Ten Trials

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Rosh HaShanah 5772 — Thursday, September 29, 2011

How we tell the story of our lives both reflects and influences how we feel. Do we tell a story of triumph or of constant aggravation? Are the other players in our life’s story allies and supporters, or is everyone a secret enemy, betraying us or letting us down? How open are we to new learning? Do we feel that the best days of our lives have already passed or do we see challenges and successes still on the horizon?

To me, one of the most striking moments in the Bible is when Jacob looks back on his life, just after having been reunited with his son Joseph. Joseph has brought him down to Egypt in great luxury, and he is speaking with the Pharaoh, one of the most powerful men in the world at that time. In response to the Pharaoh’s question, “How old are you?”, Jacob says that he is 130 but then adds, “ Few and hard have been the years of my life.” (Genesis 47:8)

It is true that Jacob has experienced hardship, the loss of his young wife Rachel, separation from his beloved son Joseph, but what about his other children, his many grandchildren, his three wives who remain alive? How they must have felt like chopped liver, hearing him assess his life in that way. The Midrash imagines not only Jacob’s family feeling slighted by his words, but also God: “I saved him from Esau, from Laban, from Schechem,” God says. “I gave him back his beloved son Joseph, and yet he complains, at 130 years old, that his life was short and hard?”

The Bible doesn’t tell us explicitly how Abraham looked at his life, but the rabbis see Abraham’s life as ten tests, or trials, or perhaps more to our way of speaking today, ten crises or hurdles that he successfully overcame. This number ten is mentioned in Pirke Avot and in other places in the Talmud but without a listing of the actual events. This being Jewish tradition, of course there are different opinions about which of the events in Abraham’s life qualify to count among these important ten moments. Looking through the various lists of Rashi, Rambam, Rabbenu Yonah and Rabbi Obadiah of Bartinora, what seems to unite them is a focus not on physical hardship but on moments that were trying from an emotional or spiritual point of view. Often they were setbacks, times of disappointment and potential despair about Abraham’s ability to fulfill the promise of his life.

For example, God tells Abraham to leave his home and his family, and travel halfway across the known world to Canaan. That alone would seem to qualify as a trial but this is compounded by the fact that when Abraham gets to Canaan, he finds not sustenance but famine and is forced to leave Canaan immediately for Egypt.

We can relate. I think of members of our congregation who have uprooted their families to move here from across the country, only to have their company sold, or their job otherwise disappear.

Similarly Sarah’s abduction into the Pharaoh’s palace and then again by Abimelech, King of Gerar, are not only hardships but also seem a slap in the face to Abraham’s hopes that they would have a child together. When God makes a grand promise to Abraham, that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands of the sea, the joy is dampened by God also sharing the vision that Abraham’s descendents would be slaves in a land not their own for 400 years.

Even when Abraham seems to have won his argument with God, negotiating with God not to destroy the cities if he finds within ten righteous, the smoke and ash rising up from Sodom and Gemorrah, must have made this seem a hollow victory.

The final trial, or crisis, is traditionally understood of course to be the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, which we heard so dramatically this morning. This trial has been understood in many different ways, and at different times in our lives different interpretations will seem to speak to us. Over the years, reading the scholarly literature, particularly Jon Levenson’s, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son I have become more and more convinced, that for many generations, the people who heard this story viewed God’s request that Abraham sacrifice his first born, as a divine demand within the realm of expectation. We know it was what King Mesha of Moab did when his kingdom was threatened, mentioned right in the book of Kings, and that King Ahaz of Israel, during the period of the Divided Kingdom, “consigned his son to the fire, in the abhorrent fashion of the nations.“ The book of Judges, doesn’t seem to feel anything should be done to prevent Jepthah from fulfilling his vow and sacrificing his lovely daughter. Sacrifice of the beloved son, was a custom that continued through the early years of the Common Era, and a trophe that has great symbolic power even in modern western society. There are 2.1 Billion Christians in the world,

1/3 of the people on this globe, And they find great inspiration from a story of sacrifice that consummates the trial that Abraham endured. (In fact in earlier generations the Scripture reading for the church on Easter, was this passage.)

This background makes the climax of the story to me even more dramatic. Abraham takes his son Isaac up the mountain, and places him on the altar. The knife is in his hand, when the angel calls out. For me this is the test. Will Abraham hear the angel Will he heed?

If we read the Bible in its ancient context, we can imagine what Abraham had to overcome at that moment. First of all he had to ignore centuries, even millennia, of expectation that human sacrifice was the greatest gift. He had to defy the accepted wisdom of his time. We moderns are shocked at God’s request, but we have to remember that for Abraham as for the original intended audience of this story, this was business as usual. The shock was hearing the angel call out, Don’t. That is when it becomes a profound test.

The rabbis recognized this as a test and point out that the angel has to call our twice, as if perhaps Abraham, might not hear the first time.

Hearing is much more than the passive registration of acoustic energy by our auditory nerve. Modern psychologist testify that what we actually hear conforms to what we expect to hear and that it is unlikely for us to really attend to that which disagrees with what we feel we already know. So we have to wonder, would Abraham believe and process what the angel is saying?

Second, in obeying the angel, Abraham had to backtrack emotionally over the trail he had just travelled, and step down. If Abraham had misgivings at the beginning of his journey, he has spent three days and nights convincing himself that he made the right decision. This is why contemporary psychologist Barry Schwartz, says that contrary to what we might think, the worst person to ask for advice about buying a car is someone who just bought one. All that person will be able to remember of their research are all the bits of information that support his or her choice. Would Abraham, in one instant, be able to reverse himself? Just as there was tremendous tension waiting to see if the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba,we wait in tension to see if Abraham will remove the knife. The Midrash even puts these words into Abraham’s mouth: I have brought him up the mountain,shouldn’t I at least make a little cut?

In a sense it’s like the old Yiddish joke, about Haim Yankel who owed Herschel 10 kopecks. Herschel goes on and on about how terrible a person Haim Yankel is not to pay his debts. Haim Yankel hears about this and finally raises the money to pay back his friend. When he comes to make the payment, Herschel says, don’t bother, for 10 kopecks, who wants to go through all the bother of having to change my mind about you.

Can we be like Abraham?

Can we continue facing challenges and overcoming them throughout our lives?

Can we be open enough to hear what contradicts what we are sure we already know?

And having faced a great crisis, can we continue to find life and meaning on the other side?

These are issues for us whatever our ages.

I know a young man who is sure that the high point of his life is already past. Successful in sports and social life, he is sure that his college years were the best years of his life. How wonderful that he enjoyed his college years. And it is true that he happened to come out of college into a less than inspiring situation with regard to jobs and his economic future, but how sad not to have the hope that life will continue to bring him even greater satisfactions.

Even if there are hardships in our life, as those Jacob faced, we don’t want to end our lives with a summary that expresses so little appreciation of the potential that did exist for good and happiness, even if accompanied also by hardships.

The irony is that for all his complaining Jacob achieved everything to which he aspired. He received both the birthright and the blessing, married Rachel and became rich in sons and herds. And Abraham’s life was one thing after another. But in seeing that as how life was, rather than some special hardship, Abraham was able to bear up under a series of very serious challenges.

Abraham’s tenth challenge in accepting the message of the angel, even though it ran counter to what he had been taught to believe, may be a challenge for us as individuals and for our congregation as well.

For us as individuals, because it is hard to accept or even to read in the newspaper or hear on tv ideas that challenge us, and for us as a congregation, because we are no longer a start up operation.

For years at Shir Hadash we have prided ourselves on not being the place where people say, “but we’ve always done it this way.” But with 30+ years of experience as a congregation it is hard not to be convinced that we know what we are doing and therefore not ready to hear those making other suggestions. That has been one of the challenges we have tried to address within our long range planning process. It is the reason why we have done so many interviews with people who are not in the core of our congregation’s leadership and why each person’s response to the long range planning survey is so important to us.

An angel called to Abraham with the radical new idea that God was not interested in the sacrifice of children. In later generations, angels, malachim, were understood not necessarily to be supernatural beings, but rather any messenger, (which is what malach means literally) who was carrying a message of importance. When the hidden malachim, messengers, in our community, who might be any one of you, call to us with a radically different idea for our congregation, we want to be able to hear. Without hearing new voices, we can’t really be open to new possibilities. I hope that our welcome both of new members and of new leadership, which may come from previously less active longtime members, will indicate that we are still able to hear the call which disagrees with our pre-set convictions.

Meir Shalev, a contemporary Israeli novelist, whose book A Pigeon and A Boy, our book group enjoyed so much last year, has written a new book about the Bible, called Beginnings. A secular Jew, he often reads the text in ways different from the traditional commentators.

Shalev finds an 11th trial in Abraham’s life, the challenge of figuring out what to do after Isaac has grown up and Sarah has passed away. At that point in his life, Abraham’s major vocation is also complete, in that God doesn’t talk to him any longer. After the binding of Isaac, the Bible does not record any further calls of God to Abraham.

What does Abraham do with this final chapter of his life? He helps Isaac find an appropriate helpmeet- actually the happiest of the marriages of our patriarchs, and then he himself remarries. He lives a simpler but still rewarding life, no longer carrying the weight of the entire Jewish people on his shoulders, and he dies, as the Bible says, old and contented.

He has faced a major crisis, following which his life changed significantly, even painfully. The midrash says that the Akedah caused Sarah’s death and alienated Isaac. Still he found meaning in a new chapter of his life with different goals and aspirations.

To me the Book of Life, is the book of our life, the book we write with our deeds and aspirations.

We pray that it will have many chapters.

May we find the wisdom to respond to the challenges of each chapter, and not prematurely decide on where the high point of our life will be. May we remain open to the new voices that contradict what we think we know.

And may we find new satisfactions even after what others consider the work of our lives, is complete, even after the crises that transform our life are past.