"Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael in our Midst"

1 Tishri 5769
September 30, 2008

by Melissa Crabbe

Shana Tova.

I was very touched when the Tefillah U’Minhag Committee asked me to speak this morning, so thank you. And thank you to Maurice, for helping me prepare this d’var, and my friend and boss, Lori.

Today I would like to talk about the Torah readings for both mornings of Rosh Hashanah, which include Abraham’s banishing of Ishmael into the wilderness with his mother, Hagar, and the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.

One thing I love about Judaism is that it contains – even within its sacred texts – different versions of narratives, and arguments about what the narratives say and what they mean. The stories in these two Torah portions are a good example. The most straightforward, or p’shat, understanding of these stories is that in abandoning Ishmael and binding Isaac Abraham was doing ask God asked.

But there are other understandings in the Midrash – like one saying that Abraham misunderstood God, and that he was never instructed to sacrifice Isaac. And another Midrash that holds that God did not intervene and Isaac was actually sacrificed, only to be miraculously revived after his death.

To me, these multiple understandings show the interplay between the mythic narratives and the lives of their readers. We use mythic narratives to understand events in our own lives, and events in our own lives give us new ways of understanding and telling mythic narratives.

Looked at this way, the Akedah was recorded in the way that was most meaningful to the editors of the Torah. In their situation, at that time, it was most meaningful for them to believe that all that happened, for good or ill, was as God intended. There is no denying the power of that way of thinking about things.

But it is a way of understanding the narrative that for me, as I struggle to live a life that honors God, doesn’t make sense, and that, for many years, made it difficult for me to appreciate this part of the Torah.

But now, in my fifth decade, I think I’ve come to a way of telling myself this story that does make sense to me, and gives me compassion for Abraham who, for most of my life, I have judged harshly.

For me, the terrible things that happen are not part of God’s plan.

Nor is the isolation, and deterioration, that people often experience in the wake of violence and loss. Nor the damage that they, in their pain, sometimes inflict on themselves, and sometimes on others.

But when we as individuals, families and communities respond to trauma with loving acts that promote healing and redemption, that is when we experience God’s presence in our lives.

Trauma can be painful to talk about, and a painful subject to listen to, and if you feel like you need to leave while I am speaking, please do.

I had an almost idyllic childhood, with two gentle parents who are the dearest people in the world.

The story we told ourselves about our lives was the story of a family whose members were close, who were part of a large community of friends.

Part of the narrative for me, at least –I don’t remember my parents telling me this – was that because we tried so hard to be kind and do the right thing, to honor God, bad things would not happen to us, and we would be happy.

Then an act of violence occurred that shattered my world. It was not committed against me, and it was not perpetrated by my parents, and it was not even the worst thing that can happen – no one was killed – but after it happened my story, my life, did not make sense.

When he was twelve, shortly after we moved to a new community where we knew few people, my brother experienced an ugly assault at the hands of an adult he trusted.

This was nearly 30 years ago, and many things have changed in how we respond to violence against children. But at that time, in that place, the crime was, paradoxically, both minimized, and made into something too scary to be acknowledged.

The police experts told my parents that because my brother was physically “okay,” that he would be “fine” if we could all just forget what happened and not talk about it. Even a therapist told my parents that what happened was not a problem that needed to be discussed.

The perpetrator, who had harmed other children in the community, did not face any of his victims and did not apologize.

The organization that he and my brother were a part of, a sports organization, never acknowledged the harm that had come to children through their organization, and never offered any kind of support.

The stigma associated with the assault as so horrible that acknowledging it openly was the worst thing one could do. So we didn’t talk about it, which meant that we didn’t get help.

As a result, my brother, my parents, and I were essentially on our own with our trauma and grief.

The very day of the assault, my brother changed. He went from being shy to being unreachably withdrawn. He responded to the trauma by internalizing it, by doing things that were self destructive.

Echoing the Midrash that Abraham actually did kill Isaac, at crisis points in his life my brother has told me he feels like the person he used to be actually was killed in the assault. Though I am happy to be able to say he is doing very well today, that has not always been the case – so much so that I am always grateful that he is still alive.

The assault changed my parents. Conversation became difficult. It was painful for all of us to be together. My father avoided us and slept a lot. My mother did things that were out of character. A trivial, but telling example: In our house, where no soda was allowed, I one day found bottles and bottles of Coke in the fridge. My brother liked soda; it was all my mother could think of to do to make things better.

Our home, which had always been filled with friends, was quiet. It’s always isolating to move to a new place, but for my parents, the isolation never lifted. In their grief, it was impossible to reach out. Holidays, which had always been so joyful, became the most painful times, because of the contrast with our previous life.

We were still alive, but we were not the same. Our old story no longer made sense. And, at that time, we did not experience healing or redemption. We did not experience God’s presence in our lives.

Howard Zehr, a leader in the Restorative Justice movement, has written about the importance of narrative in our self-understanding. He says:

All of us construct our sense of identity and meaning by creating symbols of people, objects, and events, and preserving them in narratives – stories about who and what we are. When we are asked to say who we are, we usually tell a story. Our truths are embedded in our stories.

I am reminded here of Barack Obama and John McCain, whose identities, for themselves and for us, are so tied to their stories. Zehr goes on to say:

An experience of violence represents an attack on these narratives, an erosion of meaning… To heal we have to recover our stories…We must create new or revised narratives that take into account the awful things that have happened.

This resonates for me, because, as the years passed, I gradually realized that my life since my brother’s assault has largely been an effort to understand and re-write my story so that the trauma he experienced, and which my family shared, has meaning.

Because this d’var is primarily about Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, I won’t go into further detail, except to say that those efforts led me into prisons, initially with the thought of coming face to face with the type of “monster” (as I thought of him) who harmed my brother.

Imagine my surprise when I found, not monsters, but people. People who had caused terrible pain, but, often, people who had also experienced terrible pain. Some of these people, even behind prison walls, as a result of their efforts to understand themselves and their stories, go to great lengths to try to prevent future violence, and build a better world, so that others will not experience, and do, the things that they did.

I have a friend and colleague named Paul, who has been in prison 30 years. As a child, Paul experienced severe trauma; as an adult, he committed a gang-related murder. Here’s an excerpt from an article he wrote with several other men, all of them, like Paul, serving life sentences:

Accepting the possibility that we could very well be destined to die in prison, we looked at how a life of meaning could be created given our circumstances…we began an analysis of the crime problem from the viewpoint of the perpetrators. As men of conscience, with nothing to lose or gain personally, we felt a human responsibility to do what we could to attack this problem.

The authors of this article are part of a movement, within their prison and supported by the prison administration, in which incarcerated men support each other in coming to terms with the violence in their lives – that which they caused, and that which they experienced. Paul and his friends, in working to understand the stories of their own lives, are helping others do the same.

When I think of Isaac and Ishmael, I think of the many people I know, like my brother and my friend Paul, whose lives have been shaped by trauma.

I wonder what Ishmael’s life was like after Abraham abandoned him and his mother to die in the desert.

I wonder what Isaac’s life was like after Abraham bound him and nearly killed him.
Did they take out their trauma on others? Did they take it out on themselves?

What of their mothers? Did they know how to help their sons? Or did they do the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of putting Coke in the fridge?

I wonder if the members of the larger community, given that Abraham was the patriarch, the one with the power, turned their faces aside and pretended nothing had happened. Maybe they said to Isaac and Ishmael, “Don’t worry, you’re okay, just don’t talk about it, forget about it, and move on?”

Did Isaac and Ishmael feel abandoned by God? Did their lives suddenly stop making sense? Was it difficult for them to put a coherent narrative back together?

Or did they experience healing and redemption – did they, through the loving actions of others, experience God’s presence?

And what about Abraham, who, from this perspective, seems to be the deeply disturbed parent for whom it is so easy to have contempt?

I think of Abraham’s relationship with his nephew, Lot.

As you may recall from Genesis, TErach, Abraham’s father, left the land of his fathers bringing with him only Abraham, Sarah, and his grandson Lot, Abraham’s nephew.

As a couple with no children of their own, maybe Lot was like a son to Abraham and Sarah. The bond was strong, for we know that when TErach died, the three journeyed on together.

Then, because the land where they were living could not support them all, Lot, who by this time had his own family, separated from Abraham and Sarah, settling near Sodom.

We think of Sodom as a wretched city, the symbol of all that is sinful, but I wonder if it was always such an evil place. Since Lot settled there, maybe he didn’t think the people were so bad.

Maybe he became friends with his neighbors, who themselves were about to face the 12-years of oppression at the hands of foreign invaders. Genesis tells us that they rebelled, they lost, and the conquerors plundered their possessions and took captive as many people as they could – including Lot and his family.

One captive escaped. Where did he go for help? To Abraham. And Abraham led a heroic rescue, aided by 318 others, and saved not only Lot and his family and belongings, but the captives from Sodom and their belongings.

Abraham found the king of Sodom, who had been driven into a wasteland filled with tar pits, and the king responded in a way that seems to show he had his priorities straight. He told Abraham that the only the people were important, and he offered to let Abraham keep the riches. But for Abraham, the rescue was about love, not money, and he declined the king’s offer.

Lot, in the aftermath of this trauma, stayed near the people who had been through this terrifying experience with him – once again, he pitched his tents on the outskirts of Sodom.

What happened, then, that the people of Sodom became so depraved that God found it necessary to wipe them out? Maybe one thing the Torah is trying to tell us is that, when an entire community has been traumatized, it can lose sight of its values and fall into a self-destructive spiral.

One of the people of Sodom’s sins is often thought of as the failure to be kind to the stranger. There is the story of the two angels who stay with Lot, and he has to face down an angry crowd that wants to harm them. Did the people of Sodom’s experience of invasion and captivity make them so fearful that their first thought was to kill anyone from the outside? And yet, clearly they did not think of Lot as an outsider, for, at the height of their rage, they listened to him and left the angels alone.

But, the Torah says, God decided to destroy them. So here we see Abraham’s courage again, because, of all things, he was brave enough, and compassionate enough, to argue and bargain with God in an attempt to save those evil people of Sodom.

Of course, Lot and his daughters were the only people God spared.

Lot’s wife, as you will recall, could not resist looking back. The Torah tells us that she was literally turned into a pillar of salt. But metaphorically we can see salt as symbolic of tears, and we can understand her as being literally frozen by grief.

And Lot was a broken man.

Sharing the delusion that they were the last people on earth, Lot and his daughters settled in a barren place. There WERE other people in the world – like Abraham and Sarah – but they chose to be alone. I’m reminded of my family -- friendly people who, in the wake of violence, were so isolated.

Lot drank. He slept with his daughters. He died.

And Abraham came to bury his beloved Lot, his surrogate son, for whom he had risked his life.

When Abraham learned how his kind, righteous, loving nephew had fallen apart, I have no doubt that his heart was shattered – as shattered as it would have been if Lot had been his own child.

I think that’s when the story of Abraham’s life stopped making sense to him.

I think that Abraham felt abandoned by God. And after God has abandoned you, how can you continue being brave?

So then, when Abraham was finally blessed with children, when the thought he heard God tell him to abandon Ishmael and sacrifice Isaac, maybe his courage failed him.

Or maybe his acts, which we usually think of as submission to God’s will, simply reflected that, at that point in time, he just didn’t have the strength to protect his children.

Or maybe Abraham, like many parents who harm their kids, in his grief, or anger, or mental illness, or just being overwhelmed, did the wrong thing because it seemed right in the moment.

But one thing I know – the Abraham who mustered three hundred men to save his nephew, the Abraham with the courage and spirit to argue with God over Sodom and Gomorrah –

That Abraham would have protected his children until his dying breath.

Unless his life just didn’t make sense to him anymore.

I’d like to say a word about the photographs of children that are hanging in our hall, on the way to the preschool. They are part of “The Heart Gallery.” I’m sure most of you have seen the Heart Gallery in other places, even if you haven’t noticed it here. The pictures are of children who have experienced violence, neglect and abandonment, for whom the state of Oregon is trying to find adoptive parents.

When I first heard the pictures had been hung here, two weeks ago, my eyes filled with tears, because even though Maurice and I were among those who conspired to bring the Heart Gallery to TBI, suddenly the thought of seeing all those children’s faces was overwhelming.

Because, as you may know, our kids are children whose pictures were once part of the Heart Gallery.

Before I go on, I want you to know I checked with Hunter and Clarice before talking about them today, not wanting to draw attention to them in a way that might embarrass them. But they were excited that I wanted to talk about them – because they want to help other children find homes. In fact, Clarice wanted to come up here and stand with me while I gave this d’var.

When I think of Hunter and Clarice, and all the children on those walls, I realize that they are the Isaacs and the Ishmaels among us today.

And when I think of their first parents, and the first parents of the other children on those walls, I think of them as Abraham, people who, in different circumstances, may have the potential to be capable and brave, but who probably acted from their own trauma when they did terrible damage to their kids.

While we went through the adoption process, before we were matched with Hunter and Clarice, we were given the back stories on a number of families. The stories were sketchy, to protect privacy, but in some of them you could discern that there may have been a time – before a death, a divorce, an injury, a home lost in a fire – when they were able to keep their children safe.

Why didn’t they pull it back together? Maybe they felt too broken, too alone. Maybe they didn’t experience acts of love leading to healing and redemption. Maybe, in the aftermath of their own trauma, they didn’t experience God’s presence in their lives and communities.

If we knew that Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael were among us today, what would we do? Would they be able to, through our love, experience the presence of God?

My hope for Hunter and Clarice is that they will never, never think of the misery they went through as part of God’s plan.

Instead, my hope is that they will feel that they experienced the hand of God in all the people who came together to – as Clarice describes it – save their lives.

The teachers, the counselors, the case workers, the foster parents, the advocates, their lawyer, the judge, us, their adoptive parents – and this community, Temple Beth Israel, that has taken them straight to its heart.

People here at TBI already do so much – I’m sure I know only an infinitesimal part of it. There are people here who have adopted, people who foster, people who work with families and kids at risk, teachers, coaches, DHS workers…on and on and on.

And yet, Isaac and Ishmael are still hanging on the wall down the hall, and their father, Abraham, is somewhere grieving their loss.

In Oregon, there are 350 children in need of families. That doesn’t count the children that the state hopes will return to their first families or relatives, or the families whose troubles don’t rise to the level of state intervention but nonetheless face difficulties. Families that might be part of our larger Eugene community, or part of our congregation.

I am so thankful for my own life and story, especially the painful parts, the parts that have taken me to dark places and behind bars. Without those parts of my life, I probably would not have, with Maurice, chosen to adopt children from the foster care system.

And I’m grateful because those painful parts of my life have enabled me to better support Hunter and Clarice as they try, in their own inspiring way, to understand and tell the story of their own lives. We are trying to teach them that there is nothing they can’t talk about.

I’ll close with one example that I think illustrates the two-way relationship between our own stories and our mythic narratives. It’s a story about Clarice and Star Wars.

As you probably know, Darth Vader, the villain, was once a good and talented young man. He experienced a horrific loss and injury, and joined the Dark Side. He wears his scary helmet because it enables him to breathe. His twin children, Luke and Leia, were adopted, separately, and knew nothing of Darth Vader until he revealed his identity to Luke, who is fighting the Dark Side.

The two have a final battle, in which each implores the other to join him – on the Dark Side, on the Light Side. They each have the opportunity to kill the other, but refuse. Darth Vader finally redeems himself by killing the evil emperor to save Luke, and is mortally wounded.

As Darth Vader lays dying, he asks Luke to remove his helmet so he can look on his son with his own eyes – knowing that if Luke agrees, he will suffocate immediately. And if he dies immediately – this is not spelled out, but it is implicit – he will not be able to reconcile with his daughter, Leia, because she is not there – she is fighting storm troopers in the forest.

I know that some parents would not let their young kids watch the Star Wars movies because of the violence. All I can say is that Hunter went to Space Camp this summer, got the Star Wars bug, and we acquiesced.

In any case, we watched the movies together, and as Luke and Darth Vader battled it out, Clarice became very engaged. “You can do it, Darth Vader! You can do it!” she exclaimed. “Come to the light side! Come to the light side! There’s still good in you!”

As Darth Vader lay dying she sobbed. And when Darth Vader asked Luke to take his helmet off, she cried even harder. “Why?” she said. “Why does Darth Vader want Luke to take his helmet off before he sees his own daughter?”

I was crying too, at that point.

I said to Clarice, “Do you think that this movie might be making you think of your first family? Maybe Darth Vader is making you think of your first dad?”

There was a pause, and then she said, “You’re right, Mom!”

Then I asked, “Do you think that just as Darth Vader did bad things but still had good inside him, your first dad might have good inside him too?”

Without missing a beat Clarice said “I know he does, because he always used to tell us ‘I’m going to be a good person one day.’ ”

This is a girl who is working hard to learn, understand, and tell her story.

Please, as a community, let’s do everything we can for the Isaacs, Ishmaels and Abrahams among us, so that they can experience the presence of God and work on their stories as well.

And when we’ve done all we can, let’s do a little bit more.

Shana Tova.