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Shanah Tovah u’metukah. It is my distinct honor today to be able to share words of Torah on Rosh Hashanah here at my home of Shir Chadash; and though after realizing the gravity of the task I almost immediately regretted asking for the chance to do so, now that the Dvar Torah is written, I am so grateful to Rabbi Hoffman for this generous opportunity to speak with you all and have this rabbinic experience. 

A friend and mentor of mine, Rabbi Jeremy Markiz, recently shared a beautiful and challenging distillation of the essence of Rosh Hashanah and this season of return on his social media. He wrote:

“The High Holidays simplified:
Improving ourselves is possible.
Everything else is commentary. Methods, process, and approaches vary, but the core premise remains.
The belief that we can be better, that we can grow, and change for the good.
This applies to all of us.”

It is hard to argue with his premise that this season is essentially a time to believe in and work toward personal and communal transformation; yet reading it, I found myself questioning whether the straightforward and elegant way that Rabbi Markiz laid out these goals is actually realistic. Skeptically, I asked myself, “Isn’t this season’s belief in the possibility of change perhaps overly optimistic? Don’t we always enter into this time of year with a list of resolutions, only to realize that many of them are only slightly altered repeats of those from previous years?” Around the secular new year, it has become a common cynical task to remind each other that January 1st is just an arbitrary dateline, placed to mark the passage of time, but does not suddenly mean everything changes when midnight hits. The same could be said for the 1st of Tishrei. And just like the secular new year, we often end up re-attempting resolutions of previous years that never quite took.

As the years have passed and I have more Rosh Hashanah experiences under my belt, I too have begun to recognize a pattern in the types of behaviors and actions that I hope to improve.

I find myself repeatedly confronting issues and personal flaws that I promised myself I would tackle more fully in the previous year. It is one thing to set a resolution for change on Rosh Hashanah; it is another to actually act differently in the stress of real life. So the question for me is: is Rabbi Markiz right? Can we actually make substantive changes in our behavior when so many of our actions are part of ingrained habitual or even genetic makeup?

Looking for some guidance on this difficulty, I looked to our Torah readings for Rosh Hashanah. When presented with these biblical accounts, it becomes clear that we are not alone in facing the difficulty of really changing our behavior. In yesterday’s reading we recounted the story of Avraham being placed in the terrible situation of having to choose between his eldest son, Yishmael, and his wife Sarah. Sarah demands that Avraham have Yishmael and his mother Hagar banished from their household. When she does so, the texts tells us: “Vayera hadavar m’od beinei Avraham”, that this matter not only bothered Avraham a little bit, but frightened him greatly.

He faced an impossible decision, with no choice allowing him to care for everyone whom he loved, or even keep them in his life. While God intervenes, affirming to Avraham that Sarah is justified in her demand and that he should indeed banish them, in doing so, Avraham ends up placing both mother and child in fatal danger, leaving them essentially to die in the wilderness. And that would have been the tragic conclusion to this story if it were not for an angelic intervention to save Yishmael and Hagar at the eleventh hour. 

The fact that following through with Hagar and Yishmael’s expulsion was likely to lead to their death seems to hint to me that maybe God did not actually tell Avraham to do it; rather perhaps in making the decision, he justified himself by believing it was what God wanted. Alternatively, God did in fact tell him to carry out Sarah’s wishes, but he did so to test Avraham, hoping he would challenge God and subvert the inevitable tragic outcome.

If we then read yesterday’s tale not as a rousing success of doing God’s will, but actually a failure to stand up to God, that frames the next trial of Avraham in a decidedly familiar light.

Professor Aaron Koller, of Yeshiva University, noted in an article on the scholarly site TheTorah.com that the comparisons between yesterday’s section and today’s commanded sacrifice of Yitzchak are striking. Both stories feature commands from God to, in some way, get rid of one of his sons; both feature Avraham rising early to carry the plan out; both leave his sons nearly dead until the intervention of a messenger of God; both have that messenger offer promise of blessing following their salvation; both have the messenger showing one of the parents something they previously didn’t see—to Hagar, a well, to Avraham, a ram. In addition to professor Koller’s list, I might propose one final similarity: in each story, the command to remove one of his sons comes with no explanation; Avraham is not told what exactly Ishmael did that would merit his banishment, or what Isaac did to deserve slaughter, and for whatever reason he didn’t ask. Avraham was faced not with commands of reason, but blind faith.

This leaves us with a question: why did the Rabbis decide on these two eerily parallel readings, both back to back in the narrative of the Torah?

Many have struggled to answer this simple question over the centuries. One of the traditional reasons given for these choices is that their stories include major elements of Rosh Hashanah: the story of Isaac’s birth represents God’s taking note of our ancestors—sharing a theme with the Zikhronot, remembrance section of our Rosh Hashanah Amidah—while the akedah and replacement of Isaac with a ram caught in a thicket, reminds us of the ram’s horn we sound today. Yet both of those elements only occupy a small portion of the actual narrative we read on each day, so it seems that there is something else at play in choosing these stories.

I would like to propose that we read these two tales of Avraham on Rosh Hashanah not simply because of these simple references to the day, nor even because we are meant to recall Avraham’s perfection in following God’s command; rather we read them precisely because Avraham failed his children and God’s test in the same fashion, one time after another. In both cases, Avraham listened to God’s fatal instructions but did not argue—did not stand up to God’s command—and carried out immoral orders blindly when he should have challenged them.

I might even propose that this is precisely what God wanted him to do all along. In each case, Avraham left no one but God’s messengers to clean up the mess he made through his actions, forcing God to intervene in the last second so that these unnecessary traumas would not become even more tragic. As my classmate at Ziegler, Jacki Honig, likes to point out: after these two trials, God never speaks to Avraham again in the Torah. This distancing of God from their relationship makes sense if Avraham did indeed spectacularly fail his final two tests.

If that were not enough, it furthermore seems that perhaps Avraham actually regressed over the course of his life in his success in responding to God’s tests. If we go back to an episode prior to these stories, we remember Avraham arguing with God to save the twin city of Sdom and Amorah if there were only a meager ten righteous people among them. He challenged God’s plan saying: “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty… Shall the judge of the earth not do justice?” Here Avraham stood up for what he considered right, and God leveled with him, even if his efforts were not ultimately successful.

But then, Avraham’s next real trial comes in the episode of his being forced to banish his son and handmaid. In that case, as we mentioned, it was noted explicitly that Avraham expressed fear and doubt about whether it was right to expel his firstborn son and the child’s mother, but yet, he makes no argument with God as he did in Sdom. Finally, in his last trial of the binding of Yitzchak, we no longer find any such moral ambivalence about the act he was commanded to perform; in fact, Avraham says nothing in response to God’s command and we hear little explicitly of his emotional state throughout the entire narrative. Has he become numb to making these terrible decisions? Is he an example of a sort of reverse teshuvah: progressing from arguing with God directly, to feeling anxious but not pushing back, to finally having no discernible reaction to the most terrible command he ever received?

Our traditional commentators have a major tendency to put Avraham on a pedestal. From the outset our tradition recognized the need to give him a heroic, iconoclastic backstory— as the Torah text itself gives no hint as to why God chose this particular man to share in this special relationship.

Because of this exceptional treatment by God and the legitimately laudable actions of Avraham listed in the Torah, our rabbis tend to make special effort to clean up his actions that are more problematic. While his bravery in leaving his homeland, his zeal in carrying out the mitzvah of hospitality, and his willingness to stand up to God for justice are all legitimate praises of our forefather, I think there is another side to him. Our ancestor Avraham, or at least the picture of Avraham that the Torah paints, is in fact a very flawed person, who actually does not pass every test that comes his way with flying colors. In fact his final two tests are abject failures—near tragedies.

Now, this does not mean I am starting a campaign to #CancelAvraham. On the contrary, this reframing of Avraham in all his messiness actually makes Avraham more relatable to us: not a legend, but a nuanced human being. Avraham had wild successes, took huge risks for a greater future by leaving his homeland, changed the world and created the future Jewish people, all while mitigating family and societal conflict, welcoming guests, and following God’s command each and every time along the way.

At the same time, Avraham is also the man who argued once with God, and when that failed, ceased to argue for a cause ever again. Instead, he accepts the command of his wife Sarah that he have a child with Hagar, he accepts Sarah’s later reversal in demanding that Hagar then be expelled with her son, and finally he accepts God’s command to kill his remaining son Yitzchak. Each time we encounter Avraham further along in his narrative, he puts up less and less resistance to these potentially immoral orders. 

Obviously, this steady backward progress of Avraham is not a good thing, but I believe it is something the tradition wants us to learn from. First of all, it teaches us that even our holy ancestors, who in fact were righteous in a number of areas, were also sinners in others. If we follow the traditional approach of seeing our ancestors as simply legends, we cease being able to learn anything from them about our own behavior, our own life situation. I do not believe this is what the Torah wants us to conclude by studying these stories. On the contrary, the Torah, I believe, is beckoning us to see ourselves in these ancient family members; to recognize their humanity and their fatal flaws as our own.

It is in a sense a reminder and perhaps a comfort to know that even our first brave ancestor failed and occasionally did so spectacularly. It reminds us that no one is perfect and everyone fails, we and Avraham are not so different in that way.

On the other hand, if we note Avraham’s regression from standing up for what’s right to being unwilling or unable to do so, we also have a cautionary tale for the trajectory of our own lives. When we attempt to stand up to do what is right and fail, we cannot let that dictate our future actions. Avraham seems to have taken to heart his failure to save the city of Sdom— so much so that perhaps he thought it best not to ever bother to stand up to God again. We can imagine him saying to himself: “What a fool I was for thinking I could possibly change God’s will!” This side of Avraham’s story teaches us that when we are faced with failure or are put in near impossible situations, we cannot let it numb our inherent sense of justice and fairness—leaving us to blindly follow whatever is the command of the day with no resistance. This story of Abraham turns the mirror to us in this season, reminding us that the costs of giving up on trying to change ourselves and the world are too high. If we refuse to try, we end becoming numb to the pain we could inflict on our fellow human beings, as well as all the good we have to give to world that might otherwise be lost.

So returning to our initial question: can we human beings actually make a significant positive change in our lives in the coming year, even when we are faced annually with our failure to do so? My answer based on this reading of Avraham would have to be yes, but not because it is easy or always successful, but because WE ARE CALLED TO DO SO. On one hand, we see ourselves in Avraham’s flaws and derive comfort and perspective by learning that even this great man failed to live up to his legend. This reminds us of our past failures and helps us to recognize the reality that we cannot help but fail again; allowing us to forgive ourselves for our mistakes.

And yet, that cannot be where we stop. We also see in Avraham a cautionary tale of the person we could become if we persist in our worst habits, our unfair and damaging treatment of others, and our despairing inability to make an effort to protest against injustice and for a more equitable, repaired world. Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot gives us the maxim that “it is not up to you to complete the task; yet you are not free to desist from trying.” We know we will sometimes, even often, fail in our efforts for self and communal improvement in the coming year—failure is a part of life—but that failure does not mean we are free to give up trying.

God demands and desires our arguments against the immoral status quo, our struggles to be more Godly, to reflect more clearly the person we are meant to be and want to be, to find more constructive ways to connect with others, and to refrain from hurting people unnecessarily. Perhaps in the story we read today it was not Yitzchak who was nearly sacrificed on Mount Moriah, but actually the legend of Avraham. His failure was a kind of sacrifice for future generations, who now are compelled to learn from his greatest mistakes, striving to not fall in the same trap. Like Yitzchak, though, Avraham did not die on that mountain: he continues to live on in our minds and hearts, reminding us on this day that we cannot help but fail, but we must nonetheless refuse to give up.

I bless us all that we continue to strive, to grow, and continue to believe in the possibility of self and communal transformation. As Rabbi Markiz said in his post, “All the rest in commentary.” Shanah Tovah U’Metukah.