-Steve

I reckon that this is the 35th year of my having the honor of introducing this Rosh ha-Shanah Torah portion, chapter 22 of Genesis, to the patient congregants of Temple Beth Shalom. As you might imagine, I have become sensitized to mentions of the Akedah that crop up here and there in my reading during the year. Just as God every year provides Abraham with a ram, God seems to provide me with an idea, a reference, or a connection to use in filling this annual charge. Several months ago I read a review in the New Republic of a newly translated book by Yehudah Amichai, Open Closed Open, containing several poems on the Akedah. I immediately ordered a copy in anticipation of the New Year Day, 5761. And I fell in love with his poetry.

One of the greatest Hebrew poets of recent times a period which has produced some of the finest Hebrew poetry since the Golden Age of medieval Spain, perhaps since the Bible Yehuda Amichai died exactly one week ago, Sept. 22, 2000. The New Republic reviewer, a Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, began his essay by debunking the notion that poetry had to embody "quasi-philosophical counsel." But in the case of Amichai he reversed himself: "There is in . . . poetry such as Yehudah Amichais Open Closed Open, a certain intensity of attention, an ethical focus so absolute that there is no question that significant knowledge is crucially entailed, and wisdom, as a category or a value, seems inescapably germane, no matter how our aesthetic understanding might make us veer away from it. " In its remarkably terse and low-keyed way, Amichais poetry raises us to a higher state of awareness of ourselves as embodied souls.

The short poem that provides the title for the book reads as follows:
 

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open

in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed

within us. And when we die, everything is open again,

Open closed open. Thats all we are.
 

Another poem of 31words in English translation captures the human condition through a different set of metaphors:
 

Taxis below

And angels above

Are impatient.

At one and the same time

They call me

With a terrible voice.

I'm coming, I am

coming,

I'm coming down,

I'm coming up!
 

All this probably sounds abstract, but may prepare the ground for two passages of Open Closed Open that appropriate the Torah portion for this morning. In a section of the book called "Jewish Travel: Change is God and Death is His Prophet" Amichai writes:
 

Every year our father Abraham would take his sons to Mount Moriah

the way I take my children to the Negev hills where I once had a war.

Abraham hiked around with his sons. "This is where I left

the servants behind, that's where I tied the donkey to a tree

at the foot of the mountain, and here, right here, Isaac my son, you asked:

Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

Then, up a little further, you asked for the second time."

When they reached the mountaintop, they rested a bit, ate and drank,

and he showed them the thicket where the ram was caught by its horns.

After Abraham died, Isaac started taking his sons to the same place.

"Here I lifted the wood, this is where I got out of breath,

here I asked, and my father answered: God will see to the lamb

for the offering. Over there, I already knew it was me."

And when Isaac's eyes were dim with age, his children

led him to that same spot on Mount Moriah, and recounted for him

all that had come to pass, all that he might have forgotten.

An exemplar of a truly modern Jew rooted in the riches of Jewishness, Amichai engages in that creative remembering that blends the old and in the new so as to reintegrate them and maintain Judaism as a living tradition. In rabbinic literature, we bring the reality of God into the world. (A famous rabbinic homily on the verse in Isaiah that "You are my witnesses; I am God" is "When you are my witnesses, I am, as it were, God.") In the section entitled "Gods Change, Prayers are Here to Stay," using the phrase of the Maimonidean confession of faith, Amichai ironically exclaims:
 

I declare with perfect faith

that prayer preceded God.

Prayer created God.

God created human beings,

human beings created prayers

that create the God that creates human beings.

God made us human, and we make and remake Judaism by creatively remembering. Thats what we do here today we reread this mysterious tale not just to remember the Binding of Isaac in isolation but in order to remember the need to remember. We do this by measuring ourselves by what we now realize that God wants of us.

Perhaps the most authentic Jewish art form is midrash: searching the text, imaginatively piling the biblical text with new meanings on top of the old ones, uncovering the hidden significance of details and thus reinventing the living meaning of Scripture. In a grouping of poems in Open Closed Open called "The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other Midrashim," Amichai takes up the Akedah a second time:
 

Three sons had Abraham, not just two.

Three sons had Abraham: Yishma-El, Yitzhak, and Yivkeh.

First came Yishma-El, "God will hear,"

next came Yitzhak, "he will laugh,"

and the last was Yivkeh, for he was the youngest,

the son that Father loved best,

the son who was offered up on Mount Moriah.

Yishma-El was saved by his mother, Hagar,

Yitzhak was saved by the angel,

but Yivkeh no one saved.

When he was just a little boy, his father

would call him tenderly, Yivkeh,

Yivkeleh, my sweet little Yivkie

but he sacrificed him all the same.

The Torah says the ram, but it was Yivkeh.

Yishma-El never heard from God again,

Yitzhak never laughed again,

Sarah laughed only once, then laughed no more.

Three sons had Abraham,

Yishma, "will hear," Yitzhak, "will laugh," Yivkeh, "will cry."

Yismah-El, Yitzhak-El, Yivkeh-El.

God will hear, God will laugh, God will cry.

What can we take away this Rosh ha-Shanah morning, as we prepare to hear the Binding of Isaac chanted once again? Here is a midrash on Amichais midrash on the Akedah:

Ishmael, Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac heard God, or thought they did. They laughed with pleasure as the surprises and paradoxes of their lives unfolded: divine promises, blessing, a covenant. Learning that he was to be sacrificed, Isaac was stunned. Thinking that God wanted him to sacrifice a child that was most dear to him, Abraham wept at his loss and Sarah was bereft. Their obedience, rejoicing, and agony reverberate through history, and the echos come back to us. Abraham, the biblical paragon of justice and faith, not only wept but caused God to weep. Sarah suffered silently. Isaac, the link between the generations, forgot and had to be reminded by his children. For the biblical heroes, it was difficult to become fully human. For God, it was difficult to be God. Gods hearing our prayer, laughter at our happines, and crying at the mess we all too often make of our lives, individually and collectively, have their impact on us and make us more human.

Only through creative remembering can we unite past, present and future. God, who creates our humanity, intensifies these moments of truthful self-examination. We remember to become better, how to be better. We resolve once again, reunify ourselves, and go on.

Robert M. Seltzer

September 30, 2000