People of Doubt, People of Faith

People of Doubt, People of Faith
Rosh HaShanah Second Day
September 14th, 2007

Everyone knows the main outline of today's Torah reading. After many years of barrenness, after conflict with Hagar and Ishmael, Sarah and Abraham have a son, Yitzchak, Isaac. At some indeterminable time, God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He is prepared to do so. Leaving the servant boys at the base of the mountain, they ascend to the top where Abraham binds up his son on a stone altar. Only at the last moment does an angel forbid Abraham from fulfilling God's command. Seeing a ram caught in the nearby thicket, Abraham sacrifices the ram instead of Isaac. That is the basic Torah text. There is more hidden between the lines and between the letters than there is written text. The Torah text begs us to ask questions, particularly about faith.

I.

I wonder about Abraham and whether he had any doubts about what he was doing. After quite a struggle to have an heir, with the inclusion of Hagar and Ishmael into he family matrix and all the discord it sowed, this God to whom Abraham harkened without a doubt to leave Haran and go to the unknown land of Canaan, this very self same God says to Abraham: "Go kill." After all, that is what you do to a sacrifice. "Go kill your only son, the son you love, Yitzchak!" The structure of the text clearly wants us to understand the pain and magnitude of the situation. "Where," "how," "when," most of all – "why?"- are not answered. Abraham doesn't say a word and sets out forthwith to obey God's command. The Torah's silence is deafening. The High Holy Day Torah nusah lets the wail and the pain be heard but there are no words. What is Abraham thinking? "Is this the same loving God that led me here? How can God want my only heir to die and to die by my own hand? Can I possibly do this? What can be the reason for the death of my son? Sarah and I are old. Hagar and Ishmael are gone. Who will take care of us? What will happen to our faith?" Then they go up the mountain. Only Isaac has questions and Abraham answers them bluntly, evasively. They arrive at the top of the mountain and wordlessly Abraham goes about the business of binding Isaac on the altar and Isaac allows his binding also wordlessly. What were they both thinking? Did they have any doubts? Was Abraham thinking: "Will God really make me go through with this? Why doesn't my son struggle? Why doesn't he scream? Why doesn't he run away?" Is Yitzchak thinking: "Is this how my life is going to end? Why doesn't God stop my father? Should I move? How can my father do this to me?"

These are my questions. Maybe they are your questions. Surely there are more questions. These are questions that are asked in different ways in the Rabbinic Midrashim.

In the end, the angel speaks for God and stops Abraham, but God does not talk to him. How does Abraham feel? "Does God still love me after being so faithful? Does my son love me, after all, I almost killed him? Why does the angel talk and not God? Will God ever talk to me again? Maybe He really did want me to do this, despite what the angel said. Was it really God who talked to me in the first place?"
I don't know if Abraham or if Yitzchak had these questions. I know that I do. And I can't answer them. I also know that Abraham and Yitzchak are held up to us in the Torah and in our liturgy as men of faith. The opening of every Amidah begins by saying that we are praying to Elohay Avraham v'aylohay Yitzchak, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac, besides also Elohay Ya'akov, the God of Jacob. In other prayers they are upheld as believers in and celebrants ofGod. The covenant with Israel is renewed in each of them. Somehow, the two who ascended the mountain descend from the mountain and live on as men of faith despite the human doubts which most assuredly accompanied them. There must have been an internal dialogue between doubt and faith.

II.

I have been thinking about this for quite some time because Rabbi David Wolpe, in his column Musings, in the New York Jewish Week, sited the Kotzker Rebbe, one of the famous and revered Torah thinkers, on this story. The Kotzker Rebbe asks his students: what moment of the entire ordeal of the binding of Isaac was most difficult for Abraham?This is a great question. It is an intriguing question. What are our options?

It could be the very beginning, when God gives the command and Abraham has to round up his helpers, the necessary stuff, and get Isaac and make up some excuse to Sarah for taking a hike. Imagine: knowing what you know you are going to do, and have to give your spouse such a lame excuse.

It could be the middle of the story, the very essence when they are on top of the mountain. Imagine Isaac of any age, tied up with rope on top of the rocks lying on wood. He has got to know what is going on. Abraham has quite a big knife in his hand and is ready to kill his son. Can you imagine standing over your son or daughter with a knife?

Or maybe it is the end. Abraham didn't kill Yitzchak but they both have to live with the knowledge of what they have both done. Yitzchak went along with it and Abraham nearly did it. Abraham heard God's command. Yitzchak didn't. He has to assume that his father is following an order from God, but Yitzchak didn't hear any such thing. They have to walk home knowing what has just happened.

The Kotzker Rebbe's answer was: the most difficult moment was coming down from the mountain. I think that the Kotzker Rebbe was right. Both of them, Abraham and Yitzchak, if they were going to continue on their path, if they were going to pray to the God again, they were going to have to live with their doubts, while having faith. They had to worship to and listen for God despite doubting in Him or what He said. They had to somehow live simultaneously with faith and with doubt.

III.

I have been thinking about these remarks ever since I read the short piece by Rabbi Wolpe. I find things like that during the year and label them "High Holy Day Sermon." I am always collecting. This appealed to me. It is the existential religious question. It is a chord running through the juncture of our prayers and our lives. There is a definitive schema of beliefs that defines the uniqueness of Judaism. While Judaism predominantly was written in a halachic genre, it was under girded by specific beliefs about God, morality and our place in the scheme of things. I find it very difficult to contemplate living life without faith in God, even as moments of doubt are inescapable. Perhaps the greatest exemplar of this is Moses. The Torah records that he doubted himself. He doubted the Israelites. He even doubted God. When Pharaoh denies his first requests and makes life worse, Moses will doubt his mission. He will experience no less than ten trials in the Sinai Wilderness. Yet it will be Moses who is the singular person to meet God "face to face." His concluding speeches in Deuteronomy are proclamations of deep faith. In some mysterious way, despite the doubts or because of the doubts, but certainly with the doubts Moses will reassert his faith in God, in himself, and in us. While he will not abjure is doubts, he will surmount them. So does Abraham. So does Isaac.

What about us? Do we have our doubts? Do we doubt ourselves, our strength, our knowledge, our potential, our love? Maybe not as dramatically, for all to see, but do we not all walk the same path as Abraham, Isaac, and Moses? Are we not challenged to live positive, active lives while having doubts about our decisions, about ourselves? Do we not, in moments of anguish, doubt God? Yet, do we not have exemplars of people of doubt who were simultaneouslypeople of faith?

Despite being of different religions, there is a great deal of commonality between people of faith. Just as I was beginning to compose these thoughts, I was astonished – maybe I shouldn't have been – to read about the letters that Mother Teresa wrote throughout her life that were supposed to be destroyed upon her death and are now being published as support for her candidacy for sainthood. The book is called "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light."

I have been able to read excerpts from the book in articles on the web. The entire subject is very complex. Clearly, Mother Teresa's life embodied great action, service on behalf of the abject poor and sick in Calcutta. Her public persona radiated great faith in God. Yet internally, the questions I raised from today's Torah portion about Abraham and Yitzchak are transposed into her own language, as her own.

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak."

"Lord, my God, you have thrown [me] away as unwanted – unloved. I call. I cling. I want, and there is no one to answer, no, no one. Alone. Where is my faith? Even deep down right in there is nothing. I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart."

"I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?"
"The smile is a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"

IV.

In reading Mother Teresa's words I feel her pain and empathize with her pathos. Every person who seeks God, who longs for His/Her presence, who turns to altar or ark in silent meditation, re-enacts, with or without the drama, the questions of Abraham and Yitzchak, the questions of Mother Teresa, even as we have the faith by which to pray, even as she had the strength to serve for decades. Our faiths are built on sacred texts. They posit beliefs about God. God speaks. People hear and people see. There is the tension, religious dilemma. We do not know what was going on in Abraham and Yitzchak's minds and hearts. Yet we affirm: from the crucible they emerge. From the test they walk forward. From the challenge they remain with or discover new faith. Their lives are woven into ours and give us thegift of faith, even with doubts.

Perhaps the Rabbis who chose this Torah text for Rosh HaShanah a holy day so focused on God, with so much prayer to God, did so explicitly. They lived after the second destruction of God's house, the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. They had to have doubts about God, about the Jewish people, about our collective destiny and our individual fates. They melded the two ends of the spectrum, strong faith and strong doubt into one dynamic. They heard God's voice in the words of Torah and of the prophets, and responded with their own. The mystery and the glory of being a Jew is the ability and the desire to grasp both ends at the same time. It is easy to doubt. The world and life have no lack of that. Each murder, each war, each illness, each failure, provide us with ample fodder for doubt. It is much more spiritual work to have faith, to believe, to turn to God, to pray, to enact the rituals of the conversation between God and Israel, between God and us. That is the challenge. That is the splendor. That is what it means to be the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Men of doubt. Men of faith. While the Torah gives us little information on the subject we may surmise that Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah faced their challenges and were women of doubt and women of faith, too.

Conclusion

I write each sermon separately. All of my sermons are myriad pictures that make up my composite being. Yesterday's sermon embraced great faith as I feel it, and believe in God as I experience birth, of our own children, of yours, of our grandchildren. These days specifically, if I can avoid worrying about what page we are on and what happens next, I talk to God, motivated internally and externally by the daveners from the lectern. When I step out into the sunshine, bask in the rays of this sanctuary when you are not here, when I hear the loud, united voice of our congregation in Shema Yisrael, I feel something metaphysical, spiritual, that affirms my faith in God. When I read Torah and hear the prophets chanted in haftorahs, something eternal lives and envelopes me in it. And there are moments of doubt. Just because I am a Rabbi, God doesn't especially talk to me. I remember once in my youth in an empty classroom in the Seminary on a sunny afternoon I thought that if I could just pray hard enough, if I could have enough intention, psychic, spiritual energy, I could make God answer. It didn't happen. It was disappointing. Clearly Mother Teresa experienced that too. And yet I stand here proclaiming faith in God as Judaism teaches me. I will bless God in moments of weakness, in moments of doubt besides moments of strength, moments of faith. Even when I was mad at God for my father's death, I proclaimed His holiness through the words of Kaddish. I knew very well what I was saying. Maybe that is the grandeur and magnificence of these days and of being a Jew: to be a person of doubt and a person of faith at the same time. Maybe that is the real personal and spiritual growth of these focused hours.

I don't know how to subtract from doubt, but I know that being here, repeating the words, searching my heart, praying with you, holding the babies, adds faith.

I wish you a year of "adding faith", in God, in each other and in ourselves.

L'Shanah Tikateyvu v'Taychataymu,
May we write and be written for a good year.                          

Amen.