The People and the Book: Community development

The Torah highlights the world’s fundamental insecurity because its purpose is to offer a way to live in and respond to that kind of a world.

By JOSHUA GUTOFF
311_weird hieroglyphics (photo credit: Courtesy)
311_weird hieroglyphics
(photo credit: Courtesy)
THE PASSAGE IS ALWAYS SHOCKING. I READ IT IN synagogue not two months ago, at Rosh Hashana, and I will read it again this week, as I have read it or heard it every year since I cannot remember when:
“Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’And He said, ‘Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.’” (Genesis 22: 1-2 – All translations NJPS)
Yet, for me, for quite a while, this exceptional passage had lost that power to shock. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that for quite a while, I had lost my ability to be shocked by it. And I’ve spoken to others who’ve had the same experience. Perhaps we’re so used to the story that we become inured to its brutality or perhaps we’ve arrived at some kind of relationship with the Torah that precludes shock.
And so it may be a while before you’re lucky enough to forget to be insulted when a Christopher Hitchens or a Robert Crumb or a friend with no religious axe to grind says, “What kind of God is this?” and you allow yourself to look at the story again and find yourself wondering: Indeed, what kind of God is this?
Of course, if you’re a parent or if you’ve had a parent, and if you’ve thought about the relationship, you might find yourself wondering, “What kind of father is this?” Since I know more about fathers than I do about God, I want to see if I can make some sense out of this and so I pull back a little bit to get a sense of the context. There’s not much comfort here, though, because barely a chapter before this episode we see Abraham dealing with his other child:
“Early next morning Abraham took some bread and a skin of water, and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away.” (Genesis 21:14)
True, he’s not killing here; God has promised Abraham that Ishmael will survive and thrive. Yet it makes us think that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was not as much of an anomaly as we might have hoped. And that is disturbing.
So I continue to flip backwards, looking for an even broader context and I come to the story of Lot, Abraham’s nephew. Living with his family in the city of Sodom, Lot is visited by two strangers to whom he offers hospitality. The men of the town gather at the house and demand that Lot deliver the strangers to them to be raped. Lot refuses, but the way in which he refuses is misguided so that it undercuts any admiration we might feel for his courage:
“And [Lot] said, ‘I beg you, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do them as you please; but do not do anything to these men since they have come under the shelter of my roof.’” (Genesis 19:7-8)
The traditional mode of studying Torah is to atomize, focusing on individual stories, verses, words, so it is easy to forget that these three incidents are all part of the same history. They are even all part of the same portion. Read in one go, the message is inescapable: Fathers do not protect their children. Nor is that limited to one generation. Though fathers may come to the aid of others, even at some risk to themselves, throughout the book of Genesis, fathers abandon, curse and endanger their children or stand by helplessly while their offspring are killed or raped. Mothers are marginally better – if you are her blood offspring and if you’re the favored one. It is not until the book of Exodus that we see a truly attractive model of parental protection in the person of Yocheved, Moses’ mother.
This changes the question radically. I now have to wonder about the picture as a whole. Why would an author (or authors, or Author) present such a picture? Why don’t I have a Torah in which parents keep their children safe? I think the answer is that the world as a whole is not fundamentally safe. The Torah highlights the world’s fundamental insecurity because its purpose is to offer a way to live in and respond to that kind of a world.
Part of that way is through the religious experience: “Though my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will take me in.” (Psalms 27:10) But there’s another part of the response, which only comes to us when we are open to being shocked by the text. “How awful!” you might say.
“Children should be kept safe. People should be kept safe. They should have done better. We can do better.”
Yes, they should have. And yes, we will.
Rabbi Joshua Gutoff, a contributing editor at the Jerusalem Report, is a writer and teacher in New York.