Vayera

Vayera – Jody Hirsh

Jody Hirsh is the Judaic Education Director of the Milwaukee JCC, and formerly the Programme Director of the Hong Kong JCC. He is also a playwright and author and won the 2005 Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and an OBIE award for his 1989 play, Seeing Double.

The story of the Akeidah, the "Binding" of Isaac, is certainly one of the most terrifying and troubling accounts in all of the Torah. The Rabbis since the dawn of Rabbinical discussion have been arguing its merits and problems. How could the same Abraham who argued with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah have acceded passively to God’s demand that he sacrifice his favourite son? Whose test was it ... a test of Abraham, or a test of God? Where was Sarah in this whole story? What did Abraham think about for three days while he journeyed to the place that God promised to show him for the sacrifice? How could an Israelite and Prophetic tradition which decries human sacrifice reconcile Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice a human child to his God? How could such a "test" of Abraham’s love for God be taken seriously? The questions mount up.

It is particularly powerful, that this sparse Torah account continues to captivate our hearts and imagination in every generation. In his brilliant 1967 book, The Last Trial, the scholar Shalom Spiegel points out that in the Middle Ages, the murdered Jews of those oppressed generations wrote intricate poems based on the midrashim (rabbinical stories) that claimed that Abraham, in fact, sacrificed Isaac who was then brought back to life! For them, the story symbolized at once the horror and hope of resisting anti-Semitism.

In our own times, artists and poets have continued to find resonance and meaning in the Akeidah. The artist George Segal, when asked to create a sculpture to memorialize the anti-Vietnam War Student demonstrators killed at Kent State University, created his unforgettable 1978 sculpture, Abraham and Isaac. In bronze images, he portrays the figures of an American workman with his knife at the throat of a student wearing love beads and shorts: it is the older generation, he seems to say, that sends their children to war. It is the children who die. He later created an "Israeli" version of the same sculpture using, as models, the Israel sculptor Menashe Kadishman and his son.

Last week, on November 4, represents two yahrzeits, which are intimately tied up with our parshah. November 4 is the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin. At the funeral, U.S. President Bill Clinton, in his famous "Shalom Chaver" speech, was the only speaker to refer to the Parshah, pointing out the near sacrifice of the Biblical Isaac, and lamenting the sacrifice of "our Isaac".

The second “yahrzeit” is that of British anti-war poet, Wilfred Owen, who died in action during the First World War on November 4, 1918 ... ninety years ago. One of his most powerful poems, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, resonates with the Segal sculpture (see photo) created sixty years later:

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Issac, the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, the fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there.
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not a hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.