Rosh Hashannah 5775 - Stephen Sotloff, the Binding of Isaac, The Last Thing and Adjust

This sermon is offered in the memory of Stephen Sotloff of blessed memory

Stephen Sotloff was murdered in the area under the control of IS, just a few weeks ago. You would have seen that photo, I’m sure, of a man dressed in orange, kneeling at the foot of a murderer. God help you if you saw the video and moving images, as well as still ones, are scorched on your mind.

Sotloff isn’t the only Westerner, and certainly not the only human whose life has been brutally cut short in the name of ISIS, but Stephen Sotloff was a Jew. You might have caught that in the news, and that truth scorched that image a little more deeply in my mind.

Stephen attended a Reform Temple pre-school in a suburb of Miami. You might have picked up a mention of the Synagogue’s Memorial Service attended by 700 friends family and local dignitaries.

You probably didn’t pick up anywhere that Stephen made Aliyah and studied at the IDC in Herzlia. That only made the Israeli papers after his death was confirmed.

Did anyone else pick up that Stephen Sotloff played rugby for a club in Ranaana?

I’ve been a little obsessed, trawling the internet in search of a possibility of shaking a particularly discomforting association from my mind.

Because the association that that photo triggers in my mind is a Second Day Rosh Hashanah association. I see a bound Isaac, kneeling at the foot of Abraham waiting for his fate; waiting for the stretched out knife. And I find nothing redemptive or comforting in that association. It’s not comforting to associate ISIS’s barbaric, pathetic justifications for murder with a story at the heart of my religious faith. It’s not comforting to associate the murderous ‘Jihadi John’ with Avraham Avinu. And there’s nothing comforting in the aftermath the encounter with an outstretched knife. In the Biblical narrative the next thing that happens is that Sara dies. The Rabbis suggest her heart couldn't cope with the possibility that her son could have been killed.

My heart breaks for Stephen’s parents visited by the greatest nightmare that could ever befall a family. The strength it must take, simply to put one foot in front of another, is a strength I cannot and never want to know.

So this is what I did with the images scorched in my mind, and the discomforting associations that disturb me so. I did some Chavruta. I picked up the phone to speak with the Rabbi of the Reform Temple in the suburb of Miami and asked how he was doing. Rabbi Terry Bookman was gracious and generous with his insights and time.

What had he shared with the family, I wanted to know, ‘was there any contextualisation, and framing of their suffering that had made a difference?’ ‘Not really,’ he told me, ‘I just tried to be present in their suffering and focus on the practical things.’

‘And what about you?’ I asked. Was there any moment of wisdom, any Torah verse or Rabbinic idea that allowed the Rabbi to be present in this most holy and most painful Rabbinic work?

‘Not really,’ he shared again, ‘I’m not that kind of a Rabbi. I just try and offer myself as a rock onto which their tears can fall.’

He shared that the family is starting to think about what to do honour Stephen’s memory. ‘My job is to wait and support them as they think that piece through.’ he added. ‘There’s no body of course.’

‘Of course’ said I.

I’m sure there was nothing higher or more effective Rabbi Bookman could possibly have done for this grieving family. No pre-prepared A-B-C of comforting the bereaved is going to be effective in a situation like this.

But I still hadn’t got anywhere with these scorching images and discomforting associations.

I asked Rabbi Bookman about Isaac and that image. Of course he knows this story and its commentaries as well as I. The Torah never tells us what Isaac is thinking, or even what he understands about what is happening but Rabbinic commentary guides us to understand Isaac accepting he knows that his life is to come to an end and accepting this as his fate. We are called to recognise, in Isaac’s ascent of the mountain together with his father, a heroic strength, an archetypal moment of Gevurah; self-discipline and acceptance. Over Rosh Hashanah and particularly next week, on Yom Kippur, we repeatedly lay claim to the spiritual inheritance of this act. ‘We aren’t much ourselves,’ we intone, ‘but look what Isaac was capable of! Give us a break O’ God. Forgive us in the merit of Yitzhak Avinu.’

It was this poise in the face of the outstretched knife – this powerful encapsulation of Gevurah – that struck me so in the context of that photo of Sotloff’s murder. I’ve never seen a man kneeling stand so tall, head unbowed, undefeated even as he was overpowered, exuding strength and a life-force even as his life was ended. Perhaps a strength that can only be known in face of horrors the like of which most of us, thank God, will never know.

The Talmud[1] tells the story of the death of Rabbi Akiva, murdered by the Romans. He is burnt alive in the sight of his students, and as he burns he smiles. His students cannot understand the smiles and enquire. The Rabbi, from the flames, responds, ‘all my life I wanted to know if I could truly love God, even as my life was coming to an end. And now I know.’ Even at the point of death, perhaps most especially at the point of death, perhaps only at the point where any kind of variance of a severe decree becomes impossible, there is a might that can be displayed; a life-force that can be brought to bear on a moment.

My mind went to Victor Frankl’s extraordinary memoir of his time in Auschwitz, Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankl knew, knew so clearly, the savagery humanity is capable of, but refused to despair. He had this to say of the experience of the death camps, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms” wrote Frankl, “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” And through holding onto this last thing Frankl found a way to survive not just physically, but existentially. He found a way to hold to the possibility of living a life of meaning, even in the midst of murder.

This is the correct meaning of a much misunderstood line at the heart of our Rosh Hashanah liturgy. I know I’ve made the point here before but the line ‘Teshuvah Tefillah UTzedakah Maavirin Et Roah HaGezeirah’ simply does not mean that changing our life for the better, praying and acting justly will change a severe decree. The Hebrew grammar simply cannot be translated to suggest this, frankly, untrue oversimplification. Rather the Hebrew suggests Teshuvah Tefillah UTzedakah take some of the pain away from the decree – whatever the decree might be.

If you are going to die, you are going to die, says this awesome prayer. But

Teshuvah - If you die having healed any fracture in the relationships between you and your fellow and you and God it will hurt less.

U’Tefillah - If you die having stood honestly, and as a Jew, before the One Who Spoke and Created the World, it will hurt less. I will have more to say about Tefillah – prayer - later.

U’Tzedakah – And if you die having performed acts of charity and justice, it will hurt less.

I don’t want to die either. I don’t want the slightly fanciful notion of a severe decree hurting less because I gave some Tzedakah. I want to live, long and healthy and happy.

But Mi Yichiyeh U’Mi Yamut – Who will live and who will die? I don’t get to control that.

The only control I have is how I respond, how I meet the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Whether I stand tall even as I am forced to kneel.

Whether I smile as I understand that, though tested, I can still hold true to the values I hold dear.

Whether I continue to treat myself and those around me as creations in the image of God even as I face barbarity and woe.

Stephen, like Isaac back in the mists of time, never lost the power over the last thing we have to control – the ability to decide to stand tall even in the most horrendous of circumstances, even here there is this last thing.

And for that inspiration, for that charge which I accept when facing the, frankly, paltry challenges that cause me moments of weakness, Stephen Sotloff, of blessed memory, thank you.

And one other thing.

U’Tefillah – And prayer is held to be one of those things that sweeten the decree, even as we experience it.

It seems that Stephen Sotloff prayed, even during the two years of captivity that preceded his murder. The Israeli newspaper Yedidot Aharanot interviewed someone who spent time with Steven during his initial captivity in Syria. “Stephen used to pray secretly in the direction of Jerusalem,” the friend said, “He would see in which direction (his Muslim captors) were praying and adjust the angle.”

I find that an extraordinary line – he would adjust the angle.

Forgive me please, I’m about to unleash two assumptions about how Stephen prayed, one small, one large. In truth I have no idea how Stephen prayed, but go with me.

My small assumption is that Stephen prayed to be released, to be reunited with his loved ones and to carry on with the pursuit of truth that had been the marker of his life till his capture. It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes. Surely we would all pray for redemption if, God forbid, it were us. But you don’t need to ‘adjust the angle’ to pray for a release from captivity. In fact if what you really want is release, the smart thing to do is - nothing out of line, play nice, keep your head down. If God’s minded to release you from captivity God will hear your prayer whether you face Mecca or Melbourne.

If you adjust the angle, and this is my bigger assumption, you are trying to do something else. If you adjust the angle you are trying to hold true to yourself, even as so much is stripped away. If you adjust the angle you are trying to remind yourself of how differently you stand before God when compared to the murderous kidnapping thugs surrounding you. If you adjust the angle you take all the fear you must, surely, have of being discovered to be a Jew, an Israeli even, and nonetheless hold tightly to these most basic parts of your ethnic and ethical identity. If you adjust the angle you do so because you care about Jewish values and the way we, as Jews, understand our part in the world and our responsibilities towards our fellows and our Creator.

In fact, in so many ways, adjusting the angle is the very heart of what it means to be a Jew. When God first called Abraham to ‘Go,’ the first thing Abraham does is cross the river, to stand on the side. Jews have adjusting the angle and standing on the other side of the river for over 3,000 years. It’s interesting to consider the power of adjusting the angle on this Second Day of Rosh Hashanah. It takes that extra bit of commitment to walk away from work, from school, from the life out there. It takes that extra twist to adjust the angle away. As we adjust, we become more particular, more clearly rooted in our Jewishness. And it’s only in this adjustment that we align ourselves to our true selves.

This is a message I hear from Stephen, never heed the call to fall in line with everyone else. Never think that falling in line with everyone else will save us. It wouldn’t have saved Stephen. Instead, it is through adjustment that his integrity, our integrity, can shine through. It’s through our willingness to be different, to align ourselves with our faith and peoplehood, that we come most close to being truly alive.

Adjust the angle.

Remember that ‘everything can be taken from a man but one thing – the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

And adjust the angle.

Do these insights alleviate my discomfort? No.

Do they bring Stephen back? Of course not.

Do they bring ISIS to their knees? Sadly no again.

But they might make me live better in my life, in Stephen’s memory and in his honour.

And if it might help you, then perhaps all is not lost.

There is always that one last thing, to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

And there is always to opportunity to adjust the angle, so we stand before God on our own terms.

L’Shannah Tovah

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[1] Talmud Yerushalmi Brachot 67b and parallels.

What Are We To Do With the Akedah?

Desire to not always be speaking about binding of Isaac but tale looms over the parasha. Difficult to avoid.

 

This week two men and a woman have been found guilty of causing the death of baby P; brutally beaten and attacked.

Mother in Manchester held under the Mental Health Act stands accused of killing her two sons.

Last week, right on Abbey Rd, walking back from shul, Police were clearing up after the shocking accidental death of Jack, a local boy, aged 6 killed in a car accident.

 

Accidents are tragc, but calculated infanticide is sometime else and yet, here, in our most glorious text we have an order for infanticide

So what on earth are we to do about the Akedah?

 

It is the nineteenth century Danish existentialist Kiekegaard who, I think, puts the case for finding a redemptive meaning in the Akedah most clearly.

For Kiekegaard, at the essence of the Akedah is the notion that we, as mere human beings, have to acknowledge the limits of our final grasp.

The whole point of the Akedah is to move beyond the realms of the finite, to move beyond the realm of human understanding.

As long as we use human, finite, reasoning, Kiekegaard states, we cannot fathom the Akedah. If we use human reasoning we have to charge Abraham with attempted murder.

 

We need recourse to faith as opening up a world that is beyond the powers of human reason, ‘no thought can master,’ says K.^[1] ‘how God could possibly pleased with the action of Abraham, ‘no thought can master,’ how this act of murder bequeaths to the Children of Israel an inexhaustible pool of kudos we can use to demand – zochreinu bzikaron tov – God’s mercy even today. We need instead faith since, says K. ‘faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.’

 

So Abraham, who is prepared to suspend his own morality, his own love of his child, his own dreams of a future for his seed and the nations promised to him, Abraham becomes a Knight of Faith, operating beyond the realms of human comprehension.

 

This is the theology of Job.^[2]

God tests Job and Job protests that by any kind of human, rational, comprehensible, logic he can’t deserve the suffering imposed upon him and God’s response is to blast away Job’s pitiful human attempts to understand that which is beyond human.

God’s answer to Job is basically this -

You, pathetic human, can’t even understand the power of a volcano, an earthquake or even a lion’s roar and you want to double-guess the infinite mysteries of the Divine

 

So if we are willing to accept that there is a space, a realm of sense beyond the edges of human understanding, we can accept the Akedah.

We can find a way to believe that out of something so seemingly horrific there can come something good and holy.

 

This, for Kiekegaard is black and white. Either^[3] Abraham is a murderer or we are confronted by a ‘paradox that is above meditation’ and since he is so loath to pass such a harsh judgement on a patriarch he, as a Christian, shares, he accepts the ‘paradox above meditation.’ It may be paradoxical to believe that religious triumph and glory come from death - from the command to kill, but that is precisely, says K. the meaning of faith.

And if we follow this it becomes possible to get something redemptive from the experience of the Akedah – the experience of a man commanded to kill his son. It is possible to say that the Akedah works, religiously, for us, as a tale, as liturgy.

 

Indeed, in many ways we desperately need this model to work. We, as Jews have a vast history of being taken, as the Psalmist says ‘like lambs to the slaughter.’^[4] We need to find something redemptive in this tale of a man who wished to bring death to Isaac – bearer of the Israelite faith, otherwise all the actual deaths could be left unredeemable.

 

In the eleventh century, at the height of Crusader attacks on the Jews of Germany we have an extraordinary contemporary record, the Chronicles of Shlomo bar Shimshon. He details not only how many Jews were killed horrifically at the hand of the Crusaders but also how some Jews, knowing the Crusaders were coming took their own life.

 

He claims,

‘And Zion’s precious sons, the people of Mainz, were put through the ten trials, exactly like father Abraham, they too offered up their sons, exactly as Abraham offered up his son Isaac. There were 1,100 victims in one day, every one of them like the Akedah of Isaac son of Abraham.’^[5]

 

Now I have no problem accepting the decisions of these victims of the crusades as holy, on hearing the advancing hooves of Christian soldiers, I don’t wish to double judge the impossible decisions they faced.

What however fascinates me is the way these poor, poor, souls grab tight to the story of the Akedah to give their seemingly pointless suffering some redemptive quality.

Rather than blame godless human thuggery for their demise, these victims of the Crusades attribute responsibility for their own deaths on God. It might seem almost blasphemous to attribute these human acts of savagery to God, but in the mind of the Mediaevals, because death in the name of the religion was redemptive in terms of the God-commanded sacrifice of Isaac, their own sacrifices – now deemed as equally God commanded, can also be redemptive.

 

There is, if we accept the Akeidah, a redemptive possibility in our own painful history of being slaughterwed.

Deeming the Akedah, despite all its problems, ultimately redemptive provides a sort of apologia for our suffering.

That may help too.

 

But it’s here that I start, again, to baulk.

The notion of finding something redemptive in the death, or near death, of some bearer of faith starts to ring bells that I don’t recognise as Jewish – Church bells.

Christians, of course, have far less problem in a divine command to slaughter a son, than Jews.

The death of a beloved son lies at the heart of Christian theology and, indeed, the Akedah features liberally in early Christian texts, texts like the Epistle of Barnabus.

Here, the sacrifice of Isaac, is read as a sort of redemptive pre-figuring of the death of Jesus.

And here it starts to be difficult to move beyond Kiekegaard’s own Christian faith, indeed at the end of the most important chapter of his major work on the Akedah, he embarks on a treatment of Miriam, the mother of Jesus who has to suppress her own feelings and ethics to see her son’s death.

And while its one thing for the Mediaeval Jews of Mainz, people who are under threat of massacre, to claim for a redemptive quality in death, in the Akeidah, for us, today, especially this week will not do.

 

Indeed the Jewish scholar of Jesus, Abraham Geiger, d. 1874, claimed that the whole notion of seeking redemption in the story of the Akeidah is of Christian origin. He called is ‘Akeidah Merit’ and found it inimical to Judaism.

 

And ultimately I am with Geiger.

I know it is too easy to attack the story of the Akeidah from a human perspective, (indeed the Rabbis put all the most incisive arguments against the acceptance of the Akeidah into the mouth of Satan – the conniving, niggardly, destructive spiritual force in all of us^[6], but I nonetheless make this claim.

 

If I study, and study and study this passage and cannot find anything redemptive in it, I have to, at a certain point, believe that my refusal to accept its redemptive quality, is God-given.

I simply cannot accept that the role of human, created in God’s image, is to kick back in rocking chair and say, ‘well we just cannot fathom God.’

 

I don’t expect to understand every element of God’s ineffable plan for the Universe, but there are some things I refuse to redeem; child sacrifice being one of them.

I know that sometimes bad things only appear bad at first, and subsequently reveal themselves as blessings in disguise, but I refuse to consider a father binding his child and coming within moments of killing him capable of being redeemed.

I refuse to believe that, as Jews, we are supposed to let go of our revulsion, our deep discomfort with the binding of Isaac, despite the best inducements of K., Rambam and Rabbis before and since.

 

As Rabbi Milton Steinberg wrote;^[7]

“From the Jewish viewpoint – and this is one of its highest dignities – the ethical is never suspended, not under any circumstances and not for anyone, not even for God. Especially not for God. Are not supreme Reality and supreme Goodness one and co-essential to the Divine nature? If so, every act wherein the Good is put aside is more than a breach of His will; it is in effect a denial of His existence.”^[i]

 

Jewish heroes are not supposed to submit to God’s demands if they appear unethical.

Indeed this is one of the greatest critiques of Noah.

God informs Noah that He (God) will destroy the world and the Rabbis are deeply disappointed that Noah did not oppose this divine dictate.

God informs Moses that He (God), so alarmed with the Golden Calf debacle, will wipe out the Children of Israel, and Moses successfully opposes this divine dictate. Indeed the Rabbinic re-imagining of the debate between Moses and God, up Sinai, is one of the Talmudic pieces that moves me most. I want to quote it in full.

 

And GOD said to me [Moses], ‘Go, Descend’ (Deut 9) What is meant by ‘Go, Descend.’ Rabbi Elazar said the Holy Blessed One said to him, ‘Moses, descend from your greatness. For everything I gave you was for the sake of Israel. And now Israel has sinned, what are you to me?’ Immediately Moses became powerless and he had no strength to speak.

But when God said, ‘Let Me alone and I will destroy them’ (Deut 9) Moses said “This thing depends on me,” and immediately he stood up and was seized with prayer and pleaded for mercy.

Mashal - To a king who was angry with his son and beat him severely. And [the King’s] beloved was sitting before him, scared to say a word. The king said, ‘Were it not for my beloved sitting before me I would kill you.’ [The beloved] said, “This thing depends on me.” Immediately he stood up and rescued him.

Rabbi Abbahu said: ‘Were this not a written verse, it would be impossible to say this. This is to teach that Moses seized the Holy Blessed One, like one who seizes their friend by their garment and said before God: Sovereign of the Universe, I will not let You go until You forgive and pardon them.

(Brachot 32a)

 

This is our task, to seize our friend – even God – by the tallit and not let go until they yield to the commands of a universal ethic.

Shabbat shalom

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^[1] P. 64

^[2] Let me put aside, just at this time, the role Satan plays in the Book of Job.

^[3] P. 77

^[4] Ps 44

^[5] Cited Spiegel p. 25.

^[6]

^[7] In his Anatomy of Faith  (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), pp. 130–52.

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^[i] Ibid., p. 147.