Chutzpah! Seeking Moral Leadership in Torah and Life

A Sermon for Rosh haShanah 5769

Rabbi Ellen Lippmann

It was Yom Kippur and there was a drought in the land. “Rabbi Eliezer came before the Ark and recited the 24 blessings (said on fast days), but his prayer was not answered. Rabbi Akiba then came before the Ark and exclaimed, ‘Our Father, our King, we have no king but you; our Father, our King, have mercy upon us for Your own sake!’ whereupon the rain fell” (B. Taanit 25b).

Akiva—having no patience left—cut through the usual ordered mode of prayer to urge God to respond—and the rain fell.

Ever since, the story goes, we have been singing those words: Avinu Malkeinu, haneinu va-aneinu…

Traditions so often sustain us. Coming into Rosh HaShanah, I could hear the sounds of Avinu Malkeinu in my head, as I yearned to hear its haunting melody and words yet again. But not all traditions need to be repeated again and again; some can be altered, some discarded, some replaced. Akiva himself broke through the order of prayer in his time to give his urgent prayer of necessity. Chutzpah!

Surely we too are living in a time that requires urgent prayer and an overturning of the usual order—some chutzpah. When I think of Rosh HaShanah in this way, I realize that as much as I love singing Avinu Malkeinu, I am sick of the Akkedah, the story of the binding—sacrifice? murder?—of Isaac. This story is everywhere in the midrash, poetry, art, and yes, our liturgy. And I am sick of it. It contains not a single character I want to identify with, not the God who commands the sacrifice, not Abraham who obeys so submissively, not Isaac who goes along with only one question along the way, and not even the poor ram who loses his life because someone has to. It is our tradition to read this story on Rosh HaShanah and I am sick of it. Over the cries of “We can’t leave it out, it’s part of our tradition!” I say, “Let’s.”

Not just because we need change, though that is clear enough in our liturgy, in our nation, in our world. No, I say let’s leave it out because what we need now to face the terrifying world is a story of moral courage, of protest, of hope, not one of submission to God who lays down an impossible command. What we need is an Akiva to overturn the usual in a time of crucial urgency.

Why do we read this story anyway? Dr. Larry Hoffman, our great modern Jewish liturgist, asks, “What kind of story is this to tell the assembled multitude on the High Holy days?” He then reminds us that the Akkeda is the traditional reading for the second day of Rosh HaShanah. The story for the first day was—and often remains—Genesis 21, the story of God’s visiting Sarah and promising Isaac’s birth, and of Sarah casting Hagar and Ishmael out with Abraham’s reluctant assent. But Hoffman notes that at the end of the first day, the Torah would have been rolled to the end of Genesis 21, and the very next chapter, Genesis 22, is none other than the Binding of Isaac. So he thinks it is very possible that the rabbis chose the Akkeda just because it is the next chapter!

So by the chance of a roll of the Torah, we have been reading this story for centuries?! I asked Dr. Hoffman about it a couple of weeks ago, hoping he had found more substantial reasoning for its inclusion. But no: it remains the chance—though powerful—result of rolling the Torah.

So let’s roll it somewhere else.

I do not suggest change just for the sake of change, or even just for distaste. I suggest it because I believe that our stories, both personal and collective, shape our lives, and I worry about us continuing to be shaped by the Akkeda. While we have wrestled with it for centuries, it is not usually the wrestling that people remember, but rather the story itself and sometimes its terror. God tells Abraham to take his son up on the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice—that IS what we remember, right?

In talking about change of text and its potential to change us, I am conscious that you may hear echoes of thoughts of change in our world today. That is entirely intentional. I hope that as I speak about change in Torah and liturgy, we can all be thinking about change in our nation.

I want to make change in our Torah reading and our nation because of a need for moral leadership that I see far too little of anywhere. Rabbi Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem wrote recently that, too often, “religious piety is judged by a person’s ability to dissociate from their moral and intellectual commitments and make the leap of faith to serve God…in Jewish tradition, the most prominent exemplar is the story of the binding of Isaac…” Surely Abraham dissociated from his moral understanding when his only response to God’s command to offer his son as a sacrifice was “Hineini”—here I am.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote of that same dissociation last week with regard to our economic crisis: “For many people there is a disconnect, a cut between personal life and financial life. One may be a nice, quiet, straightforward person in one’s personal life; one may even be genuinely generous and philanthropic. But in financial dealings, the same person may be a cold-blooded shark…In the rare cases when people take note of this discrepancy, the common answer is: this is business—meaning that business has a completely different set of moral assumptions completely detached from other sides of one’s personality. Whatever people profess in private life or in the house of prayer, is one realm; what they do in their financial life is a very different one…The real sense of teshuva is to allow some higher concepts to seep into the kitchen, the bedroom, and the pocket.”

Our great prophets preached this same need to bring religious ritual and moral action together. On Yom Kippur we will hear again the crucial words of Isaiah, urging us to use our Yom Kippur fast as a time to commit to the needs of the world. When we act justly, Isaiah tells us, Then, when you call, God will answer; when you cry, God will say “Hineini—Here I am.”

Isaiah did not mean us not to fast, but rather not to dissociate that religious ritual from our moral commitments. This year, when I read the Akkeda, and hear Abraham say Hineini—Here I am, ready to do Your bidding, even to the point of sacrificing my child—it feels like a dissociation. I want instead to hear God say to us all, “Hineini”—Here I am—because we have acted justly in our world even as we spend time in religious ritual.

Surely, what our world does not need any more of is dissociation from moral and intellectual commitment. Rather, we need more such commitment to face, protest, engage in and act upon abuses of power and official neglect piling up all around us.

Imagine the idea that God responds, ensures God’s presence, when we make that moral commitment. I remember that it was not until the Hebrew slaves of the book of Exodus grew so oppressed that they cried out to God, that God “remembered them” and began to act. In the Torah, God’s remembering IS also taking action, thus God’s sending Moses to free the slaves.

Larry Hoffman says the central theme of Rosh haShanah is this kind of remembrance, and hence the story of God remembering Sarah is our central text, the one that comes before the Akkedah. On this Rosh HaShanah, living in our world, we need God’s active remembrance and we need a model of moral action and we need to make the changes that will get us there.

To get there, we have to make a change in the stories we tell. Philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us that our stories shape not only our identities as individuals, but our moral character as well: He calls Moral Space a place at our very core where the questions of what is right and what is wrong can be answered, and suggests we need stories that bring us to that space. I don’t think the Akkeda is that kind of story, giving us as it does a portrait of the passive, accepting Abraham. If we are not to remain in its sway, then we need to change. But how?

One way to change a Jewish text is to read it and our own environment very carefully and to bring them together in midrash, a way to seek new truth in an old story. Year after year here at Kolot, for instance, we have heard Arthur Strimling drash the Akkeda in ways that probe the story’s depths and make us think. But in the end, the story itself remains in our minds and hearts.

Another way to change is to leave, toss in the towel, separate from the whole system that gave us this story to begin with. It is amazing how often in Kolot Chayeinu’s weekly Torah study sessions this idea of leaving comes up: We have arrived at an edge we cannot justify or interpret to satisfaction, and we are tempted to throw the whole Torah against the wall.

Even Moses, arguing strenuously with God to keep God from killing all the people after they built the Golden Calf, says finally to God, “Now, if You will forgive their sin [well and good]; but if not, erase me from Your book that You have written!” L’havdil—in as opposite a scenario as possible, I want to say that if titans of American financial companies get off scot free, with billions in their pockets, write me out of that story that we see repeated again and again!

But if we do not in fact want to write ourselves out or throw away the book, where to now? Following Donniel Hartman, I want to explore a “different religious sensibility within Judaism, which views religious individuals as members of a moral community…and as people who are obligated to examine, and if necessary, criticize God’s command.”

I do not mean we need to leave Judaism or Torah or Rosh haShanah’s rituals behind. Rather, we can dig in deeper and find a new text that will be as rich as the Akkeda, but with the moral standing we need now. It is my hunch—and my hope—that in making this significant change, we will also find new vitality, new life in ourselves, our traditions, and our stories. The Torah, Constitution of our people, can find new life and new respect in more eyes.

So I ask: “If I were deciding what Torah text to read on Rosh HaShanah instead of the Akkeda (Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac), what would it be, or would I stick with the Akkeda, and why?”

Here is one of my favorite Torah scholars, Amelia Holcomb, to give us her answer:

If I could pick the reading for Rosh haShannah, I would choose to read Genesis 6-9, the story of Noah’s Ark. Rosh haShannah is about trying to wash away what we want to change, about trying to act morally, and about learning to adjust, and Noah’s Ark depicts these perfectly. G-d realizes that the world has become corrupt and decides to wash it clean. Only Noah, his family, and enough animals to continue every species, are to be left on earth after the flood. I think that God chose Noah because he had strong moral values. Instead of trying to save all people and animals, an impossibility, Noah opted to save every land species from certain extinction, and do the most to protect biodiversity in the history of the world! And, in Noah’s Ark, it is G-d who actually gave an oath to do better in the years to come, promising, “I will maintain my covenant with you, never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood.” On Rosh haShanah, learning that even God can promise to do better reminds us that when we make mistakes, we can work to improve.

I asked another Torah scholar too, the founder of bibliodrama in the Jewish world, Peter Pitzele. Here is Peter’s answer, read by Brett Parker:

I would stick with the Akeda in part out of a respect for the tradition and in part because no text challenges me more to deal with the primitive Jewish constructions of Faith, God, and human responsibility. If I were, however, to take an alternative, I would be tempted by the wrestling of Jacob to become Israel. How deeply noble to be linked to the one who strenuously engages with God-self-other. And yet, in the end, wrestling is perhaps too sweaty an image for me, and I would select the dance of Miriam on the other side of the Sea of Reeds. Her celebration fits the occasion of the new year; her drumming and her lost song can be recreated communally in our own versions; and the dance—of the women and the men who join in—is a glorious image of community and joy and more than sacrifice or wrestling offers me a glimpse of the world to come.

I thought about the same question and had a bunch of answers: God remembering the people in slavery; Shifra and Puah challenging Pharaoh and refusing to kill Hebrew babies; the Golden Calf. But ultimately, I came to this:

Our ancestors rolled the Torah and by chance found the Akkeda. Let’s us deliberately roll back just a few chapters in Genesis, to Genesis 18, and anoint another Abraham, this time one who is a fully developed moral being ready to argue with God against God’s plan to murder the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Abraham came forward and said, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”

Abraham goes on to ask what will happen if there are even fewer innocent people in the city—what if 45, what if 40, 30, 20, what if only 10? And God answered, “I will not destroy, for the sake of the ten.”

I am not so naïve as to think that any protest I or we undertake will get such a swift and heartening response. But I do deeply desire that the story that I read every year as the year begins offer me a model of the founder of my people that I can live with and aspire to. A man willing without hesitation to offer his son as a sacrifice cannot be for me, in our time, that kind of model. This protesting Abraham is the one our ancestors compared with Noah, and saw as superior, for just this protest, something they thought Noah had never even attempted. They should have known Amelia Holcomb!

In 1966, Rabbi Theodore Friedman wrote a Rosh HaShanah sermon in which he said, “Today we live in…a world whose real Gods are Mars and Mammon—war and money. To that world, the authentic Jew says no, with every fibre of his being…As long as the world remains unredeemed, we remain what we have always been, the eternal protester. We shall wait, hope, work and pray for the coming…of a realm whose dominion is peace, justice and love.…To a world of senseless hatred, of bloodshed, oppression and vainglory, we say a resounding no!”

In 2008, that resounding “no!” is needed even more than in 1966. As we begin the new year, we have a choice of stories, and a choice of two Abrahams: the active protester of injustice and the passive receiver of an impossible command.

I can no longer learn about being a Jew from that passive Abraham, and I think you can’t either. We need a moral leader, a Jewish leader who does not hesitate to protest even to God when needed, a leader who will elevate us to a moral level we have so lacked, often in Judaism, everywhere in our government.

Will this one relatively small change really make such a big difference? Not for us. But if Amelia Holcomb and her sisters grow up hearing a different story every year, if they learn that the original Jew was someone who stood his ground even against God and urged God to act with justice, who knows what may happen?

If God is the energy of the universe, as Sheila Bock once taught me, then how may that energy shift when we shift? Perhaps even our ideas of God will shift as we imagine not a harsh commander but a partner engaged in conversation and debate. Rabbi Elyse Frishman has written that in so many places in Torah where we read “God commanded,” it does not actually say “commanded,” but rather “Va-yidaber Adonai…”—God said, God spoke. Frishman suggests that what God always wanted was a conversation, while we humans wanted a command. I think a change of story can remind us that God wants to talk, wants to hear even debate and criticism. That may be why Akiva’s prayer gained favor; perhaps even God was bored with the old order of prayer! On this day of remembrance, let’s remember that, and make some change.

It is a little wild, this urge to change. It’s exciting, it’s chutzpah-dik: It makes us sit up a little straighter, feel our power stirring, maybe we even laugh out loud at the possibility. But change for change’s sake is often empty. On this day of remembrance we need to remember Isaiah, who wanted us to change without abandoning the things that had kept us going for so long, wanted us to link our prayer space and our moral space, letting them interweave in a way that would benefit us and improve the world.

Let’s not fear change, and let’s not change without thought, without care. Quick fixes are no fixes, and we do not have to jump to Amelia’s or Peter’s or my ideas in a moment, after at least 12 centuries of the Akkeda as Rosh HaShanah text. But let’s not NOT jump after we have a chance to think about it, either.

Tomorrow, we are going back to the traditional way of reading. We will read tomorrow the story of Sarah and Hagar, so ripe with issues of power and abuse, of hope and abandonment. On Wednesday, we will read the Akkeda with musical midrash, letting the music break it up that it may enter our hearts in a new way. On Thursday, I want you to begin to think about your answer to the question: “If I were deciding what Torah text to read on Rosh HaShanah instead of the Akkeda, what would it be?” Who knows what may happen here next year?

I know I want to follow urgent Akiva and the protester Abraham and sometimes Noah and Miriam, and many in our day, including someone like Max, who made mischief of one kind or another, and who was not afraid of wild things even when they roared their terrible roars and rolled their terrible eyes.

Last week I was present at a big celebration of the life and work of Maurice Sendak as he turned 80. I think of Sendak here because he, like Akiva, had chutzpah! He busted through convention to create something new that has lasted for generations. Here was a gay man who could not be open, and who created Max and Where the Wild Things Are. It was a new story, unlike anything read to children before, and generations have now been shaped by it.

I’d like to bring a few wild things into Torah and into liturgy, and see what happens. This is after all a new year, a year ripe with possibilities, just being born. Right now, let’s feel the excitement of change. I am excited and a little fearful just to think about changing 12 centuries of accepted liturgical wisdom. Chutzpah!

Let’s cultivate a little more chutzpah here. Let’s fast AND free the oppressed, read Torah AND inhabit moral space, sing Avinu Malkeinu AND let some jazz into the service. Kolot Chayeinu is, after all, a congregation that refuses to be satisfied with the world as it is.

So, in the immortal words of that great Jewish sage Maurice Sendak, “Let the wild rumpus begin!”