Congregation Beth Shalom

Be afraid, very afraid…of fear

Rosh Hashanah 5769

Rabbi David Wechsler-Azen

When you come to think of it, FDR’s assertion that we have nothing to fear but fear itself is absurd.    We had plenty to fear then, and clearly, even more to fear now.   We could simply suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and give in. That of course is not the Jewish way, and so we will take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.    However, if we let fear be the driving force in how we respond, we can be led to make terrible decisions.   Therefore, even though we do have what to fear, in order to make the best choices we do need to fear fear itself.

     This morning I want to examine with you, through the prism of the Torah reading, the consequences of making decisions from fear.    Usually called “The Binding of Isaac,” it deserves a different title for the focus we’ll give it today.    “The Tragic End of Sarah” points toward this moment as the culmination of a series of choices she makes from a state of anxiety, which lead to her death in the verse following the end of our reading.

     Let’s retrace the steps Sarah takes from a constricted viewpoint that end in tragedy.    By the way, I hasten to add that my original notes for this chat go back several months – it just so happens to be timely given everything we’re witnessing this week in the world, but I would hate for any of you to think that I’m a slave to relevance.

     We meet Sarah as Abraham’s wife.    Now, we know that the Torah has some pretty inflated numbers for the ages of our ancestors, so adjusting for inflation, she’s in her late 30’s, he’s in his forties.    Yet they have not had children when he’s called to follow a singular deity into the unknown, even as he’s promised as many descendants as there are stars in the sky.    Sarah joins him in his trek, but twenty something years later, those big promises seem empty as Sarah remains barren.    She’s now 60 something, he’s in his 70’s.    Sarah loses hope that she’ll be the mother of all those stars and so suggest that Abraham bed Hagar her handmaiden.

     The practice of hiring surrogate mothers is documented from 4,000 years ago, as contracts have been found between the women that were written on clay tablets.    One of the chief conditions was that the surrogate shall not mock the wife.    So surrogacy had its place in society then, as it does today.

     I want to be very careful that no one take offense or think that I’m denying that hiring a surrogate is kosher when I say that the results of Sarah’s choice are not positive, and suggest that perhaps she made the wrong decision.    The Torah tells us that in her case, she ends up on the losing end of a series of transactions, and that ultimately, the tensions between Arabs and Jews resulted from this move.    Now, I take the whole story as allegory, not history – it’s more than likely that the Torah author already knew about these tensions and created a story about the origins of the conflict ex post facto – but be that as it may, to say that the Torah shows anxiety filled decision making leading to tragedy offers us a cautionary tale as an opportunity to look at how we process our options.

     So if surrogacy is alright, even though it doesn’t go as she hoped, why do I say she was misguided in sending Hagar into her husband?    I say it because what’s missing from the story is Sarah asking God whether this is a good idea.    Abraham doesn’t ask either, so it seems both of them have given up on God.    Now it’s not like it’s always wrong to take the initiative when heaven doesn’t seem to be helping you – the tradition teaches that atheism has a positive side in teaching us to feed the hungry rather than telling them that God will provide – but when you buck a promise from the Almighty without checking in first and then find out things don’t go so well, it might be the Torah’s way of giving a sign of faulty logic and lack of faith.

     In those days, everything was believed to be in the hands of the gods and punishments resulted from the gods’ displeasure.    Sarah may have naturally believed the one God was like all the other gods, and that her barrenness was a judgment.    Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that she was in a state of high anxiety, anxious about how God viewed her character, anxious about her marriage, anxious about the future of the promise that all her children and their children’s children would be numerous.

     The negative results begin immediately.    Hagar does make fun of her; Sarah then gets Abraham to agree that she has the right to kick Hagar out (which in fact the tablets do authorize contractually); this backfires however when an angel tells Hagar to go back, perhaps as if to say to Sarah, you set this in motion, you’ve got to deal with it; Hagar returns and has a boy, Ishmael, a firstborn son for Abraham, a son who is a rough and tough hunter that Abraham, also a warrior, must have loved, and Sarah must be jealous.   

     Sarah is now on the far side of possibly getting pregnant, yet as we know today from the advanced age of some mothers, not completely beyond fertility.    She chuckles when told she’ll have her own child, yet conceive and bear a son of her own she does, but her joy is spoiled when she watches Ishmael playing with Isaac – the verb m’tzachek might mean he’s mocking him, laughing at him, making sport of him, or perhaps even just making him laugh at rude noises and jokes – at any rate, Sarah, now anxious over her own son’s place in the line of inheritance, gets Abraham to exile mother and son.    Sarah may suspect the peril Hagar and Ishmael actually face when they almost die in the wilderness and this may plague her.    Abraham understands that this act will turn Ishmael into an antagonist with other people, all because of the bitterness between the mothers, something Sarah might have been able to avoid if she hadn’t been stricken with a narrowness of vision and emotion due to anxiety.

And then, after all these things, as the Torah tells us, Abraham hears God calling upon him to sacrifice Isaac.    So early one morning, without a word to Sarah, father and son disappear without a farewell.    No way, no how does Abraham have the guts to tell Sarah what he thinks he needs to do, because he knows she’d never let Isaac out of sight after that – Abraham would only be allowed supervised visitation rights for sure.

     One well established psychological interpretation of Abraham’s motivation is that he’s conflicted about what he did to Ishmael, whom he truly loved, perhaps even more than Isaac the meek, and in his guilt, shame and anxiety about the fate of his firstborn, he comes to believe he ought to offer up the second to show his loyalty to God, but really, it’s because he’s angry at Sarah and this is his passive/aggressive way of getting back at her.

     Sarah wakes up to an empty house and she never sees Isaac again.    Legend says she receives word that Abraham has sought to sacrifice Isaac and she dies of the shock.    She doesn’t live to see Isaac married, she doesn’t live to see grandchildren.    Perhaps this is Torah’s way of indicating that she wasn’t being judged when she was barren, but that as a result of the bad decisions she made from the anxiety about being judged, she did ironically end up being judged.    Anxiety comes from the same Latin root as anger, having to do with tightness, narrowness, constriction.    Sarah forced a solution to her fear that she and Abraham would remain childless, without praying about it, without examining sufficiently the possible outcomes, and for that she was judged and for that she suffered.    And, if we take the Torah literally, for that we too still suffer, as her actions led to historical enmity between the descendants of the brothers.   

     Don’t get me wrong, everything Sarah did makes sense from the perspective of a wife and a mother trying to make sure her husband’s and her dreams would come true.    And to judge her is to ask too much of her.    Besides, perhaps the point of the story is to let us in on seeing someone else make choices we ourselves could see making in the same situation, yet come to realize that when we are too attached to a goal we can end up with tunnel vision that leads not to the light at the end of the tunnel, but the oncoming train.

     The final argument I’ll make that the Torah is trying to teach us this lesson is the very story we read this morning, because in stark contrast to Sarah’s nervousness, we read about the cool, calm, collected way in which Isaac faces danger and comes through alive and empowered.    Just as she ends up bereft as a result of over-attachment, Isaac’s letting go leads him to win Abraham’s heart and to increase his appreciation of life.

     “And Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said:    ‘My father.”    And he said:    ‘Here I am, my son.’    And he said:    ‘Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’    And Abraham said:    ‘God will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’    So they went both of them together.”

     The rabbis read this exchange as Abraham indicating to Isaac that the lamb is Isaac – from the juxtaposition in the Hebrew of the lamb and “my son.”    And they went on together shows that Isaac didn’t flee, but rather went along.

     I’ve argued in previous sermons that Isaac doesn’t go along because he consents to his own demise, as the rabbis say (under pressure of competing with early Christianity), but rather he goes along because, again treating the story as allegory, he understands that he can run but can’t hide from the influence of his father, and that the only way he can become free is to confront Abraham with the fullness of his own humanity.    Therefore, Isaac is the messenger (another translation of the word usually understood as angel) of the Source of Life, showing Abraham that he’s misguided himself as a result of his anxiety about whether he’s really loyal to God.

     Isaac therefore represents the antithesis to both Sarah and Abraham, each of whom is functioning from limited perspectives.     As he’s able to let go of all attachment, able to risk everything, he suffers from no anxiety, or at the very least, he doesn’t let fear run the show.    He’s in charge even as he surrenders.    And as a result, he enables real change, change in his father and change in himself.

     Authentic change requires a willingness to risk everything for the sake of nothing.    That is, and this is tricky, unless one passes through a state of nothingness, all one’s done is rearrange what was already there rather than be able to create something entirely new.    To be willing to let go of what is, even when it is counter productive, can feel like dying.    That’s how hard it is for us to truly alter our destiny.    And yet, unless we can give it all up, not as a strategy for change but as a pure practice of non-anxious non-attachment that allows for a full range of vision, we cannot really change our fate.

     When we dig a little deeper in the dirt of what makes us nervous, we are led to the next level of questioning ourselves.    Do we believe this is the only life we have?    If it is, then letting go, I believe, is much, much harder.    On the other hand, if we trust that our essence, our spirit, is immortal, then we can have more freedom from anxiety in this lifetime.

     Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky’s incredible novel about the brothers K, posits that morality requires a belief in the immortality of the soul.    “Without God and immortality, all things are permitted.”    Unless you believe reward and punishment will follow you after the end of this body, he’s implying, then you’ll likely end up doing whatever it takes to survive and get what you want in the here and now.   

     He’s being provocative, as his the wont of his character, but the point is, if you truly believed your soul was eternal, how would it alter your view of this existence?    Would you worry quite as much?    Would you be more able to stop sweating the small stuff?    Would you feel more powerful in contemplation of your choices?

     For those who already believe in the soul’s existence in a manner that goes beyond this lifetime, you may already understand this, or, contemplating Isaac’s example may extend the power of your belief as you consider the implications of the freedom that can come with such a view.

     For those who think this is it for them, one go around the track and then you’re gone, that all we are is flesh and blood and chemical reactions -- Maybe.    You might be right, but have you considered the possibility that with all the weirdness we’re discovering in subatomic physics and quantum mechanics, where communication across a million miles seems to happen simultaneously and all the energy that was present at the beginning of the world is still here today – that maybe, just maybe, our soul encodes in a quanta, an infinitesimally small packet of energy that can travel without a body and then implant in a new form?    I’m not saying you have to say Amen, say it is so brother, I’m just saying that maybe it’s possible to be a subatomic quantum rationalist and admit of possibilities that classical Reform Judaism and previous definitions of plausibility could not acknowledge.   

     And if you admit the possibility, then perhaps you are willing to consider Pascal’s wager.    Blaise Pascal, living in the 1600’s, demonstrated the limits of human reason and the fact of uncertainty in knowledge.    He begins with the premise that the existence or non-existence of God is not provable by human reason, since the essence of God is "infinitely incomprehensible". Since reason cannot decide the question, one must "wager", either by guessing or making a leap of faith. Not to make a choice, to sit on the fence, is also a choice, but not really possible, since we are already embarked on the voyage.   

     Now if you will, replace the issue of God’s existence with the question of whether the soul is eternal or not – or at least, will last as long as the universe does, since we’re talking in terms of energy that’s been around since the beginning of space and time.    I don’t believe the question of the soul depends on whether you believe God exists or not, so let’s stick with the question of the day, and remember that what is at stake is personal power, the kind that Isaac had which truly enabled him to transform a situation.

     Pascal asserts that there is an equal risk of loss and gain since we cannot determine ultimate answers.    Therefore, we decide according to our happiness, by weighting the gain or loss in believing that our spirit will outlast our body.    The wise thing would be to wager that the endurance of the soul is real, since if we gain, we gain all, and if we lose we lose nothing – we can gain by living with less anxiety and more integrity, and if it turns out that there really is only one life to live, we’ll be no worse off in death anyway.

     I’d like to share with you a story I’ve told on occasion before, yet it’s worth repeating, because it reveals and reverses what we usually consider to be positions of power, shifting the focus from the external to the internal.   

     In the days of the Soviet Union, with secret police everywhere, anxiety about plots against the Communist regime leading to constant crackdowns and interrogations, and religion outlawed, a rabbi was arrested on suspicion of being part of a conspiracy.    The police captain interrogated the rabbi, pressing him to reveal information.    The rabbi refused to talk, so exasperating the captain that he finally took out his pistol and put it to the rabbi’s temple.    The captain said, “I call this my Enforcer, because it forces people to talk.”    The Rabbi replied:    “For you who have one life and many gods, the Enforcer works.    For those of us who have many lives and but one God, however, the Enforcer cannot work.”    The rabbi gave up nothing, and the captain recognized he had met his match and let the rabbi go.

     Now, it is also altogether possible that this story could have had a different ending – and yet, to surrender power and survive at the cost of one’s soul has its own price.    Film director Elia Kazan rationalized naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy Red Scare in the 50’s and lost many friends and colleagues as a result.    Even 40 years later when he received an honorary Oscar, at least a third of the audience refused to honor him.

     In the long run, these days of Awe ask us to examine ourselves and our choices and determine how we want to live.    If I asked you how many of you were authors, how many would raise their hands?    In fact, everyone should have their hands raised, because you do have the power to inscribe yourself into the Book of Life.    Perhaps not all the particulars of how things will go, but certainly we have in our hands some amount of power about how we will deal with how things go.    Whether we will panic or whether we will keep our wits about us, whether we will divide or unite, whether we will permit ourselves anything in order to get by or whether we will have the longer view inform our everyday actions.

     If you truly do want to develop more personal power and the possibility to transform your life and the world by gaining the abilities of Isaac, I strongly suggest intensifying your practice of making Shabbat.    Most of us who live in the grip of the illusion of success and pleasure as defined by Western culture don’t understand the freedom that comes with surrendering and letting go on Shabbat.    To many of us, not pursuing pleasure or not working feel like death – and instead of facing those feelings and developing Isaac’s inner strength, learning to breath without anxiety even in the midst of what seems to be life-threatening, or at the least, ego-threatening situations, we continue to run from thing to thing, moment to moment.    And then we wonder where our days and weeks and years went.

     And I want to reinforce what Rabbi Nancy said last night – that in perilous times, one of the most stabilizing forces is community and the connections we make with others on a search for inner peace and power.   

     So, for sure, we have all sorts of opportunities to be afraid, very afraid.    And yet, when it comes right down to it, maybe it’s not so absurd to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

     May you inscribe yourself, those you love, your community, and the wider world into the Book of Life for a sweet and healthy, calm, cool and collected new year.

     Amen.