by Stuart Klawans, delivered at Minyan M'at

Shabbat shalom.

Our minyan is fortunate in having skilled practitioners of the autobiographical drash: people who know how to situate a parsha within their experience; people who are adept at making us feel the link between their lives and ours, our lives and the text. I regret that I am not one of these people. In the past, when I’ve worked up my nerve to speak before you, representing the am ha-aretz wing of the minyan, I’ve avoided personal anecdotes, having learned the hard way that I don’t have the tact to use them well.

I will try again today not to turn into a memoirist; but it’s going to be hard. First, Vayera happens to be the parsha from which I leyned at my bar mitzvah

Bad news—I am a superannuated bar mitzvah bachur, who resembles all the others in having a lot to tell you.

These memories, in large part, have to do with my mother, whose 83rd birthday would have fallen this past week. You see, I haven’t even begun, and already the drash is soggy with a sense of evanescence, loss, and the fragility of life. I’m not sure these emotions are entirely appropriate to Vayera. But then, because of recent experience, they well up, all the same.

The point of these opening remarks lies in that bit about “recent experience.” As many of you know, Bali and I have needed the help of this community over the past weeks. And the community has responded as it always does, magnificently. I hope that Bali and I will soon be in a position to perform mitzvot, rather than being an occasion for the mitzvot of others. In the meantime, I need to tell you how deeply grateful we are, to many individuals in the minyan and to the community as a whole.

We’re grateful, again, because we’ve just had such a troubling, sudden reminder of the fragility of life. And, to take this drash definitively out of the realm of the autobiographical, I will add that we’ve all just had another such reminder in the sudden death of Paul Wellstone and his family—Paul Wellstone, who died as he lived, passing up a fundraiser so he could give comfort to a steelworker’s family.

Appropriate or not, our fragility is going to be the theme of this drash.

Now, if you look at the concerns of the parsha as a whole, you can see that my theme is all wrong. Vayera has to do with the genealogy of nations. There are no fewer than four prophecies in this parsha about impending nationhood—and that’s not even counting the peoples who spring up without prophecy. There is, for example, the charming myth of origin of the Moabites and Ammonites, who are so rotten because their father was an incestuous, drunken coward—but even he, even Lot, gets to figure in Vayera’s chronicle of fecundity, which of course reaches its culmination in the birth of Rivka.

The world must be peopled. I think it’s peopled even more emphatically, more distinctively, in Vayera than it was after the flood, in Noach. More distinctively, because we’re now getting to the point of the peopling. Our people, the multitude of our community today, can trace itself back to a single couple.

And yet at the same time, in the same gesture as Vayera insists that our lineage was pre-ordained, the parsha also shows emphatically that the line could have been cut. Vayera asserts that it’s a miracle we’re here.

We find both reassurance and anxiety in this parsha: a predominant reassurance, which says that life was sure to have continued abundantly for us down to our own day—abundant life, and hospitality—but also an anxiety that life so easily fails. Within this anxiety are two intermingled terrors: about the possible annihilation of the group and of the individual.

Given the parsha’s overall message about nationhood, I think the stronger of these two anxieties concerns the group. Had Abraham failed in his test, then we would not be here. A whole society would be missing from the Earth, along with the stories and customs that give meaning to our world. An unfathomable loss. It’s more upsetting to contemplate, I think, than the loss of Yitzhak as an individual—although, of course, no competent storyteller would expect us to imagine the knife slicing into a collectivity. We each feel the blade, one at a time, as it would have cut into his body.

Now, it bears repeating: Vayera as a whole means to reassure. So you might wonder if I’m about to betray the text, by focusing on individual moments and finding in them some cause for anxiety. You might suspect such readings to have become possible only recently, after the 19th century’s invention of psychological realism. But there is evidence that readers over the centuries have felt the parsha’s terror very keenly—so keenly that they have tried to wish it away.

For example: One of our sages maintains that God never ordered Abraham to kill Yitzhak. God said, bring him up as a sacrifice—and once you’ve brought him up, bring him back down. This is a wonderfully ingenious reading—but I feel it’s false. It turns the most dreadful of tests into nothing more than a riddle.

I also think there’s a false reassurance in the most famous of the rabbinic stories about the Akedah. Everyone knows this reading:
“Take your son,” God says—and Abraham replies, “I have two sons.”
Your only son—Each is the only son of his mother.
The son you love—I love them both.
Take Yitzhak.

Why do I say this is false reassurance? Because the midrash denies a loss that has already taken place. By the time of this test, Abraham had cast off his first-born son, Ishmael, and sent him into the desert. Could Abraham have been certain that Ishmael would survive? Of course not. Did Abraham later learn of Ishmael’s survival—did he hear from him again? There is nothing in the text to make us think so.

Just as the rabbis read between the lines of the Torah, I want to read between the lines of the midrash.

God said, “Take your son,” and Abraham, buying time, answered, “I have two sons.”
“Do you?” asked God. “Take your only son.”
Abraham, still buying time, replied, “Each is the only son of his mother.”
“I don’t see her around, either,” God said. “Take the son you love.”
“I love them both,” Abraham insisted.
And God said, “Then where is he, that other son you love? Take Isaac.”

After that, Abraham did not protest. Nor did he plead—and for that reason, tradition tells us, Abraham was found worthy to be the father of our people. And yet, I’m not reassured. Perhaps Abraham was so ready to sacrifice Yitzhak—so unnaturally ready—because he’d done something like this before. After he’d been responsible for the disinheritance, and expulsion, and all-too-likely extinction of Ishmael, what was left in his heart to stop him from sending Yitzhak, too, to die?

At this point, I could make a political comment. But I’m not entirely without tact—and so I will say only that we all have a tendency to wish away the parts of this story that are most disturbing to us. As I’ve noted, this wishing-away has been going on for centuries, with the rabbis inventing the most clever ways to let Abraham off the hook, and let God off as well.

They let God off because we are not supposed to question the Holy One. Granted, Abraham argued back, about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—but from that story, we may learn that God had refuted the argument in advance. The only conclusion to draw is that we should obey and be quiet, as Abraham learned to do; and yet, a voice of judgment keeps nagging. I confess I’m frightened of this God who can create life on Earth and then resolve to destroy it; who makes his original covenant only when some of the surviving flesh is burned for his pleasure; who goes on destroying whole populations, and who, after promising offspring to an old man, tells him to send his first-born into the wilderness, and then, after that, orders him to kill the remaining child, too. I would like to find some wordplay, some neatly moralized story, to explain why these actions of God aren’t what they seem. But I’m in a double bind. I can neither ignore my sense of dread—of outrage—nor can I pretend before God to have a right to these emotions.

So I come back to the doubleness of this parsha: its terror, when I consider individual moments or the experience of single characters; its reasurrance, when I consider the overall movement of these stories or the fate of the whole people. What I learn from this parsha is that the collectivity wins out, reassurance wins, even as we’re annihilated one by one.

You’re probably thinking, “Some reassurance. Some cheerful message for shabbat.” So, to show that it’s not as bad as it sounds, I will close with the words of a psalm, one that we all know very well: “Lo ha-metim y’hallelu Yah, v’lo kol yarde duma. Va’anachnu n’varech Yah, me-ata v’ad olam.” The dead will not praise God, nor will those who lie in the dust. But we will bless God, from now until the end of time. How is this possible, when all of us will die? There can be only one answer: “We” are whichever generation is alive at the moment. Let the dead lie silent, because the living will go on blessing God.

This is what we sing in Hallel—with thankfulness, with reassurance, with joy. May the living continue to sing it. May we rejoice, knowing they will.

copyright reserved by the author