Hi everyone - I have two things for you today - (1) the text of the video mini-sermon I recorded for this past weekend1 and (2) a call-back to an earlier newsletter that I found interesting.
Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, an iconic rabbinic leader and educator in Israel’s religious zionist movement, recounts an argument with his wife about this Shabbat’s Biblical portion, Parashat Vayera.2 His wife maintained that, throughout the story of the Binding of Isaac, which concludes our portion, Abraham firmly believed that God never actually desired that human sacrifice and that Isaac would somehow emerge unscathed. In effect, she argued that Abraham demonstrated his faith in God by calling God’s bluff.3
Rabbi Bin Nun himself, though, maintained that Abraham really did believe, deep down, that the sacrifice of Isaac might actually take place. And at that critical moment when he stood over the altar to which Isaac was bound, Abraham really did intend to carry out God’s inscrutable command - that even as he hoped that something would happen to spare Isaac’s life, he was prepared to make that sacrifice if it was truly God’s will.
Their debate was not merely an exercise in Biblical interpretation - it reflected their anxieties as their own children and students were drafted into service by the Israel Defense Forces. Rabbi Bin Nun writes that his wife always sent these young men and women off to the army with the implicit expectation, that they would return safely, protected by Divine providence. But Rabbi Bin Nun, who himself served with distinction as a paratrooper in the Six Day War, explains that he had no such conception. He saw himself as a modern-day Abraham leading his loved ones to the altar, encouraging them to put their lives on the line in service to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, despite the very real possibility that it was a sacrifice, that they would not return, if that were indeed God’s will.
How poignant to reflect on this debate, with the searing emotions it evokes, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis, in the IDF and reserves, begin their ground operation in Gaza.
This coming week we commemorate Kristallnacht, the devastating pogrom in Germany and Austria, November 9-10, 1938 that first hinted at the horrors to come. The Holocaust culminated a two-thousand-year period in which the Jewish people were powerless, and the Binding of Isaac was understood primarily in the context of martyrdom through an unending series of oppressions, persecutions, and massacres.
How powerful it is, eighty-five years later, to see this same Biblical story of sacrifice and dedication, again invoked after the massacres on October seventh. Now, though, the Binding of Isaac is not (only) about the innocent people slaughtered for being Jewish. Instead, the narrative frames the determined, powerful servicemen and women of the Israel Defense Forces, who bravely step forward, risking (even sacrificing) their lives to protect the reborn, independent Jewish State.
A few months ago, I did a newsletter on one rabbinic interpretation of the Tower of Babel, which I was thinking about in the context of the World Cup at Qatar. In part, I wrote:
in the actual Biblical text, the people specifically don’t build the tower to fulfill the directive of Nimrod - they do it to create “a name.” It sounds like a story for/about themselves…But, actually, their story was Nimrod’s story, and their labor was for him, not for themselves. Even if it gave their lives a sense of meaning and purpose, it was ultimately an expression of Nimrod's will, not theirs…the rabbis are telling us that they weren’t really sacrificing themselves. Nimrod was sacrificing them.
I was reminded of this piece last week because Open For Debate (formerly Intelligence Squared US) took up the question “Does Economic Growth Cost Too Much?” In her closing statement, Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason (a libertarian magazine) actually made reference to the Tower of Babel story, coming out on the side of the people, against God, whom she reads as a stand-in for government authority that holds the people back. (Obviously, she was taking the position that economic growth does not cost too much - so there should be no limits on what people create, develop, or build.)
Peter Victor, who took the other side in the debate, noted that economic growth now accrues more and more to fewer and fewer people - at the expense of an ever-larger population that ultimately bears the burden of all of that economic activity by doing more work for less compensation and benefits, in a rapidly degrading environment.
According to the rabbis of the Midrash, the point of the Tower narrative is to scrutinize who is not explicitly named in the story, yet who stands to gain by all that work - usually, it is not the actual workers. Similarly, we would do well to scrutinize who the Nimrods are in our economy.
My cadence is a little funny in this video, and that is because the teleprompter program i was using was a bit glitchy. It is not always easy to do these videos solo, and I don’t always have the time to make sure they come out perfectly!
I can’t find an English-language version of the essay anywhere. But here is the basic argument recounted by Rabbi David Wolkenfeld in a powerful sermon of his own.
This is also the basis of Rabbi Lord Jonthan Sack’s understanding in this essay, which argues that the test was of the complexity of Abraham’s faith - the ability to keep contradictory thoughts in his head at the same time and live with that tension.