurred to Isaac sometime on that three day journey with his father, “First, my brother, now me. I should have seen this coming.”

Naturally, Isaac was never the same. He had no choice in the matter.

And many of us who read the Torah’s accounts of Isaac’s life look at him and say, “Nebuch, it’s a shame.” After all, Isaac is a somewhat stunted character. He’s the only man in the Bible who cannot find his own wife. And then, it seems, when Rebecca enters the picture, Isaac recedes into the background, and Rebecca’s image begins to take shape in bold relief. We are left to imagine what kind of hero Isaac might have been had the crippling effect of the Akeda not shadowed the color scheme of his life’s canvas. It’s a shame God tested Abraham commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son. For even if Abraham didn’t kill Isaac, he succeeded in obliterating a part of him, a part of him that could never be born, the greatness he might have attained, filling Abraham’s shoes as a trailblazer, setting the next generation on fire.

It’s peculiar then that we read this story on Rosh Hashanah. Isn’t this time of year about reminding us of our greatness in potential as we see the example of Abraham’s great faith?

Moreover, Rosh Hashanah isn’t the time we’d think we were supposed to pay much attention at all to Isaac. A big portion of our New Year’s message is that we can turn all our shortcomings around and start over. Each year, the canvas is clean, and with teshuvah, proper repentance, we don’t have to carry the past with us into the present and future. But if this time and place is only that, we have to ignore Isaac. Because in looking at him, we see that some of us do carry our past with us, and some scars will remain visible year after year for entire lives- the scars of an abused child, the remnants of pain leftover from a failed marriage, the defeat of an economic reversal, the lingering sadness of parents after the death of a child.

A lesser known Chasidic master, Reb Tzaddok Ha’Cohen of Lublin taught, “Through the very quality in which one is lacking or wounded, by that very quality one finds one’s unique gift or strength.” So it is with Isaac. He finds his greatness and strength in succeeding to remain as bound to the covenant of his father as he was bound to the altar on Moriah.

Isaac’s greatness was the wisdom that we need not all be trailblazers or charismatic leaders, like his father Abraham or Moses. A valuable life doesn’t have to be one that sets the next generation on fire. Our most precious contributions can be simply going on after tragedy, living with our childhood scars without allowing them to overcome us, imparting sacred values to our children by setting an example with our own lives. I ran into someone at a shiva house recently who I hadn’t seen for a few years. As he reintroduced himself to me and I asked how he’d been, he said, “Each and every day, I wake up and thank God.” Since that isn’t the canned reply of social convention, I pressed him on what made him feel that way. He proceeded to tell me that ever since surviving a bullet during the Yom Kippur war, he figures he’s here for a reason and sees every day as another opportunity to fulfill that purpose. Isaac must have said the same thing to himself. Being spared on Moriah was his mandate to go on and do something.

So what did Isaac actually do? The first example he provides us is his response when Rebecca struggled with barrenness. Vaye-atar Yitzchak, Isaac pleaded with God to open Rebecca’s womb. Va-yei- ateir lo Adonai, and God responded to him. In the Talmud (Yevamot 64a), our Sages noticed that the Hebrew word for plead is also the word for pitchfork because just as a pitchfork turns the sheaves of grain from one position to another, so the does sincere prayer change the dispensations of God. Isaac’s prayer on behalf of Rebecca reminds us that when we give of ourselves to others we are changed in the process- as is epitomized in the act of child rearing, but not limited to it. Rabbi Mordechai who said to his son, the Rabbi of Kovel “My son, one who does not feel the pains of a woman giving birth 200 miles away, who does not suffer with her and does not pray that her suffering may be easy, does not deserve to be called righteous.” The extraordinary example of Isaac, whose family history included the banishment of his brother, almost being sacrificed himself on Mount Moriah, a man who couldn’t choose his own wife, is that he was able to empathize with Rebecca’s pain of childlessness, and pray earnestly that she might have a child.

And by doing that committing himself to being the father of a family constellation parallel to the one in which he was born. But it was a different family, complex and dysfunctional in its own ways, one which we know Isaac committed his love and attention. We all bring baggage to life. But whatever scars you carry, you can still live nobly without feeling obligated to live dramatically. You don’t have to be an Abraham. So if you’re feeling like your life is thwarted or unfulfilled, perhaps you want to try spending a little more time with your kids or grandchildren. Laugh with them, play with them. Tell them stories about when you were young. Tell them why you are the person you are. If you are feeling angry all the time, stop yourself in the middle of the next argument you have with someone near and dear to you and find a way for reconciliation. If you are feeling empty, visit a neighbor or a friend who’s been sick. Sometimes the responsibilities of relationships can be painful. But true relationships require responsibility. They give dignity and nobility to life.

The second act which defines Isaac’s character is when he digs the wells of his father. As Isaac acquires an unusual amount of wealth in the land of Canaan, he inspires the envy and ire of the Philistines, who stop up all the wells that Abraham’s servants had dug a generation earlier. Isaac encamped in the valley of Gerar and dug those wells anew, giving them the same names his father had given them. Isaac is the son who returns and repairs his father’s work. He is the first person in the history of the Jewish people who realized that future generations would be built upon the past, that a chain of tradition would have to be established. (Our Father’s Wells, Pg 149) As much as he was scarred by the terror of the Akeda, still he returned to his father’s place to remove the debris which had covered and contaminated his father’s wells, so that he might drink again from their precious waters. (Schorsh) Many of us struggle with our role as links in the chain of tradition. Not all of our fathers’ and mothers’ wells yield good waters for us unless we repair them. We have children, we send them to Hebrew school, just as we went to Hebrew school, even though, for some of us that experience may have been dreadful and meaningless. And for too many of us, it simply becomes an Akeda, a sacrificing of our children that we do out of blind obligation.

And the more we talk of our own suffering in religious school, the more it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for our children. Isaac models for us that no matter the grievance, it is also our sacred obligation to reclaim and repair the wells, to internalize the purest parts of our legacies, so that they can live and be nourishing for us and our children again. The timeless words of German writer Goethe remind us, “What you have inherited from your ancestors, take hold of it in order to make it your own.” Make it your own are the operative words. Make it your own. And it is ok that our own ways are different. There is a Chassidic story told about Reb Zusya of Hanipol. When asked by his students why his teachings were different than those of his master's, he replied, "when I reach the Gates of Heaven I will not be asked why I haven't lived my life as Abraham or as Moses, but why I didn't live it as Reb Zusya." We must learn how to dig, and sift through our tradition to find the parts that heal our brokenness and provide the lessons for us to pass down in earnest to our children. I know we Jews feel we live in two worlds. We’ve got one foot in the Jewish world and one foot in the secular world. I know its hard for us to reconcile science and religion, faith and reason.

It isn’t easy to walk out of our secular worlds into the synagogue any day. And it isn’t easy to walk from our family lives and business pursuits, hobbies and sports into ten days of repentance, long services, complex music, big crowds and to feel totally involved in the task of self examination and self -transformation. But the task of modern Jewry, your task and mine, is to see how those worlds can be integrated. Isaac dug wells to get water. It was a very practical thing. Without water, he couldn’t live in the desert. We can’t be bothered to dig up the past for its own sake. We do it to give dignity to the present and purpose to the future. The secular world, the world of science and reason and politics offer us no such comfort. Isaac dug wells to get water where his father had dug before him. He used the same names for the wells. He simply taught us to sift through the tradition and find life’s highest values.
We know from later on in the Torah that our forefather Isaac did just that as God appears to him and says, “I am the God of your father Abraham....” And in response to that encounter, Isaac built an altar and invoked God by name. Like Abraham, Isaac knew the significance of being visited by God. Like Abraham, Isaac built an altar. And like Abraham, he calls God by name. However, it is an unrecorded name, a name that only Isaac knew.

He found his own place in his father’s tradition, and we are called to do the same.

In an essay on our patriarch Isaac, Elie Wiesel imagines that what happened to Isaac after Mount Moriah was that he became a poet. Perhaps this is because poets rarely invent new words. Instead, they know the indispensable value of a word’s past, its associations and history. Every poet must do as Isaac did, redig the wells, take old words and make them live and flow in a new time. We are inheritors of the great artistry that is Jewish tradition. And it is for each of us, to search out the well springs of the words of our tradition and make them live in our lives. We needn’t be great. We needn’t deny our brokenness, our fragility, our neediness. We only need to give of ourselves to others and learn from the past how best to shape the future we choose.

Amen.