­The Akedah, The Un’taneh Tokef and the Pandemic:

Part 1: “Envisioning” the Akedah

Erev Rosh HaShanah 5782 (September 6, 2021)

Tonight I share a story that I have never before seen in the light of the High Holy Days. I have told this story during the internment portion at funerals, though I did not learn it in that context. The story arose out of Eastern Europe where Jews were impoverished, and the world was cold and unkind. Against this backdrop arose a tradition of Jewish storytellers who would go from town to town and region to region to light up the hearts of these Jewish communities. One of these was Reb Yitzchak of Drogobych during the 18th century. He traveled especially throughout Galicia and Volhynia, where my father’s side is from. Reb Yitzchak’s stories were legendary, and this is one.^[1]

A king had a most unusual, beautiful diamond. It was quite remarkable, perfect in every way. He liked to take it out and watch it sparkle in the light. And when he was done admiring it, he took great pains to place it carefully back in its case. One day, however, when he took out the diamond, he discovered to his horror that there was a thin, hairline crack running right down the middle. The king was devastated. His perfect diamond was ruined.

The king became depressed. He refused to see or talk to anyone. Realizing something had to be done, his advisers put out a call across the realm, offering a handsome reward to whoever could fix the king’s diamond. No one stepped forward to answer the call. No one could figure out how to fix a cracked diamond.

Some time later, a woman appeared at the castle, asserting that she could help, but she would need to take the fractured diamond to her workshop for one year. With nothing to lose, they sent her away with the diamond.

One year later, the woman reappeared and insisted on personally returning the diamond to the king. Hopeful, the king emerged from his chambers, the first time since the crack appeared one year earlier. She handed him the diamond. The king looked at it and then let out a yell of rage, “You didn’t fix my diamond! Look, the crack is still there!” The woman calmly replied, “Where? I don’t see any crack.” The king pointed to where the hairline crack still did indeed exist. The woman responded, “Oh that! That, your majesty, is not a crack. That is the stem of a rose. If you look carefully, you will see that I have spent the last year carving the petals of the rose onto the diamond.” The king looked again at the diamond, and only then did he see the most beautiful rose he could ever have imagined. His flawed diamond, he realized, was even more perfect than before.

Let’s look inside this parable. The king takes life at face value. If there appears to be a crack in the diamond, the king accepts that and responds by becoming a recluse. He has no plan and no vision. He has financial resources, but his inner resources feel depleted. The man with power over an entire nation has no power to help himself.

The woman, on the other hand, is able to see beyond the obvious. She has the vision to take a seemingly difficult situation and transform it into a thing of beauty.

Much of the time during these past 18 months, we could have been down and out. And maybe at certain moments we were. The difficulties of shelter-in-place orders, the constant anxieties of assessing personal risk when leaving our homes, the changing recommendations by our public health officials as medical knowledge about COVID-19 grew and then the arrival of the Delta variant, concerns about our country’s future that was heavily debated in the months leading to and following the presidential election, the horrific event of January 6, ongoing concerns about election integrity, the rise in hate against the AAPI, transgender and Jewish communities, a rise not just in quantity but in severity–any of these could leave us following the king’s example. We, too, could retreat and lock ourselves away. It’s so much more difficult to try to see the situation, the cracked diamond of life, from various angles, as the woman did, and to seek alternate options.

Tonight and tomorrow I want to honor what we’ve been through these past 18 months, how we at CAH have looked at our situation from many angles, and the lessons that I think we learned. Tonight I will consider how to face challenges like the pandemic; tomorrow I will focus on lessons learned. In both, I want to use two texts: the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, that we’ll read on Wednesday, and the Un’taneh Tokef. I do this for several reasons. First, I have never used either text in High Holy Day study or in a drash. Second, I hope that by spending some time with these texts, that the experience of them will be heightened this year.

In the Akedah, the binding of Yitzchak, the two main characters journey together through a difficult experience. The Akedah was traumatic for both Avraham and Yitzchak. Yet their responses in the end differ greatly, not unlike the king and the woman of our story. Avraham manages to keep his ability to see multiple options and to continue living robustly; Yitzchak, on the other hand, does not have a wellspring of resilience, and does not develop a sense of vision. So the question for us is: What message does the Akedah teach about vision? Let’s review the story, highlighting the metaphor of sight in this story.

Genesis 22 begins by telling us that G!d tested Avraham. G!d tells Avraham,

“Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Yitzchak, and go to the Land of Moriah, and offer him there as a sacrifice on one of the mountains which I will point out to you.”^[2] Moriah means vision, so G!d is telling Avraham to take Yitzchak to the “Land of Vision.” It seems Moriah is less a place than a possibility.

The two set off with their entourage. On the third day, Avraham lifted his eyes and saw the place they were to go, without G!d having to point it out.^[3] Notice: Avraham raises his eyes and knows which mountain is the predetermined place. Avraham has a sense of vision. Avraham is able to look at something and not just see it literally, but perceive its significance.

Once they arrive, Avraham and Yitzchak leave their servants and scale the mountain. The Torah explicitly mentions that they ascend together.^[4] They are in it together. The test is for both of them. Father and son are being tested to see how each one would handle the unimaginable, just as we have had to do these past 18 months.

At one point, Yitzchak calls out to his father, asking where the animal is for the sacrifice.^[5] Avraham’s answer is telling: “G!d will see to the sheep for the burnt offering, my son.”^[6] “G!d will see”–again, Avraham is the one who understands vision. Yitzchak remains in the dark. He did not “see” the mountain and now cannot understand that G!d will “see to” the sheep.

Finally, Yitzchak is bound on the altar. Avraham is ready to sacrifice him when an angel calls out and estops him from going through with it.^[7] Now G!d seems satisfied that Avraham was indeed willing to sacrifice his son; there is no need to carry through with the action. We are relieved; what a great place to end the story.

But here is where the test begins, for the real test is whether Avraham and Yitzchak can continue to affirm life even after having experienced such a traumatic event. Will they retreat into themselves like the king whose diamond was cracked? Or will they have the vision to make their world meaningful, like the woman of our story?

Avraham does indeed manage to keep his sense of vision. The story continues, “Avraham lifted up his eyes and behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns.”^[8] So Avraham sacrifices the ram in place of Yitzchak. Avraham can still see. He is able to envision alternate options, even if behind him. so he sees the ram, meaning, he sees the possibility of the ram.

The final clincher of the Akedah story reads, “And Avraham called the name of that place Adonai-yir’eh; as it is said to this day, “In the mount of HaShem there is vision.”^[9]

That Avraham chooses to name the place “Adonai-yir’eh” tells us that this story is indeed about vision, about being able to reconstruct one’s world even when it appears to be falling apart, even when there are challenges, even when there’s a pandemic. How easy it would have been for Avraham to say, “Forget this, I cannot deal with a G!d who demands this kind of faith, who asks of me this.” That is the king’s response of impotence, not the woman’s response of vision.

And Avraham has vision. He is able to take the trauma of the Akedah and grow from it. Afterwards, we see Avraham actively involved with his family. He buries his wife Sarah.^[10] He goes to great pains to find a suitable wife for Yitzchak.^[11] And he even goes on to remarry and have six more children before he dies.^[12] Despite whatever horrors Avraham endured as the result of the Akedah, he did not shirk his responsibility to his family. Nor did he allow his life to come to a standstill.

And Yitzchak? He seems to have disappeared–literally out of sight. The last we saw of him the angel stopped the sacrifice. What happened to Yitzchak afterward? The question becomes even more acute when the Torah explicitly tells us that Avraham returned to his servants at the foot of the mountain. But the verb is in the singular. It would seem that Yitzchak was not with him.^[13]

So, nu, where is Yitzchak? If we follow the text, the next time we see Yitzchak he marries Rivkah,^[14] a marriage orchestrated by Avraham, not Yitzchak. Yitzchak still acts as a passive child, traumatized by the Akedah and mourning for his dead mother. Only after he marries Rivkah is Yitzchak comforted over the loss of his mother.^[15] But has he yet worked through the trauma he underwent on Mount Moriah?

Later, Yitzchak and Rivkah have two children–Ya’akov and Esav. At some point Yaakov plots and succeeds in stealing Esav’s blessing,^[16] because Yitzchak cannot tell the difference between his own children. “The voice is the voice of Ya’akov; the arms are the arms of Esav.”^[17] This has always seemed odd to me. Why can’t Yitzchak tell the difference? A clue: The story begins with the words, “Yitzchak’s eyes were dim.”^[18] He couldn’t see well. However, the root ra’ah in Tanakh can mean “to see,” but it also can mean “to foresee, to envision.” Here the Torah is clearly not talking about physical sight only, just as in the Akedah story, “seeing” was not primarily physical. Rather, the Torah is referring to the ability to see the larger picture. It is entirely possible not to have physical eyesight, while still being capable of incredible insights and visions. We are not talking about Yitzchak’s physical vision here. We are talking about his ability to function in the world.

So why didn’t Yitzchak see like his father Avraham did? Back in the Akedah story, we recall that after the near disaster, Avraham looks up and sees the ram.^[19] Both men have experienced a terrible moment in time, but Yitzchak does not look up; he withdraws. He does not make an effort to move on. He does not take control of his life. For this reason, he fails to see the ram as a possibility. In the end, he becomes spiritually blind and incapable of functioning and participating in the world around him.

Judaism does not see the world through rose-colored glasses. It is not oblivious to the pain that father and son endured going through the Akedah, and it is not oblivious to the pain and struggles we face in our lives. Judaism knows that we have struggled the past 18 months, and that we worry about the Delta variant and newer variants on the horizon. And it knows that we are weary of it all, and that we wonder when it will all end. And that we have other concerns, other worries on our plates. The ultimate question, however, is how can we, like Avraham, make our lives spiritually significant even in the face of overwhelming trials? What do we learn and what do we have inside so we can restore our joie de vivre?

We’ll lay that out tomorrow. But part of the answer lies in the Un‘taneh Tokef, which we’ll recite tomorrow and Wednesday. We usually focus on its terrifying passage about who will live and who will die, and how those who will die might die. However, one line in the aftermath of this litany undercuts the terror: U-t’shuvah u-t’fi-la u-tz’dakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-g’zeirah. Actions of “repentance, prayer, and righteousness remove the severity of the decree.” Deeds matter.

Some machzorim translate the passage as “remove the severe decree.” It may sound like a minor detail but there is a world of difference between the two statements. To say that these actions can remove the severe decree implies that somehow we can change the hand we are dealt if only we have enough piety, that we can return to what once was. This simply is not true. Lack of prayer did not cause the pandemic, and prayers will not be at the center of a medical solution to it; nor will life after the pandemic be life before the pandemic.

What is crucial to understand is that the actions we choose to take in the face of adversity can make a difference in our lives. They can remove the severity of the decree, although not the decree itself. Our actions can allow us to do the best we can with whatever we have to work with.

I believe that we have done that most of the time this past year in rich ways, and I’ll explore that tomorrow. But let me conclude here with this thought: We may not be able to change the objective reality, but we do have the ability–like Avraham–to transform meaninglessness into meaning and hell into holiness.

May we all have a year of blessing and peace, despite the many problems that face us.

May we try to look up from our troubles and find alternate perspectives.

And may we use our vision to transform our flawed diamonds into objects of beauty.

Amen.

^[1] Various versions of this story exist. This telling is indebted to Rabbi Shoshana Gelfand in Living Words, JFL Books, Inc., 1999, pp. 1-2.

^[2] Genesis 22:2.

^[3] Genesis 22:4.

^[4] Genesis 22:6.

^[5] Genesis 22:7.

^[6] Genesis 22:8.

^[7] Genesis 22:9-12.

^[8] Genesis 22:13.

^[9] Genesis 22:14.

^[10] Genesis 23:19.

^[11] Genesis 24.

^[12] Genesis 25:1.

^[13] Genesis 22:19.

^[14] Genesis 24:67.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Genesis 27:5-29.

^[17] Genesis 27:22.

^[18] Genesis 27:1.

^[19] Genesis 22:13.