Love Hurts - Drash for Rosh Hashanah 5763

In this past year we have seen:

• The collapse of the World Trade Center
• The collapse of hopes for peace in the Middle East
• The collapse of our faith that our government will protect the fundamentals of our lives: our environment and our freedom and our sense of justice

During this past year we have all in some way lost something:

• our loved ones
• our opportunities
• our sense of self
• our inspiration

Like Abraham in today's text, we all, in one way or another, have been faced with the reality that we cannot have all that we want to have, do all that we want to do, or be all that we want to be. We have all been faced with difficult choices of how to live in a difficult world. And like Abraham, the choices have torn us apart. We have had to say "no" to things that are dear to us, and to struggle with how to respond to the things that threaten us. We have seen that there is, indeed, evil in the world. Yet, we stand here at the beginning of a new year, at what should be a time of promise, reconciliation, and renewal.

There is a quote from Dag Hammerskold:

For all that has been: Thank you.
To all that will be: Yes

How in the world can we say that? Where do we get the chutzpah to go into this new year - any year- believing in the potential for goodness, or justice, or joy? Believing that, in fact, this is what God wants for us and this world? I'll tell you, in our reading today, Hagar isn't saying that and neither is Abraham.

I see today's text as a story of great sacrifice and great faith, as the climax of what Abraham's life is about. It is here that Abraham makes a momentous decision to choose God, and he almost loses his heart in the process. Wait a minute, you might ask, don't I mean tomorrow's reading? Well, give me a chance to explain myself. I am going to talk a little about tomorrow's story, because I think it helps to look at the story of the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael as part of a larger movement of spirit within Abraham that isn't completed until Mount Moriah. So I'm going to talk about what happens on Mount Moriah before I talk about Isaac and Ishmael.

But let's set the scene a little. Here we have Abraham, who all these years waited for a son, got a son - Ishmael, but not the right son, waited some more. Abraham finally gets his promised son but he isn't everything Abraham wished for. Lets face it, Ishmael is the son who makes sense - the eldest, one who seems better suited to getting by in the world. What is this Isaac? He's a wimp, a nebbish. All he seems to do is complicate and disrupt things. And then Abraham is asked to send away his first son, the son he understands better, the son he would have been happy to have a future through - to preserve the well-being of this less-formed son. Where does Abraham get the faith and strength to do that? How easy would it be for any of us to part with someone we had invested so much in?

I believe we don't really get the answer to that question until Abraham takes Isaac up Mr. Moriah. So many commentators talk about how Abraham's willingness to bind Isaac was an act of great faith, and there is much to get out of reading the story that way. I also think you can see it as exactly the opposite - as Abraham's expression of despair, his doubt in God's promises to him.

I do not believe God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; but I think Abraham thought God did. After all, child sacrifice was an accepted custom at that time. I can imagine Abraham, in a dark moment, questioning whether he was being weak in not trying to secure his future in this way. I can imagine him still grieving the loss of one child, wondering if he'd been duped by his God all along. Significantly, the word for God that is used when Abraham hears this so-called test is Elohim, not Adonai. Elohim can be used for a lot of things - including idols, false gods. Those more tangible, less ambiguous gods that we are tempted to turn to when life becomes overwhelming. I can imagine Abraham, who has been amazingly patient with God up to now, finally losing faith in God's promise of a future of blessing through Isaac. I see him wanting to take some action to be secure in a harsh world and deciding to sacrifice Isaac. We can get a lot out of Torah sometimes by looking at it the same way we would look at dreams. Sometimes in dream interpretation they suggest that you see each person in the story as a part of yourself. We can see Isaac here as Abraham's heart. To Kabbalists, Abraham stands for the quality of chesed - lovingkindness. Where is Abraham's chesed as he is walking up the mountain with his son? He is about to kill it. He might have seen Isaac, the heart of his dreams, his more tender, less understood son, as the weakest part of his life. So that when he takes Isaac up that mountain, he isn't demonstrating his great love of God. He is ready to deny it for the sake of some greater security, for something more practical and concrete. He wants to do something, not wait for the fruition of an impossible dream.

I believe that there was a test for Abraham. And passing the test wasn't demonstrated by Abraham's willingness to kill Isaac. Abraham passed when he discovered he couldn't do it. He could not deny his son life. He simply could not deny love. Remember, in the text, it was not God, but an angel that stayed Abraham's hand. To Jewish mystics, angels are those forces or inclinations inside us that motivate us for good. That angel was Abraham claiming his heart. It was love showing itself to be stronger than fear, pain, doubt, and desolation. It is only after the angel stays Abraham's hand, that the word for God in the text becomes Adonai.

And so, to get back to today's reading - remember today's reading - what Abraham chooses when he chooses between Isaac and Ishmael is to believe in his heart. To have faith in a vision, a promise for the future, that is barely manifest in the life he sees around him.

In today's reading, Abraham chooses Isaac, the promise, over Ishmael, the manifest and practical. And in deciding to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham may have been wondering whether his choice had been worth it, if he could really go through with it. On Mt. Moriah, the angel tells Abraham that God is pleased that he did not withhold Isaac. If Abraham had killed Isaac and turned his back on the demands of God's promise wouldn't that have been withholding Isaac from God? Wouldn't he have been turning his back on the demands of love by killing Isaac rather than tackling the responsibility and pain of nurturing him into full maturity? .How many of our dreams have we torpedoed because we thought they would be too hard to see all the way through to fruition? But God wanted a future through Isaac, through the heart. If Abraham had killed Isaac, he would have been killing the very thing God wanted most from him. When we deny love, we withhold ourselves from the very Source of life.

Our tradition teaches, over and over again, that God wants our hearts. We cannot live in this world, we cannot grow and change, we cannot fight for justice, we cannot be fully what God created us to be without love.

I seldom hear love talked about in a synagogue. Maybe some people think the idea of a loving God is a Christian concept, and that "our" God is a god only of justice and who demands action and obedience. You can certainly read today and tomorrow's stories that way. But to do that is to discount the many other voices in our tradition, such as the voice in the Talmud that said: For every blade of grass there is an angel whispering, grow, grow. Maybe our vision of God is too abstract to allow for such intimate characterizations. But then are we saying that love is not a spiritual value?

Maybe we see love as something that is too passive, too impractical, to have much to say about the work of this world. I believe that Torah as a whole, and the two readings of Rosh Hashanah, in particular, cry out against such viewpoints. If we can learn anything from Torah, and from these two texts, it starts with knowing that there can be no fruitful, just action in this world, there can be no dynamic life, without a foundation in love.

Let me explain what I mean when I talk about love. One writer, Dr. Gerald May, contrasts "efficiency" - the hows of life, how we make a living, how we get through a day, make decisions - with the "why" of life. It is this "why" of life that is what I mean by love. That in us that yearns for and insists on a sense of connection, meaning and belonging and that is the heart of faith. Living out of love, with a deep appreciation of the why of life, is the hardest possible thing we can ever do. It is much easier to deny our deepest dreams, our deepest hopes for ourselves and this world than to live out of them.

Think about it. Our faith, our hearts, are daily assaulted by fear, cynicism and hypocrisy. We are steeped in our daily, habitualized idolization of the God of Productivity or Results - all of the concrete hows of life. We all succumb to the worship of the secure, the tangible. Its not that there is something wrong with efficiency - indeed, we can't live without it. But when our actions become divorced from their source of love - that sense of the "why" of life - we see our efficiency become addictions - addictions to food, work, victimhood - I'm sure you can think of more for this list - all things that anesthetize our hearts.

It is love, the "why" of life, that is the source of our vitality and strength. Ideally, love should be what all of our "hows" are trying to express. Without it we get a person who chooses to work 60+ hour weeks for a better life for the family he or she never sees. An adult child who avoids a dying parent, because he or she can't bear to see the parent "that way," rather than bearing the pain of loss and the bittersweet joy of fully loving another with all their limitations.

We get the kind of social policy where we build more prisons than schools, and so we have more people to put in those prisons. A society that invests more money and respect in its entertainments than in its teachers or spiritual leaders, and so we get "Seinfeld" a show about nothing, forming our vision of life.

A colleague of mine tells a story about his youngest son. At the time, his family lived next door to an older man who was not very friendly. My colleagues's son had a kitten, and one day the neighbor walked angrily into their yard holding the kitten and saying if he ever saw that kitten on his yard again he would poison it. Four days later, the family watched the kitten die, and it was very obvious that the kitten had been poisoned. The family took turns saying all the things they would like to do to get revenge for the kitten. But his youngest son was very quiet. Then it came his turn to talk. He said, "I bet that old man must be very lonely. Maybe we could give him a birthday party or something."

Think about how you respond to that story. What would you say to that child if he were your son? What would happen to that child's heart if it were in your hands? What do you say to that part of yourself that is like that little boy?

Or consider this by Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who spent the last two years of her life in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and died in Auschwitz in 1943. She wrote this as the Nazis were taking away more and more of the Jewish community's possessions, freedom and dignity:

"I believe in God and I believe in people and I say so without embarrassment. Life is hard, but that is no bad thing. If we start by taking ourselves seriously, the rest follows."

Was she simply naive? She volunteered to be among the first Jews sent to Westerbork camp. People who knew her at Auschwitz reported that she was a source of comfort and inspiration for many, and her story continues to inspire others.

I am not talking about "turning the other cheek," or giving murderers a hug. But our actions will time and again fail to result in effective, lasting solutions to the problems that are all around us, if we are not ourselves firmly grounded in love, in a sense of the "why" of life. If we are not oriented toward a higher, broader, stronger hope than expediency and short term security. If we do not allow for a loving God to somehow be at work in this world through us.

Which brings me back again to today's reading. Love hurts. Love makes us vulnerable. Love asks for hard choices. It must have been horrible for Abraham to send Ishmael out into the wilderness in order to safeguard the well-being of the rest of his family. Think what it must have taken for him to somehow trust that the same spirit he felt guiding and sustaining him was somehow working for everyone's good in this. It is searing to let go of the things we think we want and need, in order to claim something we hope is deeper and truer in us, having no way of knowing if we really are choosing the right thing. Ask anyone who has struggled with addiction. And we are all addicted - to our skepticism, our fear, our ideologies, whatever it is we have built as fortresses around our hearts.

Love doesn't mean denying the pain and difficulties of this world. It doesn't mean that we don't fail, or that we will always act "lovingly," with perfect faith and perfect motives. It doesn't mean handing everyone a flower and saying have a nice day. There are things we have to say no to and things we have to act against. But there is, in each of us, that potential for acting beyond fear, beyond safety - for the sake of what matters more to us. For the sake of the sacredness of life as it is lived in each of us day by day. It is possible to live trying to honor the why of life as much as the hows. We can learn to do more than simply deny our failures and our pain; we can live "into" them with clear-eyed engagement, and still see a world of goodness, beauty and potential. As Dr. May wrote:

The only way we can reconcile real openness with the reality of the world and ourselves is through a committed trust in God. We are not wholly good, and neither is the world around us, but God is. And God's grace is not only with us but in us.

I believe that is what Abraham felt when he found the faith to send Hagar and Ishmael away. I believe that it cost him a great deal to choose to trust in God. To choose the why of life represented by Isaac over the how of life in Ishmael. Abraham doesn't appreciate or understand the full meaning of his decision until the doubt and pain of that choice sends him up Mt. Moriah, only to learn that love must be at the core of all action. That love is indeed God's gift and promise to us all.

Theodore Roszak put it this way:

We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of the social order; that if the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build around us.

Martin Buber said it like this:

Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace [the world] with our spirit's arms- and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.

What will it take to be able to say:

To all that has been: Thank You.
To all that will be: Yes?

It will take all of our hearts.