[image credit: “The Sacrifice of Isaac” Caravaggio 1603

Mollie Leibowitz]

guest post by Rachel Kaufman

“No poetry will return to the lonely / what was lost, what was / stolen,” wrote Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on October 20, 2023, at the age of 32.^[1]

In today’s Parsha, we are confronted with the insufficiencies of language. Abraham says “Hineni,” a powerful declaration of here-ness, of obligation and embodied agreement, to both Gd and to Isaac, and I hear this as a double promise, two promises impossible to fulfill at once.

Issac asks for his father as he anxiously looks for the ram as they ascend, the wood of sacrifice in his hands, and Abraham answers him: “Hineni.” Isaac replies:

הִנֵּ֤ה הָאֵשׁ֙      וְהָ֣עֵצִ֔ים וְאַיֵּ֥ה הַשֶּׂ֖ה לְעֹלָֽה / Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”

To his father’s here-ness, Isaac offers his own “here”/ הִנֵּ֤ה—but this “here” refers to the tools of his own sacrifice. The word slips from feigned fatherly comfort, “Hineni,” to “הִנֵּ֤ה,” the objects of a certain betrayal. To whom is Abraham accountable? This double-edged “here-ness” reveals an impossibility: what if we are accountable to two opposing forces, two forces asking us to do different things, two parts of ourselves dedicated to distinct, and incompatible, inheritances or convictions?

The language of the Akedah reveals this impossibility—of choice, of ethic, of accountability or of faith. The story’s language holds each figure’s (even Gd’s) faltering in the face of an impossible moment. I struggle through this parsha, because in the story, silence looms loud; no one speaks for themselves, no one speaks wholly: in answer to Isaac’s question, Abraham tells his son that Gd will provide the ram; Isaac remains silent as he is bound to the altar; an angel of Gd, rather than Gd Gdself, comes down to tell Abraham to stop the slaughter; and when Gd first tells Abraham to kill his son, Abraham does not say a word. The act of speaking in this story is impossible; everything is ventriloquy, words placed in another’s mouth, words postponed, accountability suspended. Gd’s original instruction to Abraham does not include a place of sacrifice—it is עַ֚ל אַחַ֣ד הֶֽהָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ, / on one of the mountains that I will tell you. Rashi writes that Gd makes the righteous wonder, only revealing full details along the way (“Go to the land I will show you,” Gd says to Abram earlier in Genesis, or “Go to Nineveh and proclaim to it the proclamation I will say to you,” Gd says to Jonah. Two psukim later, Jonah arrives in the city and speaks. When was he told what to say?). So much text is unwritten.

When Isaac asks his father about the ram, Abraham answers:

אֱלֹהִ֞ים יִרְאֶה־לּ֥וֹ הַשֶּׂ֛ה לְעֹלָ֖ה בְּנִ֑י / God will see to a ram for an ascent-offering, my son. Rashi moves the comma: God will see to a ram (and if there is no ram), for an ascent-offering, my son.

The violence lives in the unspoken; whether or not Isaac understands this hidden message, Abraham can only speak it by not speaking it. Language falters, dissipates, turns to silence.

And yet the parsha is framed around language. It begins: “וַיְהִ֗י אַחַר֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה” / and it was after these words…; and the story ends: “וַיְהִ֗י אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה”. This phrase appears a few other times in Genesis and elsewhere, and could always be translated in terms of time: sometime later, after these events, etc. But are we meant to stay in the world of the story, within narrative time (later, after), or are we perhaps meant to live in the world of the telling of the story, within the narrator’s time (after these and those words)—at a remove from the action and from the site of sacrifice, with an awareness that we are being told a story? The story can only begin after language (whatever that previous language was; it’s unclear), and it can only end when new language arrives. We, as readers, are suspended in a story that reads to me like farce, like surrealism, like an empty field where everyone is staring off into the distance and muttering, their words lost before they reach any audience. And yet we are given some narrative comfort, some linguistic frame, that there were words before this story and there are words after. So what do we do with the noticeable quiet, the impossibility of speaking, that lies between?

I’ve written about and even spoken here, at Shtibl, about holding multiply, about remaining accountable to multiple stories, histories, griefs, communities at once. But as we sink further and further into ICE kidnappings in our city, to which we are all witness, and into a genocide, for which we are all accountable, I am faltering in the face of multiple accountabilities. If we promise ourselves multiply, as I see Abraham doing, and find it an impossible promise, our words get lost, we fail to speak. In the silences of the Akedah are every failing, every faltering; the sequence of silences leads to almost-disaster. The site of Isaac’s almost-sacrifice is named a site of vision, a site where Gd can be seen or, as Rashi writes, “on the mountain of Gd will be seen the ashes of Isaac as though piled up, serving as atonement.” The ashes sit on the mountain in memory, even if they were never really there. The ashes as though piled up, the bodies as though piled up; what about now, when there is no “as though”? “No poetry will return to the lonely / what was lost, what was / stolen.”

How can we surpass this story of sacrifice, of impossible accountabilities, in which our inherited figures fail to speak?

I was hoping this parsha would provide an answer to this question: How do we confront the impossible? And how can language help us? Disappointed by the story, I turned to today’s haftorah instead. In Yirmeyahu 31, it says:

כֹּ֣ה  אָמַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֗ה/  ק֣וֹל בְּרָמָ֤ה נִשְׁמָע֙/ נְהִי֙ בְּכִ֣י תַמְרוּרִ֔ים / רָחֵ֖ל מְבַכָּ֣ה עַל־בָּנֶ֑יהָ/  מֵאֲנָ֛ה לְהִנָּחֵ֥ם עַל־בָּנֶ֖יהָ כִּ֥י אֵינֶֽנּוּ

Thus said Gd: A cry is heard in Ramah—Wailing, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. / She refuses to be comforted / For her children, who are gone.

She refuses to be comforted for her children, or on behalf of her children, or in the name / for the sake of her children.

In the face of silence, destruction, the failure of the living and the failure of the word, Rachel refuses. A midrash on this passage asks: “When did Israel weep a gratuitous weeping? And when did Israel weep a weeping of substance?” Some rabbis cite Rachel’s tears as a weeping of substance. Why?

In her refusal to be comforted, Rachel resists. She dwells in the impossible, in the unspeakable, in exactly the place where all sound but wailing falters. “Interruption and hesitation [can be] used as a force,” writes poet Susan Howe.^[2] In the face of silence, missing histories, unnamed and endlessly perpetuated cycles of violence, the poet hesitates before the impossible, stutters, tells her reader that she is confronting and then attempting to act amidst an impossible story, an impossible moment. This is what I hear in Rachel’s wail; it is an impossible, and yet sounded, telling.

And so I am ending with impossibility, bringing impossibility to my beloved community—not as a site of hopelessness and certainly not as a site of inaction, but as a site of refusal. In today’s parsha of ventriloquy, of succumbing to silence, of speaking around and through, I do not find courage. The imagined ashes of Isaac can not be our site of atonement; Abraham’s quiet in the face of a double promise can not be our model of accountability; and Gd’s absence at a site of violence which Gd created is not a Gd in whom I want to place my faith. As the father and his son stay silent, Rachel wails. Her resistance is exactly an acknowledgment of the impossible, and of an impossible persistence—in the face of lost children and at the edge of an ability to speak, we must refuse to be comforted.

Gud yontif, Shana tovah

^[1] Hiba Abu Nada, “Pull Yourself Together,” tr. Huda Fakhreddine, Words Without Borders / The Home for International Literature, https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/.

^[2] Susan Howe, “Encloser” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York, NY: Roof Books, 1990).