Almost ten years ago as we prepared to host our first Pesach sedarim in Princeton, a car pulled up in front of our home and stopped with a screech in a cloud of dust. Moments later the car zoomed away to squealing tires. When the dust settled, boxes containing Pesach china for twenty-five people were left behind on the curb. I’m not sure the story happened quite this way, but my memory of that moment, at which my mother-in-law handed over the mantle of Pesach hosting, remains a vivid one. We still use those dishes each Pesach, although when we moved to Chicago, we had to replace the original cardboard boxes they were in with plastic bins filled with newspapers which can stack higher and resist moisture.
This past spring, as I was returning our Pesach dishes to those boxes, I found myself reading the newspaper as I was using it to pack up the dishes. That was in part to relieve the boredom of packing up the dishes, but it was also because I found the news from 2014 to be so much more positive than the news from this past year. Do you remember that far back? There was still war and famine and devastating disease across the world in 2014. We faced our vulnerabilities and fears and existential angst when we gathered for Rosh Hashanah back then. But as I read those yellowing newspapers with real yearning and wistfulness for a simpler time, I had the clear sense that we are more vulnerable today, that we perceive ourselves to be at greater risk today, and that our lives feel more unstable.
That is the inevitable result of reading old newspapers. Yesterday’s worries and the risks that did not pan out as badly as feared no longer frighten. (Does anyone remember the great tungsten shortage of the 1990s? It was a thing; look it up!) And today’s dangers, which were already brewing years ago beneath the surface, were unnoticed and therefore unreported in those newspapers which makes reading them even more unsettling. We didn’t even know back then what we really had to fear.
But there may also be some objective scale in which we really are living in more unsettled times. Events in our city, in the national news, reports from across the world buffet us. Old assumptions about the way things are meant to be no longer are true. Each of the many roles that we assume in our lives are under question and no part of our identity is stable: what does it mean to be a parent, a child, a spouse, a citizen, a Jew?
That’s why Yitzchak is the Rosh Hashanah hero that we need this year. On this second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Torah reading tells a story of spiritual heroism. Avraham complies with an incomprehensible command from God to offer his beloved son Yitzchak as a sacrifice. Yitzchak is bound upon an altar and his life is only spared when an angel commands Avraham to relent, having passed a test, and offer a ram in place of Yitzchak. Avraham’s Yirat Shamayim, fear and reverence for God, is proved by the story and his example of faith occupies one of the central themes of this season in Jewish liturgy.
But Yitzchak, no small child during the akeidah, is a full participant in the unfolding drama and his experience of being bound, and his trauma of discovering the mortal danger into which he was placed by his own loving father, also animates an important spiritual stance of Rosh Hashanah. Yitzchak is the Rosh Hashanah hero we need this year.
For we are like Yitzchak, bound on the altar. We are vulnerable. We are at risk. Our assumptions about who would protect us and who would cause us harm have been overturned. Our sense of security and stability has vanished. We are inextricably bound and cannot extricate ourselves from our precarious situation. All that we can do is wait for God to rescue us, without deserving it or having any right to expect that salvation, but knowing that is the only way towards safety. And if some of us have come to these feelings more recently, this understanding is not a new reality, but only a new recognition of the frightening reality that has always existed.
Those who have been buffeted by history or put at risk by those more powerful than they, can become calloused or cynical. “The world only understands power.” “In the game of life there are winners and losers and I want to be a winner.” There are those who give up on the pursuit of goodness and give up on old dreams in order to protect themselves from physical or emotional pain.
By seeing Yitzchak as a hero and embracing and emulating his acceptance of vulnerability, and thereby rejecting callousness, we remain sensitive to all of the suffering in the world. We should remain open to feeling pain, whether it emanates from within our very own families or from some conflict zone thousands of miles across the sea.
We should feel that sympathy with the suffering of others, not because of ultimate reward from God, but out of love for God. That’s why Yitzchak is a hero of Rosh Hashanah this year.
My teacher Rav Yehuda Amital searched in vain for many years for a midrashic account of Avraham and Yitzchak during the three day walk to Har MoMori’ah and the binding of Yitzchak in which the two men discussed Yitzchak’s share of paradise. He could not find any such midrash because no such midrash exists. Yitzchak was not thinking about his future reward. Yitzchak put everything on the line for his beliefs.
When we make ourselves vulnerable for an ideal, we are emulating Yitzchak.
Yitzchak’s vulnerability has spiritual power. The Gemara in Shabbat (89b) tells of God’s search for a patriarch who will plead on behalf of the Jewish people when we do not deserve protection or support.
לעתיד לבא יאמר לו הקדוש ברוך הוא לאברהם בניך חטאו לי אמר לפניו רבונו של עולם ימחו על קדושת שמך
In the future that will surely come, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will say to Avraham: Your children have sinned against Me. Avraham will say before Him: Master of the Universe, if so, let them be eradicated to sanctify Your name.
אמר אימר ליה ליעקב דהוה ליה צערגידול בנים אפשר דבעי רחמי עלייהו אמר ליה בניך חטאו אמר לפניו רבונו של עולם ימחו על קדושת שמך
God said: I will say it to Jacob. Since he experienced the pain of raising children, perhaps he will ask for mercy on their behalf. He said to Jacob: Your children have sinned. Jacob said before Him: Master of the Universe, if so, let them be eradicated to sanctify Your name.
אמר לא בסבי טעמא ולא בדרדקי עצה אמר לו ליצחק בניך חטאו לי
The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: There is no reason in elders and no wisdom in youth. Neither Avraham nor Jacob knew how to respond properly. He said to Isaac: Your children have sinned against Me.
אמר לפניו רבונו של עולם בני ולא בניך בשעה שהקדימו לפניך נעשה לנשמע קראת להם בני בכורי עכשיו בני ולא בניך
Isaac said before Him: Master of the Universe, are they my children and not Your children? At Sinai, when they accorded precedence to “We will do” over “We will listen” before You, didn’t You call them, “My son, My firstborn son Israel” (Exodus 4:22)? Now that they have sinned, are they my children and not Your children?
ועוד כמה חטאו כמה שנותיו של אדם שבעים שנה דל עשרין דלא ענשת עלייהו פשו להו חמשין דל עשרין וחמשה דלילותא פשו להו עשרין וחמשה
And furthermore, how much did they actually sin? How long is a person’s life? Seventy years. Subtract the first twenty years of his life. One is not punished for sins committed then, as in heavenly matters, a person is only punished from age twenty. Fifty years remain for them. Subtract twenty-five years of nights, and twenty-five years remain for them.
דל תרתי סרי ופלגא דצלויי ומיכל ודבית הכסא פשו להו תרתי סרי
Subtract twelve and a half years during which one prays and eats and uses the bathroom, and twelve and a half years remain for them.
ופלגא אם אתה סובל את כולם מוטב ואם לאו פלגא עלי ופלגא עליך ואם תמצא לומר כולם עלי הא קריבית נפשי קמך
If You can endure them all and forgive the sins committed during those years, excellent. And if not, half of the sins are upon me to bear and half upon You. And if You say that all of them, the sins of all twelve and a half years that remain, are upon me, I sacrificed my soul before You and You should forgive them due to my merit.
Yitzchak takes our side. He takes the side of the sinner because he is open to the pain of others. His spiritual heroism is not running away from vulnerability but letting it turn him into someone more compassionate. Yitzchak knew, first-hand, how challenging it can be at times to obey a Divine command. But that religious virtuosity does not turn Yitzchak into a judgmental, self-righteous individual who looks down on those who do not live up to his example. On the contrary, he knows that it is sometimes nearly impossible to live up to all of God’s expectations and, having once bared his neck to receive his father’s knife, he is subsequently willing to stick out his neck on behalf of us.
In the Torah, Avraham is the one who bargains. Yitzchak is so passive in the Torah. His older brother is abusive. His father takes him from place to place and nearly kills him. His wife and son manipulate him. In the Talmud, however, Yitzchak is not truly passive. His apparent passivity is unspent spiritual capital that he can deploy on behalf of his children. From being the victim, he has accrued merit that can rescue us when no one else can.
Yitzchak is the hero of Rosh Hashanah and we need to turn our vulnerability into spiritual capital and empathy for others that can rescue them just as the Talmud imagines Yitzchak rescuing us.
We are needed. We have to stay in the game. Our families need us to stay committed and to stay involved and invested. Our community needs us to donate our time and our money so that we can come together and be something greater than the sum of our parts. The world beyond the shul, outside the eruv, if you will, needs our tefilot, our prayers and our activism. Yitzchak is a hero of Rosh Hashanah and he can be a hero to us this year as we absorb unexpected news from the world beyond and also absorb unanticipated developments in our personal lives, some positive and some negative, and still remain steadfast in our commitments and beliefs.
We are always vulnerable. Yitzchak reminds us that vulnerability can have spiritual power. It can help us feel for others who are also vulnerable in more obvious ways.
It isn’t just the newspapers but the dishes themselves that remind us of the passage of time and our inability to control events. When Sara and I took possession of our Pesach dishes nearly ten years ago we had not yet met our two youngest children. We could not imagine that service for twenty-five would one day no longer be sufficient for our Pesach meals.
There is no safety. There is never total safety. It isn’t the newspapers that reveal that. Life reveals that vulnerability when we pay attention. On Rosh Hashanah we should pay attention. We should pay attention, not to become paralyzed by fear, but to be galvanized by compassion.
There are forces that will act on us in the coming weeks and months. How should we react? Sometimes we shape events and sometimes events occur despite us, but we make meaning out of them all the same. I promise that there will be an item this year in the newspaper, or a breaking news item on your phone that will shock you. Your family and circle of friends will expand and contract in ways that you might not predict.
You can’t choose whether or not you are vulnerable. You can choose whether or not you will hide that vulnerability. You cannot choose whether or not people will be in need and at risk. You can choose whether or not you will deny that reality and build a psychological wall between you and other people and their demands, their suffering, and their expectations.
Let’s decide to read the bad news and cultivate sympathy for the suffering of all human beings. Let’s decide to invest our love in other people, even though we can never keep them fully safe. And when waves of anxiety rise within us, let us channel that feeling of vulnerability, just like Yitzchak did, towards feeling greater sympathy and concern for those are even more vulnerable than we. Shannah Tovah.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 