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This morning marks the fortieth time it has been my privilege to officiate at High Holy Day services here at Temple Israel. In all those years, I don't think I have ever given a really satisfying sermon based on the story we read from the Torah today and every year on Rosh HaShanah, the story of God commanding Abraham to offer up his son Isaac as a sacrifice. It is a troubling story. It has always troubled me, as I would hope it has troubled you. After many years of frustration, a child is born to Abraham and Sarah. They are overjoyed, not only for their personal fulfillment but because it assures them that their distinctive way of life will be continued beyond their time. Then as the child begins to grow up, God commands Abraham to take his son up to the mountaintop and offer him as a sacrifice, as apparently many religions of that time required of their believers. Abraham is ready to do God's bidding, but at the last moment, God intervenes and tells him he doesn't have to do it after all. A ram is substituted on the altar, and father and son go home together.
I have never been comfortable with that story. I don't know who bothers me more, God for making that demand, toying with the emotions of His most devoted follower, or Abraham for so readily agreeing to go along with God's demand. It's hard to think well of either of them. As I studied the commentaries and explanations scholars and apologists have given, I was horrified by what it drove thoughtful religious people to say, justifying what God did, praising Abraham for his obedience, warning us never to question God, urging us to suspend our sense of the ethical in the face of God's demands.
There was a movie some years ago called "The Immigrants," about a farming community in Sweden whose inhabitants came to America together and settled in the Upper Midwest. One of the immigrants was the pastor of their church. In the course of their crossing the Atlantic, the pastor's child becomes ill and dies. They have a funeral service on board ship before they bury him at sea. In the course of his eulogy, the pastor says, "God commanded us not to worship idols. I turned my son into an idol. I loved him more than I loved God, and so God has taken him from me to remove the source of my sin." And I remember sitting there in the theatre and saying to myself, "That's sick. Why would anyone in his right mind worship a God like that? Why would anyone belong to a religion like that?"
So there I was, year after year confronted by this baffling story and totally unable to make sense of it. Then one day this past year, I read an essay that pointed out a detail I had missed in all the dozens of times I had read the story. Some of you may remember that, a couple of years ago, our Sisterhood invited a speaker from Brandeis University, Professor Marsha Mirkin, to be our guest speaker for Sisterhood Shabbat. She shared with me a manuscript she was working on that ultimately became a book called The Women Who Danced by the Sea. In it, she has a chapter on the Abraham-and-Isaac story in which she points out that, as the father and son are walking up the mountain, the presumption is that, when they get to the top, they will sacrifice a lamb. That's what people in those days generally did. Isaac says to his father, HINEH HA=ESH V'HA=ETZIM V'AYEH HA=SEH L'OLAH, We have the wood, we have the firestarter, but where is the lamb we're going to sacrifice? Abraham answers him, ELOHIM YIR'EH LO HA=SEH, B'NI, God will provide the lamb, my son. At that point Isaac begins to intuit that he is going to be the sacrificial lamb.
But then, at the climactic moment of the story - and this is the detail I kept missing all those years - God doesn't provide a lamb. God provides a full-grown sheep. V'HINEH AYIL ACHAR NE=EHAZ BIS'VACH. There was a ram caught in the thicket. What is a ram? A ram is a lamb's father.
Now, if the lamb would have represented a substitute for Isaac being sacrificed, what does the ram, the full-grown adult sheep, represent? It represents Abraham sacrificing a part of himself instead of sacrificing his son. And what part of himself? I would like to think that he is asked to give up his understanding of religion as unquestioning obedience.
I picture God saying to him, "Abraham, what on earth did you think you were doing? How could you possibly have believed that killing your child was the will of God? Did it never occur to you that I stand for life and not for death, for kindness and not cruelty? Have you completely forgotten that I gave you a conscience, that I planted in you the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, between good and bad, between that which a person should do and that which a person should never do? Have you forgotten that you are a descendant of Adam and Eve who ate the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and learned in a way that no animal could understand that some things are not to be done? You were about to kill the child and blame Me for it, weren't you?"
Why are we so eager to define piety as unquestioning obedience to what represents itself as the word of God? Shouldn't we, of all people, have learned by now that "I was only following orders" is not exactly the hallmark of a religious person, a person to be admired? Why do we continue to defend that mentality?
For one thing, in a confusing world like the world we live in, there is something seductive about having someone tell you what to do. I think that is one of the reasons behind the unanticipated resurgence of fundamentalism across so many societies today. As life becomes more and more complicated, as we are confronted with issues about life and death, war and peace, human cloning, issues of business ethics and sexual behavior, we would love to have someone tell us what to do and think, and spare us the discomfort of having to decide.
Early in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Doestoevsky gives us the parable of the Grand Inquisitor. He imagines Jesus coming back to earth in 15th Century Spain at the height of the Inquisition. He begins working miracles, reviving the dead, opening the eyes of the blind. Adoring crowds recognize him and gather around him. At that point, the Cardinal of Seville, the Grand Inquisitor, has him arrested and tells him that the next day, he will be burned at the stake as a heretic. Why?, the cardinal explains. Because he is offering the people freedom and people don't really want freedom. They only think they do, but in fact they can't handle freedom. What they really want is authority. They want certainty, not the painful process of making difficult choices and wondering if they have done the right thing. We have spent 1500 years, the cardinal tells Jesus, teaching people that religion means letting us tell them what they may or may not do, and we're not going to let you come and mess that up.
I can believe that a lot of people find making moral choices an intimidating process. But I also believe that God wants us to grow up and take on that burden. There is no going back to the Garden of Eden, before we ate the fruit and developed a conscience. There is no going back to the days of childhood, before we learned about right and wrong, back when the only way to be "good" was to be obedient. God has slammed that gate shut behind us.
A second reason for rooting one's life in a posture of unquestioning obedience is that it lets you off the hook. Nothing you do wrong is your fault. You were only following orders. If we do something because God commanded us to, then nobody can blame us. They can only blame God. In his classic work Varieties of the Religious Experience, William James cites a 15th Century Spanish monk who writes in his journal,
Excuse me for thinking that that is not an impressive example of mature religion. That reduces us to the moral level of children and pets, for whom "being good" means being obedient, doing what you are told. I think that for a great many people, there is a longing to go back to being a child again, not being held responsible for what you do. But it seems to me that that is the opposite of authentic religion. In my understanding of religion, responsibility is one of the hallmarks of a human being. That is why Judaism invented the Bar Mitzvah, to say to young people as they come of age, "You're not a child any more. It's time for you to take responsibility for what you do." And that is why I admired the late Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter who spent the last fifty years tracking down elderly Nazis, not because he thirsted for revenge but because he paid them the compliment of seeing even Nazis as human beings, and as human beings being responsible for what they did.
When God tells Abraham to substitute a sheep on the altar, I would like to think that that was God's way of saying to him, "Abraham, don't be a sheep. Don't define piety as simply following. That's what you are up here to sacrifice. I summoned you in the beginning because I saw you as someone who was willing to say No to things that were asked of you that you thought were wrong. Don't stop doing that just because you've become a follower of Mine"
I suspect many of you can see where this sermon is heading. We are living at a time when terrible things are being done and justified in the name of religion. They are done by Muslims on Israeli school buses and British subways. They are done by Christians at family planning clinics. They are done by Jews in disputes about the future borders of Israel. It's not the first time in human history, but it's the first time in recent history and that is one reason why we find it horrifying. It's as if the Middle Ages, the religious wars, the Inquisition were returning. You hear a lot of people saying that religion is the problem, that too many people are drunk on religion. Religion, they claim, gives too many people a sense of certainty, the confidence that they are right and everyone else is wrong, that they are God's agents and those who disagree with them are God's enemies.
For Ivan Karamazov in the Dostoevsky novel, organized religion is the problem. It represents the disastrous conjunction of people's need to be told what to do and some leaders' thirst for power, the power to tell others what to do. Permit me to disagree. I think the problem is not too much religion but not enough religion, not enough of the kind of religion that was revealed to Abraham on Mt. Moriah, the kind of religion that is grounded in God's having given us a conscience to know the difference between right and wrong and God's wanting us to grow up and use that conscience, the kind of religion that would say to suicide bombers and abortion clinic bombers as I would like to think God said to Abraham on Mt. Moriah, "Where did you ever get the idea that killing people was the will of God?"
Now when I ask rhetorically "where did you ever get the idea that killing people was the will of God?" I realize that some people could say to me, "I got it from the Bible. I got it from all those places where God mandates the killing of Midianites and Amalekites, all those passages in which we are commanded to kill people for violating the Sabbath or showing disrespect to their parents. I find a lot of that in the Torah, but I don't find anywhere in the Torah where it says that if you don't like this commandment, you don't have to do it."
As Jews who revere the Torah as the Word of God, how do we respond to that? How do we relate to passages in the Torah that offend our conscience, whether it is about killing Canaanite women and children and destroying their religious sites, or about condemning gay love or limiting the role of women in society? I remember my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel once citing the verse from the Torah, "These are the laws and commandments which you shall do, V'CHAY BAHEM and live by them," and interpreting those last words, V'CHAY BAHEM to mean "and live with them." He asked "what if the Torah summons us to do something that we can't live with, something our consciences cannot abide?" Is it possible for human beings to be more moral than God? Is it conceivable for us to say No to the word of God on moral grounds and still be loyal Jews?
Let me suggest that when we are bothered by what we find in the Torah or elsewhere in Judaism, it is not a matter of our passing judgment on God's word. It is not a matter of our judging the Torah by the moral standards of the 21st Century and finding it inadequate. What we are doing at that moment is responding to one passage in the Torah with a conscience that has been formed by the Torah as a whole. We are calling the Torah to witness against itself, citing the loftiest passages of the Torah to supersede some of its earlier and less impressive verses.
There are places in the Torah that reflect the limited scientific and historic knowledge of its time, but the Torah as a whole, Judaism as a whole, is marked by an unflinching commitment to Truth. We don't have to be afraid of what astronomers learned about the relation of the earth and the sun, by what Darwin learned about the evolution of species or what Freud learned about the darkest recesses of the human soul. If it's true, there is room for it in our understanding of Torah. Emet, Truth is one of the names of God. HaRahaman, the Compassionate One, is one of the names of God. The same Torah that on one page seeks to exclude people - women, gays, gentiles, the physically handicapped - is the same Torah that on page after page speaks so eloquently about the innate dignity of each and every human being.
A colleague of mine who is a member of the committee charged with coming up with a Conservative policy on the question of ordaining gay men and women as rabbis told me that one of the more traditional members of the committee said to him, "My heart goes out to those young men and women. I respect the legitimacy and the honesty of their feelings. I have no doubt that they would be fine rabbis. But what can I do when the Torah tells me that they are sinners?" Well, maybe what he can do is to ask himself, as Abraham had to ask himself, which is the authentic voice of God, the voice of compassion or the voice of exclusion?
My friends, the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac begins with the words, VAY'HI ACHAR HAD'VARIM HA-ELEH V'HA-ELOHIM NISSA ET AVRAHAM, It happened at that time that God tested Abraham. I don't believe that the test was to see if Abraham would obey without question, without hesitation, no matter how morally outrageous the demand was. I believe the test was to see whether Abraham's conscience had matured to the point where it could distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic voice of God. Which voice, the voice that said Kill or the voice that said Stop and Don't Do It, was more in keeping with everything he had previously known about God? And I believe that God is testing us today. God is looking for Muslims who will say No, I have read the Koran and the God I pray to five times a day is a God who cherishes life and not death. God is looking for Christians who will say No, the Christianity to which I have pledged my soul is about whom I am required to love, not about whom I am entitled to hate. And God is looking for Jews who will say No, if I am asked to do things in the name of the Torah that violate the spirit of the Torah, things that make it hard for me to be the kind of person the Torah wants me to be, I will not do them.
At a turbulent, confusing time like the one we are living in, a time that makes it so tempting to hate people, a time when choices are so complicated that we crave someone to tell us what to do because it is so hard to decide for ourselves, I believe that God is testing us even as He tested Abraham, to see if we have learned to recognize God's authentic voice in the midst of so many competing voices and competing ideologies. May God grant that we be worthy to pass that test. AMEN