This week’s Torah portion is called Va’yerah, ‘And there appeared...’. It
contains the stories in Genesis that follow Abraham’s change of name from ‘Avram’ – ‘High Father’, ‘Big Daddy’ – to
‘Avraham‘, ‘Father of multitudes’.
They‘re the narratives (Genesis 18-22) that establish his status as
foundational for the three monotheistic faiths. So who, or what, is Abraham?
What is it that ‘appears’ to him, or with him, or in him, that makes him into a
cornerstone of monotheistic tradition?
In these chapters – which are
about ‘sight’ and ‘insight’, seeing and making something of what we see - there
is, firstly, the hospitality, the openness to strangers: people appear, three
strangers (chapter 18), and they are fed and sheltered. We see that generosity
of spirit that seems a part of the archetypal mythology of the Middle East, a
capacity to share and care that is ancient in origin and yet often seems so
alien to the tribes of Britain today. Our pious politicians and their frenzied
media masters are bound up in a sado-masochistic pact, the ongoing thrill of
bondage to feeling pained and causing pain. They want to keep out the stranger
from our shores - other Europeans, those from further afield, it doesn’t
matter - the latest manifestation of
this being the decision to cut off the funding to help rescue those desperate
enough to cross the seas in crowded rickety unseaworthy boats, braving the
journey away from imperilled living towards the shores of Europe, these
promised lands of salvation and hope, our streets supposedly paved with golden
opportunities and easy lives. Like the people of Sodom and Gemorrah, some of
our political so-called ‘leaders’ and their media hound dogs enact the
antithesis of Abrahamic hospitality: ‘Let the strangers drown, pour décourager les autres...’
Old man Abraham, an immigrant
himself, knew what it was to be a stranger in a strange land. And he knew what
it meant to raise his voice when destruction was imminent; he was pulled in two
directions, for he knew that the evil of Sodom and Gemorrah was real - but he
knew too that God’s monomaniacal thinking had to be resisted, like any
totalitarianism; that the evil was not only in the cities, but also in thinking
that you should condemn a whole group because of the wrongdoing of part of that group. So he starts to bargain
God down: what if there are fifty innocent ones, 45, 40...?
For he recognises, and this
is part of his greatness, he recognises that God is acting as a ruthless moral
force that doesn’t see individuals but just sees the cause, the cause of
‘righteousness’ – and to hell, literally, metaphorically, with individuals,
with the innocent who are to perish with the wicked. This ideology of moral
righteousness has a deadly undercurrent and Abraham recognises it: from God’s
certainty here in this text, to the Spanish Inquisition, to ISIS in Iraq and
Syria is a straight line.
But Abraham is on the side of
the individual who does not deserve to die alongside the guilty - though the
innocent always die alongside the guilty. Abraham is the human voice of conscience that
holds God to account: ‘you can’t do this, you can’t condemn the group, the
whole city, if there are individuals in it who are innocent’. And God, from the
midst of his ruthlessness, seems to concede that Abraham has a point, as if
he’s prepared to learn from his creation, so he half agrees with Abraham’s
compassion and sets up a test for Abraham:
‘how far will you go, how far will you bargain me down, how brave are
you in your moral convictions?’ Almost as if God needs Abraham to teach him
about compassion and justice.
So Abraham presses on: what if there are 30 innocent, 20, 10? And God
is thinking : ‘How far dare you go? Are you going to get me to save the world
for the sake of just one innocent human being?
I will, of course, because you’re right - but do you have the courage to
demand that I should care so much about life that I will spare this wicked
world for the sake of one innocent man or woman or child? Dare you stake
everything on the value of a single life?’ But Abraham fails – he fails to hold
his nerve and defy God for the sake of the single human being.
So he saves his own family,
and moves on, leaving destruction in his wake. And he journeys on, for this is
what he does, move on , restlessly, never pausing too long to reflect on what
he leaves behind. But as he moves on,
with Sarah his wife, he is carrying the laughable knowledge that something
extraordinary is still to happen, that a child will be born, when between them
their time for bearing children is long over.
And as we read these chapters
what appears to us is not history, but saga - a way of telling stories about
how we got from there to here, from then to now; a way of telling stories which
emphasises that continuity generation after generation is a marvel, a wonder:
it makes no sense, there is no rational logic to it. We hear the storytellers
spinning a tale in which the dramas of one family are the vehicle for the story
of a whole people. Survival is a miracle.
Sarah gives birth when she is too old to give birth. This is laughable.
She calls the child Yitzchak, ‘The one
who generates laughter’. And we laugh at the absurdity of this tale, we become
accomplices in the saga, we laugh at the absurdity of the tale of how Isaac,
‘Laughing Boy’, enters our national story.
And then our laughter turns
to tears as we see Abraham caught up in the all-too-recognisable, all-too-human
drama of Sarah’s jealousy of the other woman who has already given birth: Hagar,
the Egyptian, the outsider, who has to be pushed out of the family into the
desert to die with her son, Ishmael , Abraham’s firstborn son and heir. Abraham
is shown as having the compassion to care about what is happening (Genesis
21:11): he’s very upset, he doesn’t want to do it; but – another test he fails
– he doesn’t have the courage to stand up against Sarah’s fears, and
protectiveness, and jealousy, and vindictiveness. He doesn’t stand up against
the injustice in the family. ‘Just do what she says’, he thinks, he hears – he
thinks he hears – ‘it’ll all turn out for the best’. But how are we ever to
know that it’ll turn out all right if we turn our backs on injustice? What kind
of a model is this for a religious tradition to have in its veins?
Yet the story – in that rich,
dense, poetic prose that the Bible uses for its most dramatic narratives -
reveals that the God who had been waiting for Abraham to bargain him into a
corner and plead for the city to be spared even if there was only one innocent
creature there, that God who destroys the innocent along with the guilty,
unsettling us as he does so, disturbing our wishes for a God who is consistently
on the side of life and of justice - that God is also the one who does, after
all, care about the individual. Hagar weeps over her abandoned child, she weeps
about her own desperate situation, she weeps from the midst of her own solitary
state of having been abandoned , and in that typical Biblical twist while we
hear the woman’s cries and see her tears, ‘God heard the voice of the lad’
(21:17). As if the child is an extension of her. As if the two are one, even
though she has left him a distance away, to die. She cries out, but it is the
unspoken suffering that God hears. Again we are unsettled, nothing can be
assumed about this God. We can’t second-guess the divine.
So God opens her eyes – and
our eyes – and Hagar sees the well of water that has been there all the time
but that in her misery she has not been able to see; and life is preserved. And
we see a miracle too, an everyday miracle that is in front of our eyes: that
compassion is a quality that transcends ethnicity, that divinity is not
exclusively the preserve of one people, one nation, one religion, that God’s
care for the individual woman and child, for each human being, transcends tribe
and race. This lowly Egyptian handmaid is held in mind by God, is seen by God,
is cared for and responded to for she – representing all outsiders – is
precious, is of infinite worth from God’s point of view, if not from ours. The
story makes all this appear in front of our eyes in this sedrah that is all about sight and insight.
And then ‘after these things’
(22:1), the final test. How to convey that God is on the side of life, not
death? Set up the ultimate test, dramatise the queasy boundary between sanity
and madness by ordering the execution of
a child by his father – in the name of God - and see if humanity, Abraham, will
see it through, or see through it. That’s the test. See if ideology, the
ideology of obedience to the cause, trumps human feeling, compassion. Or
whether Abraham can reach inside himself and find the deeper moral voice which
puts the individual before the ideology. And it’s a close run thing.
Because Abraham goes all the
way and prepares everything: the wood, the binding, the sacrificial space, the
fire, all prepared with the cool, calm, logic of dedication to the cause, and
the knife is raised to destroy the future because of an inability to see that
God is testing him to find out if Abraham can think for himself, if he can
utilise his own moral vision, his own conscience, his own humanity. ‘And
Abraham lifted up his eyes and he saw, va’yahr...’
(22: 13). A moment of insight on which everything turned: God is on the side of
life. Sacrifices may be necessary, but not sacrifices of people in the name of
God.
Some might say that because
Abraham even contemplated it, he failed the test. Maybe. But child sacrifice
was the norm, it was the conventional, ideologically sound practice of the times, so
why wouldn’t people think – even Abraham - that their God would reflect the
status quo? that God was on the side of tradition, as it were? But in the end this
isn’t a story about the transition from child sacrifice to a different kind of
morality. After all, child sacrifice still goes on: when children are victims
of perverse religious ideology, murdered because ‘the devil is in them’;
although it doesn’t need religion for a parent to kill a child, it happens the
world over. For the story dramatises the reality that destructiveness is in
every human heart, whether we acknowledge it or not, and it is always touch and
go whether it is going to gain the upper hand. So child sacrifice happens,
literally. And it happens symbolically: in trafficking and sexual exploitation,
and economic exploitation. It’s universal, still.
The ‘binding of Isaac’ is a
defining moment in the life of Abraham and his family. The news killed Sarah,
the midrash says, and it’s true that we never see her again. And it traumatised
Isaac, who carries the melancholia of a survivor all his life. And it ends
God’s relationship with Avraham Avinu.
God never talks to Abraham again. Or Abraham to God. And the texts don’t tell
us who turned their back on who. Is God satisfied now that the new faith is
secure in this family’s hands – now that he’s put the first two patriarchs
through the most harrowing experience of their lives? Or is he disgusted that
Abraham almost did it, without complaint, without a murmur: murder in the name
of God? So does God withdraw from Abraham, in satisfaction, or in disgust?
Or does Abraham withdraw from
God ‘after this things’? Does he find the whole enterprise of trying to
understand and follow the erratic moral vision of the Divine One just too much
for his poor old soul? Or does he withdraw into his memories and start
constructing his memoirs, rehearsing the journey he’s taken, polishing his
stories for the generations to come, editing and fabricating, weaving new
fictions out of the dramas of his life.
“Abraham – Man of Faith”: catchy title, could make a best seller. Which
indeed, for better and worse, it’s become.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, November 8th, 2014]
No comments:
Post a Comment