Jews Sans Fronteres has a moving post about sucking in the dust of 9/11 in Manhattan and then breathing it in in house demolitions in Palestine a year later– and this with a foto of the Empire State Building lit green for Eid last night. It's been a long time since 9/11. I feel we're making progress.
I drove to synagogue today, past a family walking to a mosque, and heard the Abraham and Isaac story from Genesis, the binding, with all the terror that story has always had for me. The rabbi offered Rabbi Harold Kushner's interpretation (Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People): that the "test" God gives Abraham is to test whether he'll challenge him. Abraham had done so earlier in Genesis, at Sodom and Gomorrah, when he bargained with God over how many good people there had to be in a town for God not to destroy it. On that occasion God had dropped his number. But this time Abraham fails to challenge God, and thereby fails the test, Kushner says; and yet God loves him anyway and rewards him. I don't like that interpretation because it wishes away some of the fearsomeness of the tale and goes against its actual language. "Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only beloved son from me," God says, and the angel repeats the same language. They're both honoring the idea of sacrifice. So I see the tyrannical father in that story, both of them, God and Abraham. And a father trying to rationalize physical punishment of his son. A lot of the bible is completely anachronistic. Like the wide acceptance of concubines, and the sacrifice of animals.
There's prophecy in the binding story, too. The angel says that Abraham will be rewarded for his faith. "[Y]our descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. And
through your descendants, all the nations of the earth shall be
blessed." That goes right to Jewishness today: the belief among Jews that a nation cannot be strong unless it respects the freedom of Jews inside it. And also: owning the gates of the Palestinians, their homes. That strikes me as the real dilemma of Jewishness. We're exceptional, so valuable to nations, and yet we possess someone else's gates. I say "we" because there was an Israeli flag on the altar, of course. Our generation gets to figure out that dilemma at last. The unbinding. Happy Rosh Hashanah, Happy Eid.
