Vayera
This parsha covers Chapters 18-22 and includes the binding of Isaac, one of the most difficult stories in our heritage. The parsha begins with the three angels visiting Abraham, being served a non Kosher meal (18:7-8) and telling of the birth of Isaac in the coming year. It includes the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s bargaining for the city, and the repulsive and slanderous tale of the origins of the Moabites and Ammonites coming from Lot’s daughters who got him drunk, had sex with him and gave birth to the founders of those two people (19:31-38). We also have the birth of Isaac and his weaning festival, (a rite of passage) the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael and YHVH’s saving of them. The parsha concludes, after the binding of Isaac, with the lineage of Abraham’s nephews and nieces, including Rebecca.
My entire focus will be on the theme of initiation and how it plays out in this parsha. Within this theme, I offer comments on the following areas.
Voluntary vs involuntary beginning of initiations
Role of preparation in initiations
Role of Death in initiations
Role of elders in “catching” and interpreting the experience.
The Akedah as a failure.
I want to start by differentiating rites of passage and initiations. Rites of passage, as I use the term following a large body of ethnographic literature starting with Van Genne’s seminal work, effect a change in social status of the person. The new status is visible to everyone and is independent of any internal change within the person undergoing the rite of passage. That is, the person undergoing the rite of passage might or might not change internally, but that’s not needed for a successful rite of passage.
Here are some examples of rites of passage: the weaning festival marking the end of infancy in this parsha, the circumcision of males as a sign of the covenant introduced in the last parsha, marriage, divorce, B’nai Mitzvah, High School and College graduation, getting a driver’s license. I think we can all agree that all of these mean that the person is viewed differently from a societal point of view, but the person might or might not be any different internally and the ritual does not make any internal change happen.
Initiations, again as I am using the term, are designed to effect a significant internal transformation. If we think of ethnographic literature around Native American vision quests, Australian walkabouts, Martin Prechtel’s accounts of Mayan village life, Victor Turner’s accounts of Pygmy life in Africa or the hunting initiations of the !Kung San, all of these involve a significant test of the individual on the path to adulthood. Success means that the adolescent is ready and able to assume adult responsibilities; failure means that s/he is still an adolescent.
That the akedah is an initiation is supported by the text announcing the akedah echoing the text of lech lecha. The JPS commentary says that the only two times lech lecha appears (I think they mean in the 5 books of Moses) is here and in the opening of Chapter 12. Further, there is an echo in the triplet. When Abraham is told to Lech Lecha in Chapter 12, it is from his land, his relatives and the house of your father. Here he is commanded to take his son Isaac, his favored one, the one whom you love. These two journeys of spiritual development are linked through this grammatical triplet.
Initiations can start in a voluntary way or through some kind of “abduction.” The core distinction here is between something that feels voluntary compared to something where there’s little sense of choice. Some initiations are initiated voluntarily. A young person decides they are mature enough and makes plans to go on a vision quest, a walkabout, a solo hunt, or some other kind of challenging time isolated from other humans in the more than human world. They choose the time, tell the elders and off they go. I have done two vision fasts in my life and both were completely voluntary, though one was successful and one was not, as I will talk about more below.
Some initiations are more involuntary—the elders “kidnap” the children and take them out into the bush away from their families. This is attested to by both Prechtel and Victor Turner. Someone may have a breakdown, or in some way the initiate is forced into the process of transformation. Plotkin talks about the abduction experience of Jung, for instance, in the Journey of Soul Initiation or we might think about the abduction of Persephone by Hades. In my case, my father died without a functioning will and I was “forced” to hammer out a settlement between my step mother, my sister and I, and the only way I could do that was to go from being the dysfunctional, immature baby of the family to a functioning adult.
Ishmael’s initiation is definitely of the abduction kind. After Isaac’s weaning ceremony, Sarah says to Abraham “Drive this maid out and her son because the son of this maid will not inherit with my son Isaac.” (21:10). This doesn’t sit well with Abraham, but God says don’t worry, Ishmael will also father a great nation. Abraham gives them the barest of provisions “and the water was finished from the bottle and she thrust the boy under one of the shrubs and she went and sat opposite, going as far as a bow shot “let me not see the boy’s death.” And she sat opposite and raised her voice and wept.” (21:15-16). Nothing voluntary about this at all.
Isaac’s initiation is equally an abduction. There’s no preparation and the test comes out of nowhere. Chapter 21 closes with the formation of an alliance with the Philistine king Avimelech. Then, “and YHVH said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love and lech lecha to the land of Moriah (and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” (22:2). And Abraham takes Isaac to Mount Moriah, the teaching mountain (Moriah is from the same Hebrew root as teach).
I want to offer two possible approaches to this question of voluntary action versus being abducted. One approach is to think of the initiatory experiences you have undergone, if any. The other approach is to think of deeply meaningful experiences in your life.
What experiences felt like abductions or where you felt like you had no choice but you had to take a certain specific action? I offered the example above of my having to coerce my step mother and sister into resolving my father’s estate. What experiences felt voluntary such as my undergoing vision fasts?
Initiations involve extensive preparation and can take multiple months or even years. Bill Plotkin, who has dedicated his life to pan cultural initiations, says clearly that one of the key factors in success or failure of an initiation is the level of preparation and then the subsequent work in isolation in the more than human world. Think of the vision quests of indigenous people such as Native Americans (think of all the anthropological accounts, Lame Deer and Black Elk) or Africans (Victor Turner), Martin Prechtel’s story of Mayan Indians or the walkabouts of Australia. There’s some preparation period of sacred teachings and practice. Then there’s the most intense period of fasting or wandering, being without other humans in the more than human world. This period always involves emotional turmoil and descent into despair. It is not supposed to be easy. In a successful initiation, the initiate has some kind of vision and brings back that vision to be interpreted by the elders. The vision and the interpretation then function as a guide in his/her life. The initiate returns to the village and his/her return is frequently celebrated with a feast.
In both the Akedah and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael, there seems to be absolutely no inner preparation. Ishmael and Hagar are just tossed away, though the divine tells Abraham that he will watch over them. As for Isaac, the only thing he says in the whole story is to ask where the sheep is for the burnt offering (22:7) and he walks with his father and somehow lets his father bind him and lay him on the top of the altar (22:8-9). There’s no solo time in the more than human world in which the adolescent self is supposed to die to make room for the adult. There’s no obvious emotional descent in the Akedah, no wailing the way Hagar and Ishmael wail.
Think back to periods of personal upheaval in your life from which you emerged changed, if any. What kind of preparation did you have for the period of turmoil? Did you feel in any way ready or have any idea what a path through might look like? How much time did you spend alone? How much of that was in the more than human world, versus feeling alone inside of human civilization?
All initiations involve death. In order to transform, the old self has to die, in some sense of the word. You cannot become an adult without your adolescent self dying. If you are not willing to let the old parts of you die, you will get stuck. How many 50-70 year old adolescents are running around, hankering after a life of play, no responsibility, travel or golf or shopping, in denial of the changes in their bodies (60 is the new 40)?
We are really told precious little of the story of Hagar and Ishmael. Ishmael is faced with the challenge of going from being a protected boy (who probably already should be a young man, given his age) who is well loved by his father and mother as part of a family unit to becoming a man, separated from his father. We’re not given enough of his story to know how he transformed into the adult we will meet again at Abraham’s funeral. But we know that his adolescent self has died with his exile from his father.
This death and most if not all psychospiritual deaths, naturally involve grieving for the loss of the earlier stage of life and for the losses that were also part of that stage. I suspect that if you are not willing to wail, you are not ready to transform. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael both wail and the divine pays attention and tells them to not be afraid and that God will make Ishmael a great nation. (21:16-18). “God has heard the boy’s voice.” (21:17). In my experience, wailing is absolutely often an essential part of allowing ourselves to experience a psychospiritual death.
One interesting thing about the story is that it is Hagar who finds the water and gives it to Ishmael—so he doesn’t survive and transform on his own, but only with his mother’s active participation. Maybe this is because Ishmael is not really ready for an initiation because he is still a boy. (21:19). This is a bit confusing because he’s at least 16, which is old enough to be a young man in that society.
The presence of the theme of death is omnipresent in the Akedah. After all, Abraham is supposed to kill Isaac, but instead a ram is killed as a substitute (22:13). The whole test is made vivid and terrible precisely because it involves killing and death in the most direct way. Our text doesn’t tell us a story of Isaac being challenged by a difficult course of study, or having to migrate to a different country, or having to learn how to work—it tells us a story of a very real potential death.
Think of your transformational initiations, if any. What part of you died? Did you wail? What were you grieving? If you do not feel you have had transformational initiations, ask yourself what needs to die so that your psychospiritual age catches up with your chronological age.
Elders are decisive in the possibility of successful initiations. Reading the anthropological literature, it is clear that initiations often involve a fair measure of ambiguity.
You have a vision of a sacred hoop or a jaguar comes and licks you three times. What does that mean? Even what seem to be unambiguous experiences need guidance from community elders. If you successfully survive a walkabout, or decide to return to the Amish community after a period of interacting with the English community in a more adult way (rumspringa) or do you first solo successful hunt, that’s on the face of it pretty unambiguous. But what did you learn about yourself that will let you take your place as a young adult in the community? That’s less clear and needs the guidance of elders. For instance, returning to an Amish community because the English world scares you is very different than returning because you want to farm in community—and both motivations could readily be present.
It's often said that we suffer from the lack of elders in our world, and that’s true. What I mean here by elders is people who mentor you as a younger person not because it suits some motivation like having allies as they climb a corporate ladder, but because they are committed to raising adults. In my first vision quest, the elders who were the leaders of the quest were useless; not elders at all. In the second quest (and I was 59 years old at the time), I had two people who caught my story, helped me understand it, helped me formulate how I could implement the vision I had in my life.
Have you had elders in your life or only “olders”? Who were they and how did they help guide you?
The Akedah, in my interpretation and contrary to the mainstream Rabbinic interpretations, is a failure, not a great triumph of faith. Initiations can be successful, or they can fail. I am a firm believer that even in indigenous societies, not every initiation is a successful one. Sometimes the initiate does not have a true vision and fakes it. Sometimes the vision is more like a preliminary one and more work is needed. Sometimes the elders can’t or don’t offer a helpful interpretation and the initiate is not transformed. In the case of my first vision fast in the mountains of New Mexico, in much hindsight, I think that the vision I had about returning to my people was true, but limited because I had no clarity about what that meant. Then I had no useful help from my elders (the guides and the community). So I kept wandering in my own Sinai.
I am in complete alignment with the view, not original to me by any stretch, that the Akedah is a failure for both Abraham and Isaac, counter to the text (22:15-18). “And an angel of YHVH called to Abraham a second time from the skies and said, “I swear by me, word of YHVH—that because you did this thing and didn’t withhold your son, your only one, that I’ll bless you and multiply your seed like the stars of the skies.”
Why do I think it is a failure, beyond my revulsion at the idea that Abraham is even considering sacrificing his son, let alone that he gathers wood and binds him? Closely reading the text we discover that the last time YHVH directly speaks to Abraham is when he sets up the test; the command to stay the execution comes from an angel of the divine. (22:11-12). And that’s the end of YHVH’s direct communication with Abraham, a person with whom YHVH previously talked to regularly. Also, the next mention we have of Sarah is her death. (23:1 in the next parsha.) If this were the supreme test of Abraham which he passed with flying colors, I would think we’d hear something positive from Sarah and the direct communication with the divine would increase, rather than ending.
Further, neither Abraham nor Isaac have a vision that we are told about or that shows up later in their lives, so they bring back nothing to the community. Abraham does receive a gift from the angel (22:15-18), but it is a mere repetition of the promise to make Abraham a great nation, a boon already promised multiple times prior to this. There’s no triumphant return to the community, no feast; all the text says is “And Abraham went back to his boys [this probably refers to his nephews] and they got up and went to Beer-Sheva and Abraham lived in Beer-Sheva.” ((22:19). How is this a success?
Initiations that fail are not just individual failures; they are communal failures. The community does not receive the benefit of the vision and spiritual maturation of the young person that is the fruit of a successful initiation. When I think of my first vision fast and the call to return to my people, because I didn’t know how to do that and my elders were no help, not only did I wander in my own desert, the community did not have the benefit of my experience and my vision.
Think back to your deep transformational experiences that felt initiatory, if any. What visions did you have? How did you attempt to become the visions? What kind of help did you have in interpreting the vision or making it manifest in the world? Where did you return to?
If you have not had any deep transformational experiences that felt initiatory, or if it speaks to you more, react to the akedah. Did Abraham pass? What was the impact on Isaac? What lesson should have been learned at the teaching mountain?
QUESTIONS
What experiences felt like abductions or where you felt like you had no choice but you had to take a certain specific action? What experiences felt voluntary?
Think back to periods of personal upheaval in your life from which you emerged changed, if any. What kind of preparation did you have for the period of turmoil? Did you feel in any way ready or have any idea what a path through might look like? How much time did you spend alone? How much of that was in the more than human world, versus feeling alone inside of human civilization?
Think of your transformational initiations, if any. What part of you died? Did you wail? What were you grieving? If you do not feel you have had transformational initiations, ask yourself what needs to die so that your psychospiritual age catches up with your chronological age.
Have you had elders in your life or only “olders”? Who were they and how did they help guide you?
If you have not had any deep transformational experiences that felt initiatory, or if it speaks to you more, react to the akedah. Did Abraham pass? What was the impact on Isaac? What lesson should have been learned at the teaching mountain?
