By Rabbi Gail Fisher
ROSH HASHANAH 5787
Shabbat shalom and l’shana tova!
How I spent my summer vacation: As you know, I stayed in Jerusalem for a month, which included about a week and a half studying at the Shalom Hartman Institute. I had the overall theme of “abuse of power” already in mind for this HH season, and then the theme at Hartman was “being human” in all its aspects, from which I got a lot of ideas to share with you.
Our machzor offers two possible Torah readings for Rosh Hashana. One is the Creation story (הַיּוֹם הֲרַת עוֹלָם), and the other one is the Akeida, the binding of Isaac, which is the one we read here. I am going to refer to both of these in my drash today.
Here is the story of the creation of humanity that we find in Genesis chapter 1:
And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God …
God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”
Nachmanides (13th C Spain) interpreted mastering the earth to mean “He gave them power and dominion over the earth to do as they wish with the cattle, the reptiles, and all that crawl in the dust, and to build, and to pluck up that which is planted, and from its hills to dig copper, and other similar things. This is included in what He said and over all the earth.”
In his lecture at Hartman, Yehuda Kurtzer emphasized that this teaches us two things:
- We were created with remarkable agency over the world surrounding us. Like God, we had the freedom to choose – to make bad as well as good choices. Humanity was given enormous power before it had demonstrated that it would use this power responsibly. Kurtzer said that being human is the closest you can get to God in our world. It soon became clear that people were going to choose the path of evil probably more often than not. After all, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil resulted in our being expelled from the Garden, which was followed very shortly by the first murder. We have the story of Noah, we have the story of the Tower of Babel – these people need laws!
- ALL people were made in God’s image. This predates the particularism of the rest of the Bible! There’s no specialness about any group of people, including the Jewish people – all of humanity is little less than divine. After all, this story dates back to אָדָם הַרִשׁוֹן, not to Abraham. This also isn’t limited to some elite class like kings or priests or the rich. It’s all of us. Tomer Persico taught this to us at Hartman; he expanded on this idea in writing his book In God’s Image. Many ancient traditions distinguished between people who were born to rule and people who were born to serve. In The Republic, Plato quoted a myth that rulers were created using gold, lesser officials using silver, and farmers and other workers using iron. The Rigveda portrayed a creation story that showed each of the castes as coming from a different part of an original being.
The logical conclusion we can draw from knowing that God has no boundaries, no master, and no external laws forcing His behavior, is that being made in the image of God means to possess extraordinary behavioral autonomy. We were given enormous agency over the whole world. If our natural instinct was goodness, and our inner compass was perfectly tuned to the Divine frequency, we wouldn’t need any limitations. EXCEPT the world didn’t turn out that way, so laws were introduced to serve as boundaries on our behavior.
I want to emphasize this: the baseline condition of being human is essentially unlimited power over the rest of our environment. That’s how God saw us at the time we were created. ALL of us, not just extraordinary people.
Let’s move on to Genesis 22 and the Akeida. Abraham is an example of somebody who has a good moral compass, who is in a real, sustained relationship with God, and yet his very certainty – NOT moral corruption – blinds him to anybody else’s perspective. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, the son of his old age, and Abraham moves swiftly to obey. The Torah says, וַיַּשְׁכֵּ֨ם אַבְרָהָ֜ם בַּבֹּ֗קֶר – he got up early in the morning. The Rabbis in the Talmud interpret this as showing his eagerness to obey God. He’s operating just as we saw in Genesis 1 – total power, total certainty. No hesitation in his actions. Inside, as a father, he may have been upset, yet he acted decisively in a world where this wouldn’t be an unusual request for his god to have made. Child sacrifice was regularly practiced by peoples in the ancient world – a recognized, although terrible, act of ultimate devotion to one’s god.
What evidence do we have that this was an abuse of power? Abraham is Isaac’s father, an absolute disparity in power. Furthermore, Isaac is silent throughout this ordeal except for asking where the lamb is for the sacrifice. And when the angel speaks at the very last minute, staying Abraham’s hand when it’s already raised with the knife, Isaac goes his own way – we are not told where – and we don’t see him again until he meets Rebekah. Abraham has all the power in the relationship, and note that he doesn’t even initiate a conversation with Isaac. He is so sure of himself that there is no room for anybody else’s point of view. There isn’t space for Isaac – the weak, the vulnerable – to speak. Abraham is doing what God demands of him, and he cannot see the consequence to his son, whose welfare he is responsible for. Isaac’s whole future is about to be erased in the glare of Abraham’s certainty. It is only the angel who stops him, not his doubts.
The terrifying thing about abuse of power is that the person exercising the power does not necessarily perceive himself as an abuser. Abraham wasn’t sadistic and he wasn’t morally corrupt, as we’ve seen in other stories about him. He was completely sincere. It’s frightening when somebody who is so sure of himself has power over somebody else who isn’t in a position to challenge him. A self-righteous person makes those around him or her uncomfortable, but can be devastating to anybody not in a position to talk back.
Humanity was given power over the entire world in Genesis 1. In Genesis 22, Abraham believed that God had given him a commandment that essentially gave him power over his son, another human being created in the image of God. This is qualitatitvely different. Although Isaac had less power in that relationship, he was not less human.
So we have learned that the baseline condition of being human is extraordinary power and agency, coupled with an imperfect capability to recognize our own limits. In the Akeida, God commanded Abraham. Abraham already had power, so the perceived Divine commandment gave him certainty that the exercise of that power was righteous. Isaac had less power and was vulnerable. Certainty and power can overrun somebody who doesn’t have enough room to lift up his voice.
So where does this leave us?
- Power: We were given extraordinary agency at our creation.
- Power plus certainty: Abraham believed that his actions were divinely commanded.
- The lesson of the Akeida: Power needs limits. It cannot be absolute.
The work of the Ten Days on which we have just embarked is to examine ourselves. (pause) Where might my own certainty blind me to the vulnerability of somebody else?
Kein t’yeh ratzon.