A Returning of Strength

Dear Friends and Family:

We each anticipate Rosh Hashanah in a variety of ways, from the special psalms and shofar blasts during the preceding month of Elul, to the cooking and cleaning which are a part of family celebrations. At many of my colleagues’ workplaces, they have been thinking about the holiday for months and........ well, enough said!

I find comfort in the communal rituals of the season, and in the familial and personal rituals of preparation for the Yamim Noraim. We anticipate what is to come, be it the melodies of the holidays, the reunions with friends and family, or the texts we encounter and re-encounter each year.

In traditional congregations, on the first day we read the story of Sarah’s barrenness and the birth of Isaac. We then read of the expulsion of her maidservant Hagar and Ishmael, who posed a threat to Isaac’s inheritance. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac.

Why do we read these particular stories on Rosh Hashanah? On this day when we celebrate the birth of the world, the selected texts imply that we, mere mortals, cannot appreciate the enormity of Creation, and instead we are asked to examine the concept of God’s Plan through the lens of this one, dysfunctional family.

The story of Ishmael and Hagar is troubling: the text really says nothing to indicate that Ishmael is anything but a devoted son to Abraham (although the midrash is rich in stories trying to portray him as a harmful influence on Isaac). Sarah appears as a jealous and ungrateful person, and Abraham is a reluctant participant in Sarah’s rejection of Ishmael. This story of the separation of Ishmael and Isaac has echoes today, of course, in the never-ending Israeli-Arab conflict.

However, it is the story of the Binding of Isaac that, to me, remains at once supremely compelling and virtually incomprehensible. How can we reconcile on the one hand a God who orders the death of a beloved son, and on the other hand a God who listens to our prayers to “remember us for life?” Is the lesson of the Akedah that we are to accept God’s will without question? I think not.

I choose to focus on Abraham’s statement to the servants before ascending the mountain (“we will return”) as evidence that Abraham knew that God would not, could not, allow His demand to be fulfilled. In this light, Abraham knew that God only gives us challenges (“tests”) that we can overcome. Our strength and faith may be sorely tested by these ordeals, but we can survive them. That is the essence, I think, of Abraham's faith.

As such, we can look at t’shuvah (repentance, from the verb meaning “turn”) not only as a turning away from our errors, but also as a “re-turning” (in the sense of restoration) to the strength we have lost in our on-going battles against life’s challenges. As we look to the coming New Year, we need a "restoration" of strength to meet the “tests” ahead, and we can rejoice in a tradition that tells us that God will not give us “tests” we cannot overcome.

May we all go from strength to strength in the coming year. Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah.