Tipping Points meet Turning Points
Why is Rosh Hashanah’s central Torah story the Binding of Isaac? Most of you will correctly point out that this is where the Shofar comes from. The call from the horn of the ram offered in place of Isaac continues to awaken our return in this season. But this year, I want us to consider another reason why this enigmatic story of Abraham bringing Isaac up to the mountaintop commanded the attention of the sages. It’s a reason that might just command our attention as we enter the New Year 5782.
It was during one of the eulogies for Rabbi Jonathan Sacks last Fall, that I first learned of his favorite interpretation of the Binding of Isaac. It comes from the Hasidic Itzbitzer Rebbe, who says that the whole point of the episode is to provide us with the tools for living with doubt and uncertainty. This passage, as much as any other, schools us in how to move forward through a world mired not only with doubt and uncertainty but also confusion and a lack of control.
You’ll recall that Abraham is told, time and again, that Isaac’s existence is core to the covenant. As much as Abraham was willing to see his line flow through Ishmael or another household lad, God makes it 100% clear than Isaac is the essential bridge between his parents and descendants more numerous than the stars in the heavens or the grains of sand on the seashore. How then can it be that the same God is asking Abraham to bring Isaac up for an offering? The bewilderment is real. And this uncertainty, for the Izbitzer, is the essence of the trial itself.
Somehow, Abraham finds a way forward. Despite the quicksand of confusion and apparent divine contradiction, Abraham is able to come away on solid ground, with firm footing, facing forward, with Isaac alive – although clarifying his mental and spiritual state isn’t the Torah’s priority – he is very much alive, as is Sarah – of whom the Torah is equally vague. Most importantly for us as learners of this central, yet massively enigmatic story, Abraham emerges with covenantal purpose reaffirmed.
You don’t need me to elaborate on why this reading grips us this year. Perhaps the only thing we can all agree on this: there are immense amounts of unrealized potential out there. So let’s focus on how Abraham was able to live so effectively with such unnerving, upending conditions.
How does he do it? By activating two instinctive responses, precisely when the trial was at its most arresting moment: 1) he adapts exceptionally well by bringing the ram in place of Isaac; 2) he founds the site by naming the mountaintop. These two instincts – being resourcefully adaptive and being grounded enough to recognize the meaning of what’s happening and what to do about it – are both things Abraham does without any prompting from the angel or God. Often Abraham’s conduct in this story is associated with unquestioning obedience. With these two particular actions, however, he is demonstrating impressive agency and spiritual imagination.
There are tipping points and there are turning points. Tipping points are disempowering, their momentum builds and leaves us with little ability to change their course. Turning points are quite different. They are about active agency, when we’re in the driver’s seat. We enter this New Year at a time when ‘going in reverse’ seems to have surged toward a tipping point. Abraham arrives just in time, to school us in how to embrace course-changing turning points in firm defiance of troubling tipping point trends.
First let’s consider Abraham’s agility in discovering and offering the ram. Being adaptive is a lot more difficult than it sounds. This is because even if you’re the kind of person who demonstrates that you’re made of adaptive fibre, still there are irresistible forces out there collaring you and dragging you into situations that exhaust and frustrate you; that can wear you down and tear you down. Problems that cannot be left alone because they are real and raw, like violent eruptions in nature, or our resurgent pandemic, or the hatred of people – particularly our people, each of which seems to defy inoculation. Yet we cannot be at our best if we’re struggling to meet every challenge, everywhere, all of the time.
My first wish for us for the New Year is that we apply better taste in picking our battles. Our neighbor, Harvard President Larry Bacow, likes to say, when considering candidates for leadership roles, that he favors picking people with good taste – good taste in people and in problems.
‘Pick your battles’ goes the adage. Well, for too many of us, we’re being dragged into battles we wouldn’t pick. This is, in part, because digital-life amplifies our agitation. If online-life hasn’t done enough to upend what we know and how we think about other people, then trying to remain disengaged by the latest moral outrage, starts to feel, in and of itself, like a moral crime of indifference.
Still, you’re no good to anyone when you’re forced to fight on someone else’s terms, when you’re pulled onto someone else’s turf, yanked away from your own zone of competence. Just as none of us can be agile when we’ve been knocked sideways or put flat our your backs, we face similar deficiencies when we’re torn from our roots. Home is more than a place where they take you in, its also where you can pour new life into your kindnesses, when you can obtain fresh-fed, home-grown recipes and strategies to advance causes that are less disheveled and more custom cut and well-fitting.
We need to restore our home field advantage. When you get to decide what you’re fighting for and how to do so, when your feet are firmly planted on your own turf, then you are – at once – more effective and less drained.
Abraham’s spiritual imagination demonstrates how this can work. The tumultuous emotions which must have been swirling inside him at the moment when Isaac is spared physical harm may be mirrored by the thicket in which the ram is ensnared. Yet with uncommon spiritual dexterity, Abraham disentangles a ram to inspire a call from a ram’s horn will go forth in the future, a call that, to this very day, is designed to be disentangling for each and every one of us.
This leads to his defining, unprompted, freely-chosen act, to establish that home turf and name it as such. When Abraham elects to name the place “Adonai yir-eh” the place where God will appear’ he is founding our people’s most sacred plot of land on earth, again, to this very day. Indeed, the place will get renamed ‘the home’ (ha-bayit) and the mountain becomes, har habayit, the ‘mountain-peak of home’. It is the place we face right now in prayer. No matter where we are on earth, we face Jerusalem. When we’re in Jerusalem we face that mountain, upon which came to reside God’s House, the Temple for more than one thousand years.
Naming in and of itself is a formative act. What we choose to name somebody or some place is a profound statement of agency and affirmation. Here’s where it becomes fascinating. I hope I haven’t lost you, because this is where I want to share a brand new understanding of this turning point that Abraham introduces to such a vexing story.
Tradition presents two names for God: Elohim – the cosmic God who creates the world, and Adonai, the personal God who seeks our intimacy. I had never before yesterday at 3 am noticed this fine, but hugely important point. The name used for God who tests Abraham is Elohim, the side of God who appears more in nature, as in the dimensions of nature that get violent and the aspects of nature that are viral and infectious. But the side of God which invites and encourages a relationship with us is named Adonai and Adonai does not want the Akeda to go forward. It is Adonai who puts a stop to any harm that could, God forbid, come to Isaac. The first time we hear the name Adonai in a trial orchestrated by Elohim, is when the Angel of Adonai calls out to stop Abraham from harming his son. And, here’s the defining turning point. The name Abraham chooses for the place is Adonai yir-eh not Elohim yir-eh. So the side of God who will appear there forever more is the tender, intimate, compassionate God who hungers for closeness.
Belief is always deeply personal. Still Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wondered, “Is it conceivable that beauty, love, and music were created by something lifeless, inferior to you and me?”
What does the influence of Adonai feel like? Its currents glide your way in the form of softening ears instead of stiffening silence. Being alive to Adonai’s monumental calm, generates a happening in your soul. Its gentle caress can feel like a patient feels a gentleness with the easing of her pillow.
To court the preciousness of your relationship with Adonai, you need to be engaged with it. Being compatible with its spiritual delicacies can make things more than pleasing. It can make them redeeming. It seeks not clarity but depth; not demystifying explanation but endearing presence. Today begins a turning point, when your antennae re-sensitize to the holy, Adonai’s presence which can help you rise above the cul-de-sac of a world’s tipping point-reversals.
Over the past year-and-a-half, we have spent more time inside our homes than we ever imagined we would. This hasn’t been easy. One leading indicator of our agitation with homebound life, is the nagging urge for what we might call: anything else. There is so much sameness in your living confines, you long to be elsewhere, with somebody else, doing everything else. Not because you’re fired up for adventure, but because your cabin fever refuses to break. It reminds me of the tedium described by the writer George Eliot as not the excitement of getting to know some thing new about a thing, but the dullness of “knowing everything else about everything.”
The traditional framing of home is as a source of agreeable growth and tender relationships – core elements of what the sages name a Mikdash Me-at, a miniature sanctuary. When we abide at its threshold, our lives mirror something lasting. We detect and derive a home-grown energy wherein we become better company with ourselves.
My second wish for the New Year is that your home become where you gently clasp hands again with your People’s sources of spiritual nourishment, alongside Festive storytelling and singing around the dining room table. This is supplemented by our Shul, your home nearby your home. Speaking of naming, a synagogue’s traditional names Beit Knesset, Midrash, Tefillah, all derive from the word Bayit, meaning home, which is from where we should exercise better taste in electing to engage today’s problems.
When you are rooted, grounded, and nourished – that is – when you’re enjoying your home field advantage, you don’t have to struggle to dispel doubt and uncertainty. Instead, you can prove capable of factoring it into your life and responding to it by being at your best. The quiet current of turning point toward your intimacy with Adonai runs counter to all gusty tipping point winds.
There is an application from the world of else-thinking that is positive. It asks: What else can I become?
Consider but one example that reminds me of how adaptive a person or professional can become when they’re at home, comfortable in their own skin.
If you visit a certain floor of the University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor, it wouldn’t be long before you’d meet cancer patients who’d tell you how grateful they are for Candice Walker. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant writes, ‘her mission was not only to protect their fragile immune systems – it was also to care for their fragile emotions.” She’d often be there first to comfort families members, showing up with bagels and coffee, when their loved one’s were undergoing treatment.
Grant tells an illustrative story. One day Candice saw a patient on the floor of an elevator in intense pain. With other staff members unsure what to do, she immediately took charge, rushing the women into a wheelchair, taking her up for urgent treatment. The patient later caller her my savior. Candice isn’t a doctor or nurse. She isn’t a social worker either. She’s a custodian whose official job it was to keep the cancer center clean.
Another cleaner on a long term care unit takes it upon herself to regularly rearrange the paintings on the walls, hoping that the change in scenery might spark some curiosity among patients. When asked about it, she said, “No it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”
Candice Walker likes to call the chemotherapy center the House of Hope.
With all that life has thrown our way over the past year, at times it can be hard to know where to turn. This is what Abraham recognizes. As his descendants, we know that turning points are so much more our thing than tipping points. They enable us to unearth a setting where living with doubt and uncertainty can find us emerging whole, with even more expansive selves.
This is why the Binding of Isaac is read on Rosh Hashanah. Abraham isn’t passively obedient. He is active. Early in the story, two lads that had accompanied Abraham and Isaac are told something profound. Abraham, again unprompted and at his own initiative, tells them “stay here, we will pray and then we will return.”
Friends, we are all like the lads, attending and attentive. We watch Abraham adapt – with the help of Adonai’s angel – to adopt the ram’s horn. And then we watch Abraham establish our home for Adonai, shifting away from Elohim, which we now embrace as well as our spiritual compass of better direction and better taste – a homecoming and a call to which our response may also be “we will pray and then we will return.”
Some of you have been around long enough to remember what a collect call is. In the days of land lines and directory assistance, you might occasionally pick up a ringing phone to an operator’s greeting. “I have a collect call from so-ands-so. Are you willing to accept the charges?” Consider, perhaps, the shofar as the originator of the call and the charges to be whatever personal and collective challenges you choose to grow with in the year we have just begun. May you find your own singular way to take the call, and embrace its charges in the coming year, by going out to meet them from your turf, to help shape a year when tipping points are kept in check by turning points.
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