Rabbi Jim Morgan
Sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5773
September 16, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel
Shana Tova uMetukah. I am Rabbi Jim Morgan and I want to begin tonight on a note of gratitude. This is my first year as the rabbi of Worship and Study and I am honored and humbled that I stand before you tonight in the presence of my two predecessors: my teacher, Rabbi Norman Janis, and his teacher, Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, who w as also the founder of this minyan and a transformative figure in the Jewish life of this university and in the Jewish lives of so many of the people in this room. I have big shoes to fill, but also
broad shoulders to stand on, and I hope I can convey how grateful I am that both of you are here to guide me.
I want to tell you a story, beloved of my younger son Moses.
A teenager, orphaned as a small child, idolizes his father, a scientist and an inventor. He looks up his father’s former partner, who now works as the lead researcher for a giant biotech company. Intrigued by the work going on in the labs, our hero does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps into his hoodie and bites him on the neck. Soon, the boy—let’s call him Peter Parker—finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, cool wristbands that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk,
and a sudden need to seek revenge against bullies at school and criminals everywhere….
“But wait,” says Moses. “Shouldn’t the story go like this?”
A teenager, orphaned as a small child, has a best friend whose father runs a giant biotech company. One day, the two boys visit the lab and our hero—let’s call him Peter Parker—does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps on his arm and bites him. Soon, Peter finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, including super strength and odd little holes at the base of his wrists that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk….
Why, Moses wanted to know, are the stories different? Why does the spider jump down the hoodie of Peter Parker #1 but on the arm of Peter Parker #2? Why does Peter Parker #1 need to invent silk shooters but Peter Parker #2 just produces the silk as another form of bodily fluid? (I should acknowledge that Moses didn’t ask that second question—I did!) Behind these questions, I think, is a deeper one: which one is the true story? How do we know what really happened?
I tried to answer Moses’s question, suggesting that comic book movies, like the Greek myths he also loves, can vary details without losing the essence of the story. Different versions of stories can have different details, but I’m not sure I convinced him. Isn’t there one true story and all the others have
got it wrong?
Let me tell you another story. Let me return to a story we tell every year.
A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn, he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, and a flint stone. They are going on a journey. They travel together for a few days in the company of some servant boys. When the father—let’s call him Avraham—sees the top of the hill he has in mind, he tells the boys to stay with the ass and that his son—let’s call him Yitzhak—and he will go, make a sacrifice at the top of the hill, and return. On the way up, Yitzhak asks his father about the ram for the sacrifice—Avraham hedges. At the top, Yitzhak builds an altar of wood and Avraham binds him upon it. He raises the axe, but at that very moment, and angel calls out to him: “Avraham, Avraham!” “Here I am,” he replies and as he looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes.
But wait, someone might say, you’ve got the story wrong. Let’s return again.
A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, a flint stone. They travel for several days until they reach the base of a mountain. Leaving their servants behind, the father—let’s call him Abraham—tells his son—let’s call him Isaac—to follow him up the hill to make a sacrifice to God. “Where is the ram for the sacrifice,” asks Isaac. “God will provide,” responds Abraham.
At the top, Isaac builds an altar of the wood and Abraham binds him upon it. He raises his axe and brings it down, plunging it into Isaac’s heart. “Abraham, Abraham,” calls an angel. “Here I am,” he replies, and as he
looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes. Why, you might ask, did we change the story? Why did Abraham kill Isaac in the second story if Avraham didn’t kill Yitzhak in the first one? Why did the angel come too late in the second story? Why didn’t God intervene sooner? And in any case, which one is the true story? After all, the fate of Isaac is not just a random detail like the location of Peter Parker’s spider
bite—it determines our entire experience of the story.
Hints to some of these questions lie in our tradition itself. In Genesis, Abraham is prevented from killing Isaac, but nonetheless, Isaac disappears. Abraham returns alone to the servant boys, returns alone to Sarah, and mourns Sarah’s death alone. Isaac reappears on the scene only when Rebecca arrives on the scene. The rabbis have lots of suggestions: Abraham sent him away to avoid the evil eye, Abraham sent him to study
Torah, God took him up to the Garden of Eden for three years to recover from his trauma. That last one seems only a step away from a version that perhaps belongs more comfortably in spring at Easter time rather than in the fall at Rosh Hashana: Abraham did kill Isaac, who arose to heaven and three years later arose again from the dead to continue Abraham’s line.
I should stress that these are all Jewish, rabbinic versions of the Akedah. I take them from the prologue of a wonderful study of the Akedah by Shalom Spiegel called The Last Trial, which illuminates how successive generations shape their understanding of the story of the Akedah to make sense of their past and present, of their own lives in relation to their tradition and to the surrounding culture.(Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. and intro. by Judah Goldin [Woodstock, VT, 1993]). In particular, he’s concerned with the use of the Akedah—specifically in the version in which Isaac is killed—by Jews who experienced the Crusades and mass martyrdom. In such a reality, the horror of a father killing his son (in this case to avoid forced conversion) was perhaps less unthinkable than it would otherwise be.
For these generations of Jews, the Akedah functioned as myth—not “a myth,” as in a widespread but false belief or as in a story from this or that traditional mythology, but as myth. Rabbi Neil Gilman defines myth as “a structure through which a community organizes and makes sense of its experience.”(Neil Gilman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew [Philadelphia: JPS, 1990], 26). Gilman gives the example of psychoanalysis, in which the Freudian myth of id, ego, and superego makes sense of the often confusing vagaries of human behavior. For religious communities, says Gillman, these myths are contained in scripture and generate liturgies, rituals, and interpretations that shape the community’s experience, both in the sense of transmitting tradition and in the sense of making sense of the often confusing and sometimes traumatic events of life.
In our postmodern, postcritical condition, it has become difficult to inhabit religious myths in an uncritical way. The pressure of what we might loosely call “science” or “criticism” has pushed us away from our
stories towards ones that seem to make more rational or ethical sense: the scientific method, evolution, psychoanalysis, Marxism, Zionism, feminism, environmentalism, Star Trek—the list can go on, but all of them, I think, offer some variation of a mythic structuring of the world that their adherents can grasp hold of, can use to make sense of the world. And I should also be clear that despite many claims to the contrary, these mythic structures are not necessarily mutually exclusive: the animosity of certain psychoanalysts towards religion (and certain rabbis against Freud) strikes me as willful blindness to one’s own mythic assumptions more than as a triumphant unmasking of the other’s bad faith, but I digress…
The challenge I see here in my juxtaposition of stories is that the first set of questions about Spider Man seem to come up more readily than that second set of questions about Avraham and Yitzhak. The first, in case you
haven’t realized, are based on the distinctions between two recent movie versions of the story. The second set of questions stems from midrashim cited in a fairly obscure book, not likely to inspire a film version. But this second set of questions are full of resonance on this day of on which we proclaim the sovereignty of God (whatever that means) and celebrate the creation of the world (and let’s be honest—we don’t really know what that means either!). Which questions are we more likely to hear from our children? Which ones did I hear from my children?
Let me be clear that I don’t mean to denigrate the first set of questions. Nor do I mean to suggest that we discourage our children from watching super-hero movies—on the contrary, such stories, like other children’s stories, both literature and movies, provide heroes to identify with and emotional
struggles to recognize in oneself. Harry Potter is a hero not only because of his magical ability, but also because of his self-sacrifice and his capacity for both friendship and self-doubt. Peter Parker’s frightening new power brings forces of chaos and death into his life, forces he struggles mightily to bring under control. These stories provide mythic resonance for our children’s lives, for our own lives.
The challenge is how not to lose track of our own stories, our Jewish stories. In her recent book, In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood “argues persuasively that myths have become detached from traditional religion,
and thus from traditional religious imagery" (Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012, p. 39-40.) Atwood writes, “I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as—for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used…. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.”
All very good, but why should we, as Jews who care about our tradition and the questions that it has engendered over the generations, be satisfied with this detachment? Can’t we love both Hermione Grainger and Rebecca? Can’t we thrill to Spider Man and to the heroic Rabbis of the Talmud? Of course we can, but here we get caught up on the question of truth. I remember several anxious parents at a Hebrew School orientation, concerned that we would teach their children bible stories, concerned, I imagine, that we would suggest to the children that these stories are true, concerned that we would attempt to turn their children into uncritical believers.
Questions of truth become irrelevant when we’re talking about Spider-Man or Star Wars—no one insists upon the literal truth of Harry Potter, so it can go about the business of mythmaking without interference from skeptics or true believers. The bible has not been so lucky, despite a legacy of midrashim that encourages the free play of the exegetical imagination upon the scriptural text. Our stories, our Jewish stories, get caught between the Scylla of fundamentalist cant that insists upon their literal truth and the Charybdis of rationalist denunciations of the bible as retrograde and false. If the bible is “literally true” (or literally false, for that matter), if there’s only one answer, if Peter Parker can be bitten on the arm or under the hoodie but not both, then these questions become inadmissible, silly even, because there’s one answer and its not worth discussing.
But stories don’t work that way—they are retold, in different times and different places with different goals. These days, if Peter Parker is a cool kid, he must be wearing a hoodie. If he’s wearing a hoodie, how can the spider get to his arm? It can’t, so it goes down his neck. If a Christian tells the story of Isaac, shouldn’t he prefigure Christ, die and be resurrected? If a Muslim tells the story, shouldn’t the son be called Ishmael and represent the true descendent of Abraham? And this shouldn’t frighten us—it’s a mark of the power of our stories that we, no less than our Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, can retell them in different configurations—even with different endings—in order to make meaning from them and from our lives. It is a mark of the power of our tradition that we return to the same stories year after year and make them new. But this we must do, and ideally more than only once a year at the high holidays. We must make a commitment to engage with our own stories, with our own myths, as regularly and as readily as we do with so many others that inform our culture. Only thus can we grow Jewishly and, what is equally important, do our part to help grow Judaism.
I wish you a year of sweetness, a year of success and life and peace—and a year of meaningful and challenging Jewish stories.
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