Shabbat shalom.
In a moment Tyler is going to lead us in a more in depth text study of a selection of this week’s parsha, Parshat Vayera. But before we dig into the text together, I want to share some things that are heavy on my heart. Maybe they’re heavy on yours, too.
In this week’s parsha, G!d calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and he is fully ready to, knife poised over his bound son’s head, until an angel begs him to stop. What horrifying violence. What horrifying betrayal.
But there is betrayal all over this parsha. Abraham sells Sarah off as his sister–again. Abraham and Sarah banish Hagar and Abraham’s first born son Ishmael to die in the desert. And, in chapter 22, Adonai nisah et Avraham, God puts Avraham to the test–again, and commands him to sacrifice his son Isaac.
וַיֹּ֡אמֶר קַח־נָ֠א אֶת־בִּנְךָ֨ אֶת־יְחִֽידְךָ֤ אֲשֶׁר־אָהַ֙בְתָּ֙ אֶת־יִצְחָ֔ק וְלֶ֨ךְ־לְךָ֔ אֶל־אֶ֖רֶץ הַמֹּרִיָּ֑ה וְהַעֲלֵ֤הוּ שָׁם֙ לְעֹלָ֔ה עַ֚ל אַחַ֣ד הֶֽהָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ׃
Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you. (Gen. 22:2)
I love this midrash from Beresheet Rabbah (55:7) that seeks to understand why it took so many words for G!d to just say “go sacrifice Isaac.” Why “your son, your favoried son, Isaac, who you love…”? The midrash explains the conversation went this way:
Abraham said to God, “I have two sons”. “He answered him, “Thine only son”. Abraham said, “This one is the only son of his mother and the other is the only son of his mother”. God then said, “the one whom thou lovest”. Abraham replied, “I love both of them”. Whereupon God said “even Isaac”.
Rashi says its to drive home the obedience of Abraham to sacrifice his most beloved son, to share all these qualifiers. But even before Abraham decides to follow G!d’s call and sacrifice his son to this G!d, he has to decide who is his son, who isn’t, who he loves, who he doesn’t, who he has sent out into the desert to die of thirst, and who remains.
I’ve spoken to you before about the concept of moral injury. The term “moral injury” is more recent, though the experience is ancient. It is thought to have originated in the writings of Vietnam War veteran and peace activist Camillo “Mac” Bica. The Moral Injury Project defines moral injury as “the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.”
The damage done in this parsha to the morality not only of the characters, but potentially our own as we read it, is significant. Does G!d approve of deserting children to die of thirst? Does G!d condone the selling of women’s bodies for safety? Does G!d want parents to murder their children? How could a parent choose which child he loves best? Are the originators of our faith ok with this?
My friends, we are living in morally injurious times. I have spent the last three weeks weeping with you, hearing your stories of heartbreak and fear for loved ones in Israel and in Palestine. Your stories of family conflict and the anguish that comes with it. Your reports of looking around, even in our own community, and wondering how someone could SAY…that.
We are taking in an unbelievable amount of graphic images and narratives of unspeakable violence. Violence committed against Jewish bodies. Violence committed by Jewish bodies. We are fearing what each text, each AP alert might bring.
We are hurting as progressive Jews, wondering how we are supposed to choose whose death matters more.
The violence of the occupation, embedded antisemitism, is so pernicious that we are unable to know the way forward. We experience this moral injury when we look to Jewish community to be a place of solace and mourning for the sudden and brutal attacks against Israelis, and find too-quickly-given analysis about occupation, seeing a lack of full throated demand for the return of Israeli hostages, a compassion for those living in fear in Israel. And we are injured when we look to our non-Jewish friends to care about loss of Jewish life and see that it is too problematic to solicit compassion. We are injured when we see that tension in our own selves.
And we are injured when we look to our Jewish community to uplift the value of pikuach nefesh, saving a life, and instead see the majority of the Jewish world saying that calling for a ceasefire, an end to death, is a betrayal of the Jewish people. When we pay taxes that go to funding missiles used to kill entire family trees at once, we experience this moral injury. When we are told by family, friends, and strangers alike that our caring about Palestinian people living under 75 years of occupation are animals, and we are traitors.
And we experience moral injury, I do believe, when our hearts are shattered at the 1,400 Israeli deaths, the over 230 Israeli captives, and the over 9,000 Palestinians dead, and have to continue somehow living. Buying groceries. Returning missed calls. Joining Zoom meetings. Continuing on life in the midst of so much death.
If we look to read Torah and find a perfect G!d and perfect ancestors, we will be disappointed, betrayed. If we go in to Torah ready to trip over questions of right living, mercy, making mistakes, cruelty, self protection, resilience, we will find them. In this time, we must honor the moral injury the world is experiencing, and that progressive American Jews are uniquely experiencing. We must not silo this grief, this horror, this need to mourn. We can offer care for the injury in community, not by weighing which tragedy hurts worst and causing our souls to shatter, but by grieving, and moving towards things that may save life, so we may as Mother Jones said, honor the dead, and fight like hell for the living.
I want to close with these words I have been reading on repeat, from Muriel Rukeyser:
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
May the ancestors of Torah find healing in the ways we hold one another and make choices that protect life. Amen.