As some of you know, my kippah is a permanent fixture on my head, and has been since my early 20s. I often get asked whether I experience any feedback for being so visibly Jewish. My answer is: yes. Occasionally, Christians come up to me and say “shalom.” I say “shalom” back.
Well, this week, I have a more interesting story to tell.
Last Saturday night, Laurence and I were on our way back from a friend’s birthday lip synch. (Yes, in my time off, I do competitively mime to Nicki Minaj wearing a space suit and kitten heels.)
We were heading into Vauxhall Station. A group of men in their early 20s were dancing around, holding hands, and reaching out their hands for others to join them.
It will probably not surprise you to hear that I joined in. The boys cheered.
Within moments of joining them, I realised I might have made a terrible mistake. The man whose hand I was holding was, in fact, wearing a Palestine football shirt. They were all speaking Arabic. A taller man noticed my kippah and said to the others “hu yehudi.” I know what this means in Arabic, because you say it the same way in Hebrew: he’s Jewish.
And I thought, well, it’s basically the same language, I’ll try talking with them in Hebrew. Friends, these gentlemen did not, in fact, speak Hebrew. Their English was pretty stilted too.
Right next to us, a fist fight broke out between two white guys.
We all fumbled awkwardly, and tried to communicate across a language barrier. The tension became palpable. It was just me and Laurence and a whole group of Palestinian men.
I asked: “where are you from?”
“We are from Gaza,” the one who had been holding my hand said. “Do you support the government?”
I said: “of course not.”
The man said: “Really?”
I said: “Yes.”
The men cheered, and resumed dancing. I got on my train back to Ditton.
There was no time to explain that the Israeli government wasn’t actually my government at all, but my answer would have been the same whichever government he was talking about.
I am under no illusion that this story could have ended differently. But, as it is, the story ended with dancing in the streets of London, and everybody walking away with their dignity intact.
Now, I may have been the first visibly Jewish person these men had met who was not wearing a military uniform. And perhaps now, with the freedom of London, they will get the chance to learn more about who Jews are.
And perhaps I will go away and actually do my Arabic homework so that I can have a better quality conversation. At least, in the future, I won’t default to Hebrew as a good enough alternative.
I think we tend to imagine that tolerance is the true harmony of everyone fully understanding each other; living side by side; eating in the same restaurants; celebrating and grieving together.
I still believe that true peace will come, when everyone has full equality, and nobody has any more need for conflict.
But, most of the time, life is not like that.
As long as there is inequality, those with less will want what those with more have; and those who have more power will exert it over those with less. Until we all have everything we need, there will be conflict for the power and possessions we lack.
Tolerance, in our society, is the decision to set grudges aside, to suspend prejudice, and to just let each other go on with life. It is the decision of the stronger to spare the weaker. It is a choice to ignore stock characters and old grievances for the sake of everyone getting on with their day.
It is not easy passivity, but a conscious choice to accept the world as it is. Sometimes, that is painful.
So it is with Joseph and his brothers.
Consider all the array of feelings Joseph must have held when he first saw his brothers. The last time he had encountered them, they had thrown him in a pit, then sold him at a cheap price to travelling merchants.
Do you think he was in the mood for forgiving?
And what about his brothers? They are now in abject poverty. They have travelled miles on foot to escape famine in their homeland. And they have to prostrate themselves and beg before a foreign king in a language they do not understand.
The powerful and the powerless have switched places; the resources are now all in Joseph’s hands.
Joseph doesn’t just shrug his shoulders and get over it. Instead, he decides to test his brothers and bring his entire estranged family to Egypt.
Joseph hides a silver cup in his brother Benjamin’s satchel and uses the supposed theft as a pretext to hold him hostage. Joseph announces to his family that he is going to keep their youngest brother as a slave, making them relive what they did to him.
At the moment when our parashah ends, we don’t actually know how the story is going to pan out. We, who have heard this story many times, are already aware that the brothers will repent and offer their lives for Benjamin’s. We know that Joseph will announce himself and forgive his siblings.
But, for this week, we are suspended in the tests of Joseph and his brothers.
The Joseph narrative is the longest part of the Book of Genesis, not least because of the extensive detail given to Jacob’s sons’ journey back and forth between the two countries, and the lengthy description of how Joseph examines his brothers’ hearts.
This story is, in fact, repeated almost exactly in the Quran. Surah Yusuf is a lengthy narrative in the formative text of Islam. Within the chapter itself, the Quran says that it is repeating the words of previous prophets and is confirming the prior revelation of the Torah.
But there is a key difference between the Torah’s version and the Quran’s. In the Islamic retelling, Benjamin is in on the ruse from the start. Joseph reveals himself to Benjamin before hiding the cup and tells him to go along with the ploy.
Perhaps the goal here is to make Joseph seem more righteous. That is, indeed, what many of our midrash do when they retell Torah narratives. They iron out biblical figures’ imperfections.
But, if you look at the texts of the stories side by side, the parallel verse in the Torah reveals something more interesting. In our recension, rather than revealing himself, Joseph runs off to his room and cries.
The Quran’s version, then, makes the story less painful. It glosses over how heart-wrenching and difficult this process is of forgiving and letting go.
There is a lesson here for us. We all want to jump ahead to the part of the story where everyone is friends again and loves each other. We all want to fast forward to the point in history where there is lasting peace and harmony.
But, the Torah tells us, you have to stay in the feelings. You have to live in the mess for a while.
As Jews in Britain, we are forever doing a delicate dance of interfaith relations, while plagued by trauma. As the whole world seems ever more oriented towards intolerance and tribalism, we still need to show up to shared spaces with our best faces and our best expectations of others. We need to set aside prejudices for the sake of a better society.
And that is hard. So don’t gloss over the tears. Don’t hide the pain away in another room. Let us be honest with ourselves and each other that the task of building a multicultural society is tough.
But, while we hold the challenge, remember that we do still know how this story ends. We know that we are heading towards an ultimate conclusion of liberty and equality. God has a plan for the world. And it will end with true peace.
One day, all people will embrace one another as members of the human family. One day, we will all weep together over the years wasted on war. One day, without fear, we will all dance unabashedly in the streets.
May that time come soon and last forever.
Amen.
Alexander Ivanov, The Silver Goblet is Found in Benjamin’s Sack
One of the loveliest parts of synagogue life, which many of you will have experienced here, is getting to teach our religion to visiting schools. It’s such a joy to pull out things we normally leave aside, and point to things we often take for granted.
By teaching others about our ritual objects, things that are familiar become foreign. We have to reconsider what they are, and why we have them.
Take, for example, the tallit. Of course, these prayer shawls have existed in some form since biblical times. But, showing them to non-Jewish children, we need to come up with an explanation for why we continue to use them here and now.
I tell the school kids: these four corners remind me that God is everywhere, and the knots on them tell me all of the good deeds I can do in my life.
I do, indeed, feel that way when I wrap myself in the tzitzit. I feel enveloped by God’s mantle. I see the strings and think of all the mitzvot- not, in the Orthodox sense of listing out food rules, but of all that God has asked me to do in this world.
It’s nice to have a visible reminder of God’s presence.
That’s just what Jacob gets in this week’s Torah portion. Jacob lies down while travelling on a certain mountain and has the profound dream of a ladder ascending to heaven, with angels going up and down.
In his dream, the Eternal One appears to promise Jacob many descendants, spreading out like dust across the desert, and that God will forever accompany Jacob on his travels.
When he awakes, Jacob exclaims: “Wow, God is in this place and I did not know it!”
How could Jacob not realise that God was on that mountain? Surely he already knows that God is everywhere?
Perhaps Jacob did not realise already that God is everywhere. For some commentators, this is the beginning of Jacob’s prophecy. Only now does he really understand who God is and that this God is with him.
There is a deeper meaning in the language, too. Before the revelation, God is called Elohim. For the ancients, Elohim was universal- the God that permeates all places and things.
Then, in the dream, God is announced by the ineffable Name, Hashem, which we often render as Adonai. This name of God, in Torah, is specific. It is the personal God, who communicates directly with human beings.
When Jacob awakes, he says: “Behold, Hashem is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Jacob knew that God in general was there, because God is generally everywhere, but only at this moment does Jacob realise that the personal God who cares about him is also present.
Now we can understand why God says to Jacob: “I will not leave you until I have done with you what I promised.” God is helping Jacob understand that he is never truly alone. Not only is the world full of God, but so is Jacob’s own life.
In fact, in the moment before Jacob falls asleep, a miracle happens that is so subtle it can’t be noticed until after he wakes up.
When Jacob lays down his head, the Torah says there are many stones in the place, and he takes one of them as a pillow. When he wakes up, there is only one under his head.
Our Talmud says that this is a divine act. According to Rabbi Yitzḥak, all the stones on the mountain argued with each other about who would lie under Jacob’s head. Unable to decide, they merged together into a single rock. That rock, in turn, became an altar to God.
This is a wonderful view of the world, where God is not only in all places and with human beings personally, but acts in every part of nature. Even stones are agents of miracles and servants of God.
If we take seriously this idea that God is everywhere and personally connected with all that exists, there are real consequences for our lives. It means that everything is sacred. It suggests that we need to treat this world as an arena for revealing divinity.
For Progressive Jews, this is one way we might think of commandments. Rather than just a list of dos and don’ts, they’re an attitude towards reality. They see everything as an opportunity to do good, and to make the world better. We are blessed with the chance to show how God is everywhere, including in our own actions.
The same section of the Talmud says that this is why God loves humanity so much. Angels can only praise God when they are told to. Rocks can only move by miracle. But we, endowed with freedom and reason, can perform miracles and make things sacred whenever we want.
That’s what I see when I look at the tzitzit of my tallit. That God is in every place and that every moment is a chance to do right.
You don’t need to wear a tallit to do that. This is my suggestion to you for this week. Try and shift, ever so slightly, how you see the world.
Look around, for a moment, and imagine that everything permeates God’s presence. See God in the bricks of your home and the slabs of the street. At some point this week, try to picture the space where you are as a massive canvas that you can paint with good deeds.
Let us all try to be like Jacob and say: “Wow, God was here, and I did not even know it.”
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
We must build a wall. You cannot trust the Moabites.
The Moabites are on the other side of the salty Dead Sea and the Jordan River. A river is not big enough to keep the Moabites away from our land. They will take everything we have if they get the chance.
The Moabites are dangerous and brutal. They will destroy you if they get the chance.
We must destroy the Moabites before they can destroy us. We must kill their kings. Their king Eglon is a murderous tyrant. You will never be safe as long as he reigns. You must kill him.
You must kill every Moabite that stands in your way. You must capture the Moabite city of Heshbon. We need it to keep the Moabites away from us.
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
They must never come near you.
You must never meet them.
Because, if you met the Moabites, you might see that they are not monsters. You might see that they are like you.
And then you would not be able to kill them.
And then you would ask why we are building walls.
And then you would ask who was building these walls.
So you must always abhor the Moabites. You must fear them and revile them.
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
It must be high enough to protect you from them. It must be high enough to protect you from yourselves. It must be high enough to protect you from peace.
You may not immediately notice it, but nestled in this week’s Torah portion is an early example of war propaganda. In the vulgar and violent story of Lot is an origin myth for the Israelites’ greatest enemy: the Moabites.
The scene begins as God destroys Sodom and Gamorrah, two cities so wicked and licentious that they have to be wiped out and turned into the Dead Sea.
Only Lot and his daughters escape from that awful place. They retreat into the mountains on the east of the Jordan. There, the two daughters get Lot drunk, seduce him, and use him to sire their children.
The oldest is called Moab. And to really drive the point home, the Torah adds explicitly: the father of the Moabites.
The women in this story are not even given names. They are just grotesque plot devices to tell us how awful the Moabites are.
Those people, Israel’s nearest neighbours to the east, are so wicked that they came from Sodom. Their ancestors are so twisted that they were born of incest, drunkenness, and assault. It is a story to inspire revulsion in its Israelite listeners.
This is part of a general campaign of literary warfare against the Moabites, continued throughout the Torah.
Isaiah promises that the Moabites will be trampled like straw in a dung pit. Ezekiel vows endless aggression and possession. Amos says the whole of Moab must be burned down. Zephaniah swears that Moab will end up just like Sodom, a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.
The war propaganda reflects real wars. The ancient Israelites did repeatedly wage war, conquer, and capture Moabites. They did kill their kings, and they did turn Moab into a vassal state.
Based on the Moabites’ texts, we can see that it also went the other way, and that Moab also captured, conquered and slaughtered Israel.
We do not know how many Israelites or Moabites died in these wars. We do not know how many people grieved their families and homes. All that remains is the propaganda of the competing tribes.
Today, it is hard to imagine why anyone would have hated the Moabites so much, or even that we would believe the hyped-up stories of how vulgar they were. With centuries of hindsight, we can see that they were probably very similar to the Israelites, but dragged into wars for the glory and material wealth of their kings.
Of course, there were dissenting voices at the time. The Book of Ruth can be read as a polemic about love between Israelites and Moabites. It is a beautifully humanising story where the central character, Ruth, is portrayed as a Moabite who is kind, loving, devoted to her family, and committed to Israelites.
As long as there has been war propaganda, there has been anti-war propaganda, and our Torah contains it all.
This Shabbat, we honour Remembrance Day. We think of all of those who died in wars past, and those who served their countries in military operations. This feels so close to our hearts, as we reflect on the great toll wars took on military personnel and their families, including many in our communities.
We remember the pain of those who have lived through and died in the awful wars that have passed.
This solemn day dates back to the armistice of the First World War, on November 11th 1918. The following year, England hosted France for a shared banquet as they recalled the ceasefire. From then on, it became an annual day of reflection on the horrors and sacrifices of war.
During the First World War itself, even as the conflict was ongoing, many challenged the war. The great British-Jewish soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, charged that the war had been whipped up by jingoistic propaganda.
In July 1917, Sassoon published “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which denounced the politicians who were waging and prolonging the war with no regard for its human impact.
Sassoon lambasted “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.”
It is true that people like me, who enjoy peace, cannot even contemplate the pain that people went through in fighting wars and enduring bombing.
Today, we honour them.
Honouring them does not mean parroting propaganda and whipping up war.
Quite on the contrary. It is the duty of every civilian to ensure as few people as possible ever have to fight in wars. It is our responsibility to minimise the number of people who suffer and die in armed conflicts. It is our task to pursue peace.
We, who will never know the sacrifices of the front line, must heed Sassoon’s call, and resist the drive to war.
So instead:
We must tear down every wall with the Moabites.
Yes, with the Moabites, and, yes, with the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans and the Iranians.
We must find commonalities and engage in shared struggles.
We must learn to trust our fellow human beings and distrust the propaganda of war.
We must cease all killing. The machinery of war has destroyed too much and taken too many lives. We must endeavour to put an end to violence and destruction.
We must learn to understand the people we are told are our enemies.
In Judaism, night comes before day. The day begins when the sun sets and the first stars appear in the sky.
This has been the way of the world since its mythic origins.
In the beginning, there was endless darkness. Then God said “let there be light.” And there was light.
And God separated the light from the darkness. The first distinction. And the darkness God called night, and the brightness God called day.
And there was evening, and there was morning. A first day.
Having created nights and days, God populated them with matter. At the end of each period of creation, there was evening, then there was morning. Each day.
During the sixth day, God created human beings and placed them in a garden. Then there was evening.
The first human beings had never seen an evening before. They did not know that the sun could set. They did not know the difference between night and day.
What must it have been like for the first sentient beings to realise who they were and who their Creator was, only to see the sun disappear? How frightened they must have been!
Perhaps they called out to God and asked for guidance. But that evening marked the beginning of the seventh day, and God was resting. God did not answer them.
Our Talmud teaches that when the first human beings saw their first nightfall, they fell into despair. Adam feared that the sun had disappeared as punishment for his sin. He worried that the world would now return to the endless darkness with which it began.
Eve cried. She fasted and prayed. Adam and Eve wrapped their arms around each other and held their bodies close as they prepared for the end.
Then the dawn broke.
And they realised: this is the way of the world.
The world began in autumn, at the festival of Rosh Hashanah.
When the first winter nights crept in, and they saw the length of days decreasing, they panicked once more. Now in exile from Eden, they had no way of knowing what would come next.
Again, they fasted, wept, and prayed.
Then the spring came, and brought with it longer days.
And they realised: this is the way of the world.
We begin with darkness. Light follows.
There is evening. Then the dawn comes.
There is winter. And it always becomes spring.
This is the way of the world.
We can observe this dialectic in almost all matters of life. Our suffering is followed by joy. Our struggles are replaced by triumphs.
Some days feel like endless nights, but the dawn is always waiting for those who are patient for it. So we hold each other close and wait for the sun to rise.
This is the way of the world.
These trends appear, too, in history. There will be periods of decline followed by ages of plenty. There will be economic busts, and there will be booms. There will be war, but peace will come.
This is the way of the world.
But human history is different from all other natural rules. The order of night and day and the structure of the seasons was predetermined before we arrived on this earth.
History, on the other hand, is made by human beings. History is the one area of life where we can, collectively, choose what happens. Our actions determine whether we live in the winter of war or bountiful springtime.
So, it is incumbent upon us not just to hold each other and wait for morning, but to drag the sun over the horizon and demand that day appears.
In 1969, “Shir LaShalom,” became the anthem of the Israeli peace movement. In the final stanza of the song, we sing out: “Do not say the day will come. Bring on the day.”
Just as people make the active decision to go to war, peace is also a choice. Those who want an end to war cannot just wait in the darkness.
We sang Shir LaShalom in this sanctuary on Simchat Torah. I felt, and I think many of you did too, truly jubilant at the news of ceasefire and hostage release. After two years, we could finally see a possible end to the suffering.
My jubilation was tinged with pain as I remembered the last time that Shir LaShalom was chanted throughout synagogues.
That was in 1995. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had shaken hands on the lawn of the White House. They had agreed to the Oslo Accords.
While already imperfect and tentative, the Oslo Accords of three decades ago were the last major effort at a comprehensive peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. They paved the way for mutual recognition and the possibility of two states.
High on the dream of peace, Rabin joined Peace Now protesters in Tel Aviv Square and sang along to Shir LaShalom. With the lyrics still in his breast pocket, Rabin headed to the car park. There, a far right fundamentalist waited for the Prime Minister, and shot him dead.
There is still a copy of Shir LaShalom, stained with Rabin’s blood. There are those words, covered in the blood of a man who tried to make peace: do not say the day will come, bring on the day.
Yes, we must indeed bring on the day. But there are some who want to return us to endless night.
An Israeli fanatic shot dead Rabin to stop his day from dawning.
When Hamas saw the prospect of the Oslo Accords creating two states, they launched suicide bombing attacks on public transport. They took control of Gaza and promised endless war.
The Israeli far right wrested control over the offices of government. They promised there would be no Palestinian state and that every effort to achieve one would be swiftly repressed.
It saddens me that, even in the brief interludes since Rabin’s assassination when Netanyahu’s party has not had control over the legislature, few Israeli politicians have attempted to break from their logic of violence and occupation as the only answer to the Palestinian national question.
Daybreak always comes, but there are those who prolong the darkness, and we have been living through a terribly long night. The call to bring on the day from earlier generations has been eclipsed by militarism and fear.
We have endless war. This is the way of the world.
But this is the way of the world as some have chosen to make it. And we can make the world another way.
On Monday, we saw the first thing in a long while that looked like a sun beam.
We celebrated the hostages coming home and an end to the bombing of Gaza. It was the first reminder we have had in a long time that peace is possible, and war is a choice.
We are able to bring on the day.
Now we must create even more sunshine.
But we have become so accustomed to darkness that the dawn may even be painful.
In daylight, we will have to look hard at the choices that made this war so prolonged and destructive. We will likely see that peace was possible much earlier and that more hostages might have come back alive sooner. We may ask searching questions about the morality of this war.
In the light of day, we will have to look hard at what Israel has become, and what the spiritual state of our Jewish institutions now is.
But we must bring on the day. We cannot return to the long-lasting night of war, murder, zealotry, and extremism. We cannot let anything that happened in the last two years ever happen again.
Throughout this dark night, our Progressive Jewish counterparts in the Israeli Reform Movement have been pushing hard for serious change.
They have been protesting outside Netanyahu’s house every Saturday evening. They have been joining Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank to protect them from settlers. They have been demanding a real overhaul of the deep, structural causes of this century-long conflict.
My month with Rabbis for Human Rights before I began here helped positively frame my rabbinate. Although the picture on the ground is bleak, it made me realise just how many people are desperately trying to create daylight in the darkest contexts.
I hope that we will not fall into complacency now because the hostages are home. The task of peace building is more pressing than ever.
I want us to draw ever closer to those who are defending human rights and trying to bring about a future based on dignity and equality. I hope that, next year, we can bring a full delegation of Progressive Jews to support the West Bank olive harvest. I hope this can be a moment where we truly embrace the cause of peace.
This is not the seventh evening of creation. It is not the time to rest. We cannot leave our colleagues alone in this struggle now.
This is the first dawn of a new morning.
It is an opportunity for real accountability. It is a chance for meaningful peace building. It is the first crack of sunshine, and we have to drag out every possible ray of light to join it.
Rosh Hashanah is a moment when all judgement is suspended. The scales are suspended, and the weights could fall either way.
At this moment, anything can happen. We reflect on how precarious life is, and how delicately all is held together.
In the light of Rosh Hashanah, our own lives come into focus. How fragile is our existence.
The rest of the year, we take for granted this delicate balance that allows us to go on living. Today, we notice how remarkable our lives are, and assess what we are doing with them.
Have we embraced life’s blessings and sought to make the most of our days? Have we multiplied joy and generosity in others? What were the moments we squandered or took for granted?
At Rosh Hashanah, we acknowledge our vulnerability. We listen for God’s voice within us. We hear the messages this day brings. God, in turn, hears us.
Then, we find a way to go on. We affirm our lives.
The stories of Rosh Hashanah point us to moments of precarity. We read of times when life almost did not come about, and of moments when life almost came to an end. Through these ancestral tales, we access our own vulnerability.
Hannah longs for a child to be born to her barren womb. She asks: “why do I exist?” Then, God hears her anguish, and she gives birth to a boy. His name is Samuel, meaning God hears.
Sarah laughs at the thought that she could conceive in old age, then God remembers her, hears her, and she has Isaac.
Isaac is destined to be Abraham’s heir, then Abraham takes him up to Mount Moriah to kill him.
When we picture the Binding of Isaac, we can clearly see Abraham’s raised hand – slaughtering knife outstretched to the sky – ready to murder his own son. We are struck by the moment when all hangs in the balance.
Finally, God speaks, and Isaac is to be killed no more.
In all these vignettes, we find ourselves caught in stories of people whose lives are racked with precarity, but who listen out for God’s voice, take away a message, and find a way to go on that affirms life.
Interwoven with this story of the main characters, our ancestors, is another story, of people living more marginal lives. The story of Hagar and Ishmael speaks even more explicitly to life’s precarity.
In Orthodox communities, where they observe the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the story of Hagar and Ishmael is usually read today. Here, in the Liberal lectionary, wherein we follow the Israelis and hold by one day chag, we are given the option of reading either Isaac’s or Ishmael’s story.
I have opted to read the story of Ishmael because I believe it speaks most clearly to the festival’s theme of life’s uncertainty. Everything about the lives of Hagar and Ishmael is left to the hands of those more powerful than themselves.
Hagar is called a handmaid – a word that glosses over the gross crime inherent in a purchased human being.
A handmaid had no property, no income, and no family to come and redeem her. Most handmaidens were separated from their own kin, and stripped of their original language.
Hagar’s name means “the foreigner.” The Torah calls her “the Egyptian.”
She was beholden to her mistress, Sarah. Hers is the most precarious position one could have in life.
A handmaid cost more than a male servant because the handmaid could produce the most valuable good: more slaves.
Unlike the other women in our readings, Hagar does not long for a child. She expresses no desire; she offers no consent. She is simply used as a vehicle so that Sarah can have a son.
Abraham will take her as a concubine. The child will be Sarah’s property and Abraham’s heir.
This is already a dangerous situation. If she does not give birth, Hagar fails to deliver on the terms of her purchase. If she does have a child, she could become a rival to her mistress.
That is precisely what happens.
Hagar becomes pregnant, and Sarah immediately flies into a jealous rage. Hagar runs away, but has nowhere to go. She can either risk the harsh desert as a single pregnant woman, or she can return to an abusive household.
For Hagar, everything hangs in the balance. Then, God hears her and intervenes. An angel tells her that God knows her suffering, but promises that her life will get better.
She will bear a son. He will be a highwayman, attacking everyone, and attacked by everyone. His name will be Ishmael, meaning “God has heard.”
As with all our protagonists in Rosh Hashanah stories, Hagar finds her life in the balance. She realises how precarious her existence is. Then, she listens for God. Hearing God, she finds a way to move forward.
So, Hagar returns. And her life hangs in the balance once more.
This is where the Rosh Hashanah reading begins.
Here, Sarah sees Ishmael playing and demands of Abraham “cast out that slave and her child, because that son-of-a-slave will not share in the inheritance of my son Isaac.”
Abraham followed Sarah’s words, and sent Hagar out into the desert with nothing more than some bread and a skin of water.
She wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheva until they had completely exhausted her water.
We are told that Hagar sat an arrow-shot away from Ishmael.
This language seems to make us consider Hagar’s own thoughts: in this moment, Hagar thinks: “maybe I could put the boy out of his misery.” But she cannot do it. She cries out “I do not want to see the child die” and bursts into tears.
Then God hears. God hears Ishmael’s voice crying out, and sends forth an angel from Heaven.
Every bit of hope was lost. Everything hung in the balance. But Hagar listened. And God listened. And they heard each other. And Hagar found a way to go on.
The angel says: “כִּי שָׁמַע אֱלֹהִים אֶל קוֹל הַנַּעַר בַּאֲשֶׁר הוּא שָׁם” – “for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.”
In the Talmud’s treatise on Rosh Hashanah, this is the hook our rabbis use to tell us about our own place before God.
The rabbis say this means that God hears Ishmael in the moment when he cries out.
To God, Ishmael’s past and future actions matter not.
God does not care that Ishmael comes from the lowest and most vulnerable place within Israelite society. God does not care about the prediction that Ishmael will go on to be a highwayman. All that matters is that Ishmael cries out at that moment.
This, says the Talmud, is how we should all see ourselves on Rosh Hashanah. Rabbi Yitzhak declares “every person is only judged according to their deeds at their moment of trial.”
We are only judged by our hearts in this moment of reflection.
We are not our past mistakes, nor our future errors. We are the people that God beholds today. We are the people who chose to turn up, on this Rosh Hashanah, who knew we wanted to engage with our own souls.
That is all that God sees.
This is a part of the Talmud’s more general argument about Rosh Hashanah, that it is a time when everything hangs in the balance.
Our rabbis teach that we should all imagine that the whole world is finely balanced between good and evil, and that it is our responsibility to tip the scales.
Moreover, say the rabbis, our own hearts are precariously weighted, with an even chance of falling to the side of good or evil. In this analysis, then, the fate of the whole world can rest on just how we direct our own hearts.
So, we need to take every opportunity to place a greater load on the scale of good.
The Talmud offers things we can do to make such a change: give to charity, call out in prayer, and change our behaviour. Any one of these actions can cause a shift in that delicate balance.
A small prayer, a slight modification to how we act, a donation to a righteous cause – any of these can transform everything.
We live in a time when all can feel uncertain. Life seems nerve-wracking. At times, it does indeed feel like the balance of all the scales in the world is tilting ever more toward evil.
The Talmud tells us that we still have some control. We can still be a force for good. We can still nudge the fine weightbridge an inch towards goodness.
The Torah gives us examples of people whose own lives hung in the balance. They listened for God, and God listened for them. And God answered “I have heard you where you are.”
So, if you feel like you are hanging in the balance, hang on in there.
In our Scriptures, the changes are often dramatic.
Avram is an idol worshipper who lives in Mesopotamia, then undergoes complete conversion to monotheism and sets out on foot to a new country. With that, he gets a new name: Abraham.
Sarai is barren then, miraculously, in her old age, conceives a son. God gives her a new name: Sarah.
Jacob is a lying trickster who wrestles with an angel in the wilderness. When his heart has truly changed, he gets a new name: Yisrael.
In fact, in each biblical story, a change of direction, outlook, and often name, are the key points of the narrative.
So, what about our Rosh Hashanah reading? Who is it that changes there?
In the Aqeidah, our Torah reading for the new year, Abraham is called upon to climb a mountain and sacrifice his son.
We know nothing about Sarah, who is largely kept out of the story. We don’t know anything of how Isaac feels about this, since he stops talking once he realises what his dad could do to him.
Abraham is remarkably unchanged. At the bottom of the mountain, he is willing to do whatever God says. At the top, God says Abraham is no longer required to sacrifice his son, and to sacrifice the ram instead. At the top of the mountain, Abraham still just does whatever God says.
But there is a character who really changes in this story: God.
God begins the narrative as zealous and demanding of human sacrifice. God ends the story compassionate and eager to enter into meaningful relationships. God begins by effectively threatening to blot out all of Abraham’s children, then ends by promising Abraham as many descendants as stars in the sky.
And, yes, God undergoes a change of name. Through the whole of the story, God is called Elohim, a name associated with strict justice and universal truth. At the very end, God is revealed by a new name – יהוה – Adonai, a name associated with the close personal relationship God has with every human being.
In this story, the character who undergoes the greatest change is God.
Even God, the Creator of the world, the Almighty and All-Powerful, can transform. The Holy One, who by nature is completely eternal, can shift from being strict and distant to close and loving.
So, if even God can change, why can’t you?
In our Talmud, the rabbis introduce us to the idea that we are supposed to imitate God.
Rabbi Hama baRabbi Hanina teaches: be like God. Just as God clothed Adam, you will care for the poor. Just as God visited Abraham when he was unwell, you will visit the sick in your community. Just as God consoled Isaac over the death of his father Abraham, you will comfort the mourners. Just as God buried Moses, you will inter the dead.
God shows us a model of how we ought to live. Like God, we are supposed to be compassionate, loving, kind, morally clear, and doing justice in the world.
But more than that. Like God, we are supposed to change.
Here, at Rosh Hashanah, we learn: just as God can change, so can we.
We are made in God’s image. At the start of each year, we read a story where our Creator transforms. So we know that we can change too.
We can face our fast-shifting world. We can rise to the challenge of our changing community. We can look inside ourselves and love our own souls a little more.
Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.
At home, my fiance paces back and forth, preparing for his exams in anaesthetics. In a week, he will be tested orally to see if he can become a consultant. He recites definitions of key medical terms, revises laws of physics, gives diagnoses of uncommon diseases.
One definition he has repeated so many times it is now imprinted in my mind too.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
At times, we have pondered over such terms together. On long walks, we have discussed medical ethics through Jewish lenses. We have debated whether and how modern medicine aligns with ancient wisdom.
Now is not the moment to challenge him on the medical definition of death. But the definition sticks with me, because this is an area where I do not think science and religion align.
While Laurence prepares for his exams, you will have to listen to my thoughts on what Judaism teaches about mortality.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
Is it? Is that what it means to die?
If it were, then would living simply be brain activity and breathing? Is that all we are?
Chayyei Sarah – the life of Sarah – is our portion. It opens with her death. By telling us about her life from her death, the Torah is telling us something about how life and death interact.
The parashah is a recounting of Sarah’s burial. It is a terse text, where the primary narrative concerns Abraham’s attempt to purchase a lot for internment.
So much is left unsaid. So many emotions are not expressed. In the silences and interstices, we are left to reconstruct our own imaginings of what Abraham was thinking. Let us try.
Abraham proceeded to cry and eulogise Sarah.
He held her hands, once so strong and firm. Those hands had kneaded bread for strangers at a moment’s notice. They had sewn garments for whole families. They had, at times, pointed accusations, separated children, raised objections… Strong hands. Determined hands. Strong, determined hands, that were now drained of all their vigour, and sat coldly in his own palms.
Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites.
Abraham sprang into action. Sarah had not died in the land of her own family in Egypt, nor of Abraham’s in Chaldea. They were in a strange place, far from their own homes, among Hittites in the hill-country of Canaan.
Abraham said: “Here I am, a stranger and a foreigner among you. Please sell me a piece of land so I can give my wife a proper burial.”
Sarah had left her father’s home in the palaces of Egypt, where she lived as a princess. She was an aristocrat in a great empire who gave it up to travel with a wandering man. Abraham claimed to have spoken with the One True God, and Sarah just followed him. She forsook luxury for a life on the road. Now, she lay dead on the road, and there would be no fine processions to pyramids to entomb her.
The Hittites replied to Abraham, “Listen, my lord, you are an honoured prince among us. Choose the finest of our tombs and bury her there. No one here will refuse to help you in this way.”
Sarah used to laugh with her whole belly. Her shoulders bounced up and down. She can find humour where nobody else could. Even when she struggled with infertility, she found ways of making jokes. Abraham would not hear her laugh again.
So Abraham bowed low before the Hittites and said, “Since you are willing to help me in this way, be so kind as to ask Ephron son of Zohar to let me buy his cave at Machpelah, down at the end of his field. I will pay the full price in the presence of witnesses, so I will have a permanent burial place for my family.”
Sarah had been so beautiful people tripped over themselves staring at her. On their wanders, every prince desired her. Sarah was as beautiful at 127 as she had been when they had first met. She was still just as honourable and God-fearing. Nobody would be as good and beautiful and true again.
Ephron was sitting there among the others, and he answered Abraham as the others listened, speaking publicly before all the Hittite elders of the town.
Sarah received no ennoblement or reward for marrying Abraham. Yet so much honour came to Abraham through her. She could see visions and speak with God.
“No, my lord,” he said to Abraham, “please listen to me. I will give you the field and the cave. Here in the presence of my people, I give it to you. Go and bury your dead.”
Abraham had bargained over everything. He had struck a deal with Avimelech to share water sources. He had even negotiated with God over the destruction of a city. This was a bargain he could not accept.
Abraham again bowed low before the citizens of the land, and he replied to Ephron as everyone listened.
“No, listen to me. I will buy it from you. Let me pay the full price for the field so I can bury my dead there.”
Abraham was ageing too. Who would bury him? He had cast out one son and tried to murder another.
Ephron answered Abraham, “My lord, please listen to me. The land is worth 400 pieces of silver, but what is that between friends?”
What is four hundred shekels between strangers? What is a price on the life of Sarah? What sort of burial could ever be enough for her?
Ephron said: “Go ahead and bury your dead.”
These are some words we may complete into the silences. They come from the other biblical stories and midrash, and they paint a fuller picture. In the spaces, we see that this is not a negotiation over a burial plot, but a negotiation over the nature of death.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
Is it? Is that what it means to die?
If it were, then would living simply be brain activity and breathing? Is that all we are?
Medically, scientifically… maybe.
Spiritually, Jewishly… no.
Death is as much a journey as life is.
For seven days, we eulogise, as the last imprint of a person leaves us. For thirty days, we mourn, as the shock and grief harrow us. For eleven months, we pray, as some part of the soul heads on its journey to Heaven.
Then, every year, we say the names of the dead, and some part of our loved ones returns to us. Their soul breaks through the gaps in Aramaic words and we feel them with us once more.
Thousands of years later, we still say Sarah’s name, and some part of her keeps living long after breath and consciousness.
We are more than what we exhale: we are the laughter and joy we bring to others. We are more than our own thoughts: we are the memories living on in others.
In memory, in prayer, in faith, we grasp something greater than the material world.
Trusting in You, Eternal God, we see life beyond death.
“How many more signs do you need that God is not there?”
This was the question one congregant asked last week when I went round for a cup of tea. In fact, a few of you have asked similar things recently.
None of you was asking out of arrogance or triviality, but expressing a real despair at the state of the world. The ongoing war, which has claimed far too many lives, is enough to incite a crisis of faith in even the most devout believers.
Why will God not just stop the war? It is a serious question, and one that deserves a serious answer.
How desperate are we all to see a ceasefire, to see Gaza rebuilt, to see the hostages returned home, to know that the Israelis will no longer hide in bomb shelters, to know that no more people will be rushed to hospitals, to see an end to all the violence and bloodshed?
And it goes deeper than that. How much do we all wish that none of this had ever happened; that there was no war for us to wish to end?
In our anguish at the cruelty, we cry out to the Heavens. There is no answer from On High, so we wonder if there is Anyone there listening at all.
I will not be so presumptuous as to imagine I have the answers. I do not know the nature of God and can give no convincing proof of how our Creator lives in this world. In fact, if I found anyone who thought they did, I would consider them a charlatan.
The great 15th Century Sephardi rabbi, Yosef Albo, said: “If I knew God, I would be God.” We are, all of us, animals scrambling in the dark, as we try to make sense of the mystery.
But we come to synagogue so that we can scramble in the dark together, feeling that if we unpick the mystery in community, we will get further, and develop better ideas. Allow me, then, to share some of my own thinking, so that we can be in that conversation together.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
In our Torah, there were times when God did indeed show signs of presence. In the early chapters of Genesis, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the cool of day. At the exodus from Egypt, God came with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
This is the kind of sign that we might want from God now, then.
At a hostel in Jerusalem, I met an evangelical Christian who was absolutely convinced that everything happening in the Middle East was already foretold by the Bible and that God was about to rain down hell on the Palestinians and then all the Jews would finally accept Jesus.
Suffice to say I do not think such a God would be worthy of worship.
And I highly doubt this is the kind of divine intervention any of us would embrace.
Is there an alternative way we could wish for a sign?
Some great indication that Someone greater than us is involved in the story and cares about human suffering. Perhaps just a gentle hand to reassure us everything will be OK.
Deep down, most of us know that no such sign will come.
God did, however, send another sign in the Torah. A sign, perhaps, not to look for signs. A sign that God was not going to get involved, no matter how desperate it all seemed.
The rainbow.
At the start of the story of Noah, the world was filled with violence. Everyone had turned to war – nation against nation – all against all. The entire planet was rife with destruction.
God slammed down on the reset button. God sent a flood so catastrophic that it killed everyone bar one family. The flood was like a thorough system cleanse, designed to strip the earth back to its original state and allow Noah to rebuild.
Then, as soon as the rains had stopped and the land had returned, God looked at the devastation, and swore: “never again.”
God promised Noah: “I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God hung a rainbow in the sky, and told Noah it was a symbol that there would be no more divine interventions:
“When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
The rainbow, then, is a sign that God is there, and a sign that God will not get involved. Even if humanity goes back to being as violent as it was in the Generation of the Flood, God is not going to step in and destroy as at the start.
If the rainbow is a sign that God will not come and strike people down when the world is in crisis, it is also a sign of the other half of the covenant. Human beings must now be God’s hands on earth. We have to be the ones to do what we wish God would.
For Jews in the rabbinic period, every rainbow was a reminder to them that God would not act, so they had to take the initiative. They would look up at the sky and say “blessed is God, who remembers the covenant.”
According to the Jerusalem Talmud, no rainbow was seen during the entire lifetime of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. He was so righteous and brought so many others to do good deeds that there was no need to be reminded any more of the covenant. Bar Yochai was one who acted so much like he was God’s actor on earth that even God did not need to send reminders.
The idea that human beings had to be God’s hands became even more important in the post-Holocaust world. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits escaped from Germany in 1939 and went on to become one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of the 20th Century. For him, a traditional religious Jew, grappling with the enormity of the Shoah, he had to find a way to deal with God’s seeming absence at Auschwitz.
So, Rabbi Berkovits said, the problem lay not with God’s inaction, but with humanity’s. In his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits wrote:
“Since history is man’s responsibility, one would, in fact, expect [God] to hide, to be silent, while man is going about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God’s convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”
What Berkovits is saying is that it might be in God’s nature to prevent catastrophe, but it would undermine human nature if God did. In order that people can realise our freedom and our full potential, God has to stand back.
It seems that, in almost every generation, Jews are asking why God does not intervene to stop violence.
In each generation, we find an answer: God does not intervene, because that’s our job.
It’s not that any of these classical sources doubt God’s existence or question God’s presence. They just don’t think it is God’s responsibility to act. It is ours.
There is no flood coming to wipe out war or lightning bolt coming from the sky to strike down the wrongdoers.
We began with a question.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.
How many more signs do you need that you must act?
God is not going to stop war. So we have to do our bit to bring it to an end.
Even in our small corner of the world, we have to do all we can to push for peace and justice.
So, on the days when you find yourself looking for the sign, you be the sign.
You need to be the sign to somebody else that there is hope in this world.
When they lived in Eden, Adam and Eve did not have to labour for their food. Yet, in the moment that they were expelled from paradise, God gave them stern instructions on what they would have to do.
God warned: “Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Where once they had a homeland, the original people were cast out into a state of permanent exile, to live in the world with all its struggles.
This fable, though mythic, tells us something true about how human beings came to have the life we do. While there was probably never really an original idyll where people lived without work, there was a moment, millennia ago, when humanity’s ancestors shifted how they lived.
For most of our history, we had wandered. All people were nomadic. They hunted and gathered, migrating between caves and carrying temporary shelters all over the neolithic continents.
Then, as the last Ice Age ended, around 11,000 years ago, people discovered that they could store seeds from one year to the next. They developed agricultural systems, with plots of land dedicated to growing crops. Having once roamed the earth, they could stay put in a single place, which would be their land.
Cain and Abel are archetypal characters who tell us about this great change. Abel was a nomad, who herded flocks and grazed them over the hills. His name means “breath” or “waif” – for, like a cloud that drifts across valleys, he wafted without leaving a trace. He was a symbol of the old way of constant movement.
Cain, his brother, had a name which meant “acquire” or “possess.” Just as God had warned his parents when they were cast out from Eden, he worked by the sweat of his brow. He laboured on the soil, where he sowed, grew, and harvested plants for food.
At the dawn of civilisation, these were the two types of people: those who cultivated the land in fixed places; and those who travelled with no fixed abode. Everything that was movable, like herds and clothes, was held by the nomads, the Abels. Everything immovable – like allotments and orchards – was owned by those who settled, the Cains.
Our Torah says that God favoured Abel over Cain, and it probably felt that way. While agriculture can keep people settled and build lasting cultures, it is unpredictable. One bad year of too much rain, or not enough, or bad seeds or infertile soil, can leave an entire community famished and ruined.
A pastoralist, on the other hand, has a tough but durable existence. The life of a shepherd means much moving, but that is part of what makes their life sustainable. Sheep can be moved to wherever water is healthy and available. A goat can graze on thistles and other crops that people find inedible.
So, yes, to the ancient mind, it may have seemed like God looked more kindly on the one who wandered than the one who farmed.
Cain killed Abel.
The one who tilled the land and made it his home sought to destroy that wandering waif. Perhaps, indeed, he did. Perhaps the founders of the earliest civilisations enforced their new way of life with violence and coercion.
But not successfully. As soon as Cain commits the first murder, God tells him what he will become. Cain cries out at his punishment: “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
For killing Abel, Cain would become Abel. Having been the acquirer, he would take his place as a nomad. Having been so sure in his farmland, Cain would return to the ancient ways of roaming.
God said to Cain: “Abel had no homeland. Now neither do you. Abel was forced to wander. Now you will wander too.”
Generations passed, but the draw of homeland was irresistible. In ancient Mesopotamia, Abraham was called “ha-ivri” – border-crosser; the one who passed between places.
He heard the voice call out: “Go, get going, to a land that I will show you,” and Abraham traversed to Canaan, to a new land where he hoped he would settle.
He took his family, and his possessions, his movable goods that had sustained him in all his wanderings, and went in search of home.
But, having reached the land that God would show him, he saw it and he left. He pitched his tent and built an altar, then carried on to Egypt. When he returned, he did so as a nomad, travelling with his flocks, threatened by the Canaanites and Perizites who had acquired the land, as Cain had once done.
Abraham sought a home, and found one, but it was never a permanent space. He had wandered to be in one place, but in that one place, he found he had to keep on wandering.
Abel, Cain, and Abraham all wandered. So did the Israelites in the desert. Deep in our ancient stories, there is an idea that, while a settled home may be desirable, migration is part of the human experience. We may dream of Edens, but life is unpredictable, and fortune may force us to move.
In Torah stories, we learn the survival of migrants, passed down from generations who knew what it meant to move with the seasons.
It is a deep knowledge, from before we were Israelites or even Jews, stretching back to our history as neanderthals.
Please do not imagine that I am romanticising exile. Travelling breeds resilience and creativity, but it is far from idyllic.
Instead, wandering is an inevitability.
In every community and in every family, if you go back far enough, you will find a traveller. In the stories of our Torah, you learn that it could be you.
Abel was a restless nomad, and we may wander too.
Shabbat shalom.
Cain and Abel, by Frank Hoesel
I learnt this Torah from Rabbi Joel Levy at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.
In 1922, archaeologists dug up a site in modern-day southern Iraq. There, they found incredible spans of gold and sophisticated armour, and Iron Age Sumerian artefacts, encased within stone walls. They dubbed this place “the Royal Cemetery of Ur,” an ancient Babylonian mausoleum.
On that site, they also discovered evidence of hundreds of human sacrifices. Among the human sacrifices, a considerable number were children.
Nearly all of the skeletons were killed to accompany an aristocrat or member of the royal family into the afterlife. Some had drunk poison. Some had been bashed over the head with blunt objects. After their death, many were exposed to mercury vapour, so that they would not decompose, but would remain in a lifelike posture, available for public display.
Excavations from the Royal Cemetery at Ur
This site dates to sometime around 2,500 BCE in the ancient city of Ur. According to our legends, another figure came from the ancient city of Ur sometime around 2,500 BCE.
His name was Abraham.
In the biblical narrative, Abraham wandered from Ur to ancient Canaan, where he began to worship the One God, and founded Judaism.
The world in which Abraham purportedly lived was rife with child sacrifice. Across the Ancient Near East, archaeologists have uncovered remains of children on slaughtering altars. They have found steles describing when and why they sacrificed children. They have found stories of child sacrifice from the Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Assyrian civilisations.
So problematic was child sacrifice in the ancient world that our Scripture repeatedly condemns it. The book of Leviticus warns: “Do not permit any of your children to be offered as a sacrifice to Molech, for you must not bring shame on the name of your God.” The prophet Jeremiah describes disparagingly how the Pagans “have built the high places to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal.” In the Book of Kings, King Josiah tears down the altars where people are sacrificing their children.
Abraham put a stop to the practice of child sacrifice. It seems to happen suddenly, and without warning, and with even less explanation. No reason is given why he abruptly ended all the cultural deference that had gone before and opposed an entrenched religious practice.
The question we now must ask is: why?
One reason that comes to mind is that it is so obviously immoral. Surely it should be self-evident that you don’t kill kids! But that wasn’t obvious to all the people around Abraham. And that wasn’t obvious to traditional commentators, either. In their world, the morally right thing was always to obey God.
Fresco of the Binding of Isaac at the 3rd Century Duro Europos Synagogue, Syria
A traditional reading says that Abraham stopped child sacrifice in obedience to God. In the story we read today, Abraham is called upon by God to go up on Mount Moriah and slay his son. Only at the summit, when he holds up his arm to murder Isaac, does God stop him, telling Abraham that he has proved his devotion to God by not withholding his son, and that he does not have to kill Isaac.
Yet there are several problems with this story. If we adhere to the traditional reading, God still wanted child sacrifice, and felt that doing so would prove Abraham’s devotion. In fact, nearly all traditionalist readers interpret it this way,saying that obedience before God should be a sacred virtue. A conservative reader of the Bible says that the moral of the story is that we should be subservient to God, and do what we are told.
God said not to perform child sacrifices, so we no longer do. That would mean, then, that if God had said child sacrifice was permitted, we would still be doing it.
In 2007, the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm offered a radical reinterpretation of the story of the binding of Isaac. The story, Dr Boehm argues, is not about Abraham’s fealty to God, but his disobedience. Dr Boehm shows how, reading against the grain of traditional interpretation, this is not a story where God changes tact and decides not to ask for child sacrifices anymore, but where Abraham rebels against authority and refuses to commit murder.
For Boehm, what was truly radical about the Binding of Isaac was that it set out a new set of values, completely at odds with those of the Ancient Near East. Where other cultures practised child sacrifice because it was part of their established culture, Abraham resisted and put life above law. Where others encouraged obedience to authority, so much that poor people could be killed in the palaces of Ur to serve their masters in the afterlife, Abraham made a virtue of rebellion. For our ancestor Abraham, refusing to follow orders, even God’s, was the true measure of faith. By not killing, even if God seemingly tells you to, you show where your values really lie.
This is not a story about obedience, but rebellion. And that message – of resistance against authority in defence of human life – has much to teach us today.
Boehm reconstructs what the archetypal story of child sacrifice was in the Ancient Near East. Across many cultures and time periods, there was a familiar refrain to how the story went. The community is faced with a crisis: some kind of famine, natural disaster, or war. The community realises that its gods are angry. To placate the gods, the community leader brings his most treasured child and sacrifices him on an altar following the traditional rites. Then, the gods are pleased and the disaster is averted.
We can see that the biblical narrative clearly subverts the storytelling tradition that was around it. In other cultures, the community leader really did sacrifice his special child, and that really did please their Pagan god. In our story, the community leader does not sacrifice his special child, and the national God proclaims no longer to desire human sacrifice. This is already then, a bold message to the rest of the world: you might sacrifice children, but we will not.
Boehm takes this a step further and looks at source criticism for the text. Most scholars of Scripture accept that Torah is the work of human hands over several centuries. One of the ways we try to work out who wrote which bits is by looking at what names for God they use. Whenever we see the name “Elohim” used for God, we tend to think this source is earlier. Whenever we see the name “YHVH” used for God, we tend to assume the source is a later edit by Temple priests.
The story of the binding of Isaac is odd because it uses the name “Elohim” almost the entire way through, until the very end, when the angel of God appears and tells Abraham not to kill Isaac. That means that most of the text is from the early tradition and only the very end part, where the angel of God tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, comes from the later priests.
So, Boehm asks, what was the earlier version of the text? If you take out the verses where God is YHVH and have only the version where God is Elohim, what story remains?
Well, in the version that we know, where both stories are combined, an angel of God calls out and tells Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac. That’s the bit where God is YHVH. If you take that out, and have only God as Elohim, Abraham makes the decision himself. No angel comes to tell him what to do. Next, if we cut out the parts where God is YHVH, there is no praise from the angel, telling Abraham he made the right choice. Instead, you get a story where Abraham deliberately disobeys his God because he loves the life of his son more.
Adi Nes, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 2004
The earliest version of the text, before the Torah was edited and a later gloss was added, is one in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac, goes all the way up Mount Moriah, and then refuses. Without prompt or praise from God, Abraham decides to sacrifice a ram instead of his son. In the earliest version of the biblical narrative, when source critics have stripped away priestly edits, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham rebels.
The earliest version, then, is an even more radical counter-narrative to the other stories of the Ancient Near East. Not only do we not sacrifice children. We also recognise that sometimes you have to say no to your god. In this version, rebellion is more important than obedience, especially when it comes to human life.
This isn’t just a modern Bible scholar being provocative and trying to sell books. In fact, Boehm shows, this was also the view of respected Torah scholars like Maimonides and ibn Caspi. These great mediaeval thinkers didn’t think of the Torah as having multiple authors, but they could see that multiple stories were going on in one narrative. One, they thought, was the simple tale of obedience, intended for the masses. But hiding between the lines was another one, for the truly enlightened, that tells the story of Abraham’s refusal.
Boehm terms this “a religious model of disobedience.” By the end of the book, you go away with the unshakable impression that Boehm is right. True faith, he says, is not always doing what you think God is telling you. Sometimes it is reaching deep within your own soul to find moral truth. Sometimes you really show your values by how you defy orders.
In his conclusion, Boehm takes aim at Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, an American religious leader, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Rabbi Riskin had said, in his analysis of the binding of Isaac, that Abraham was a model of faith by his willingness to kill his son. Riskin insisted that he was willing to sacrifice his own children in service of the state of Israel.
This, says Boehm, is precisely the opposite of the message of the binding of Isaac. The point was not to let your children die. The point was to bring a final end to child sacrifice. The point was not to submit to unjust authority, but to rebel in defence of life.
Rabbi Riskin does not realise it, but by offering child sacrifice, he is really advocating for the Pagan god. He is describing the explicitly forbidden ritual of allowing your children to die.
Abraham thoroughly opposed these false gods who demanded ritual murder. They were idols; and child sacrifice a monstrous practice that we were supposed to banish to the past. The very essence and origin of Jewish monotheism is its thorough rejection of killing children.
Boehm could not have known how pertinent his words would become. This year has been one of the worst that those of us connected to Israel can remember. Beginning on October 7th, with Hamas’s horrendous massacres and kidnappings, the last Jewish year has seen us rapt in a horrific and seemingly never-ending war.
This year, thousands of Israelis were killed. This is the first time in a generation that more Israeli youth have died in war than in car crashes. Reading through the list of names, it is remarkable how many of the soldiers were teenagers.
That is not to even mention the 40,000 Palestinians whom the IDF have killed. According to Netanyahu’s own statements, well over half were civilians. Around a third were children. As famine and food insecurity rises, the risk of deaths will only accelerate. It has been agonising to witness, and I cannot imagine how painful it has been to live through.
Yet, during my month in Jerusalem, I saw that the voice of Abraham has not been extinguished. There are few groups I hold in higher esteem than the Israeli peace movement. Against untold threats and coercion, in a society that can be intensely hostile to their message, they uphold Abraham’s injunction against killing.
One of the leaders of the cause against war was Rachel Goldberg-Polin. On October 7th, her 19-year-old son, Hersh, was kidnapped by Hamas. His arm was blown off and he was taken hostage in Gaza. From the very outset, Mrs. Golderg-Polin argued fervently for a ceasefire and a hostage deal that would bring her son home. She warned that the only way her son would come home alive would be as part of political negotiations.
At the end of August, as Israeli forces neared to capture Hersh as part of a military operation, Hamas shot her son, Hersh, in the head.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s refusal to give up hope, refusal to sacrifice her son, and steadfast insistence on peaceful alternatives is a true model of Abraham’s faith.
Israeli peace protestors
And it involves serious rebellion too. When I met with hostage families in Jerusalem, I was shocked to hear how, for protesting against the war to bring their families home, they had been beaten up by Ben Gvir’s police. I saw this with my own eyes when I marched alongside them. People shouted and jeered at them, and the police came at them with truncheons.
In July, when I went with Rabbis for Human Rights to defend a village in the West Bank against settler violence, we were joined in our car full of nerdy Talmud scholars by a surprising first-timer. A strapping 18-year-old got in to volunteer in supporting the Palestinian village. What was most remarkable was that he himself lived in a West Bank settlement.
He explained that he had refused to serve in the military. He did not know that others had done it before, or that there were organisations to support Israeli military refusers. Instead, he said, he thought to himself: “if I don’t go, they won’t kill me; if I do go, I might kill someone.” What could be a truer expression of Abraham’s message: no to death! No to death, no matter the cost.
He really had to rebel. For refusing to serve in the war, the conscientious objector I met spent seven months in jail. Still now, there are dozens of Israeli teenagers in prison because they would not support the war.
Throughout my time in Jerusalem, I attended every protest against the war and for hostage release that I could. One of the most profound groups I witnessed was the Women in White, a feminist anti-war group going back decades. One of these women, with grey hair and the look of a veteran campaigner, held a placard that read in Hebrew: “we do not have spare children for pointless wars.”
Is this not exactly what Abraham would say? We will not sacrifice our children on the altar of war!
Theirs is truly the voice of Abraham, the true voice of Judaism. It is the voice that opposes child sacrifice. Theirs is the voice that upholds the God who chooses life.
Talmud tells us that, when we blast the shofar one hundred times on Rosh Hashanah, we are repeating the one hundred wails of Sisera’s mother when she heard her son had died. Sisera was, in fact, an enemy of the Israelites, who waged war on Deborah’s armies, and was killed by the Jewish heroine, Yael. Still, at this holy time of year, we place the grief of Sisera’s mother at the forefront of our prayers.
We take the cry of every mother who has lost a child and we make it our cry.
Thousands of years after the Sumerian Empire had ceased existing, archaeologists dug up its remains, and saw a society that practised child sacrifice. From the very fact of how they carried out murder and permitted death, the excavators could tell a great deal about what kind of society this was. One that killed people to serve their wealthy and their gods.
One day, thousands of years from now, historians may look upon us too, and ask questions about what our society was like, and what we valued. May we take upon ourselves the mantle of Abraham.
May they look back and say that we chose to value life. May they look back and see that our people despised death and war. May they look back on us and see a society that practised faithful disobedience.
Sim Lev 