If You See a Ram in a Thicket, . . .

"Le sacrifice d'Isaac'* by Marc Chagall

So already, in just a few days in synagogues all over the world, Jews will be reading the story of the Binding of Isaac as part of their observance of Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish new year. The blowing of the shofar, which happens many times during the High Holy Day season, reminds us of this story (among other things) because the shofar is a ram's horn, and Isaac is not killed by his father Abraham because, in the nick of time, Abraham spies a ram caught in the thicket and sacrifices it instead of his son.

It's a hard story that's long been pondered, interpreted, and discussed: the idea of religious obedience's requiring the sacrifice one's child is just so repellent to most of us. But it's also a story about seeing what's there. One interpretation of the story says the ram was always present in the thicket and therefore available for sacrifice, but that Abraham couldn't or didn't see it until he was just about to kill Isaac. Does such significant perception depend on the threat of terrible, imminent loss or choice?

Last night, I heard a poem by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfield about listening to the shofar in this season of Jewish repentance. In it, she talks about the importance of learning to see, which may mean learning how to see differently:

The ram’s horn is silent at first
as is the ram.
Caught in the thicket,
Waiting for Abraham to lift his head and see,
It appears at the last minute,
Out of nowhere,
When it’s almost too late.

Of course, it was there all along.
Since twilight
On the eve of the first Shabbat, we are told.
It was there before darkness fell.
(We barely knew what darkness was then.)

It was there all along.
Waiting for us to open our eyes.
Waiting for us to see another way.**

As I listened to the poem, I found myself thinking about another poem informed by the story of the binding of Isaac: Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," one of many Owen poems about the life-wasting, tragic futility of World War I****:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.***

Despite being called to "Behold" the ram in the thicket, Abram, the old man--Owen uses Abraham's pre-covenant name, the one he had before God promised him that he would be the father of multitudes--chooses not to behold, not to see or observe. And the result is mass senseless death and despair.

As I contemplated the several types of persons both of these poems suggest--the person who won't look, the person who can't see, the person who hasn't seen yet and will, and the person who does see and chooses to ignore what she's seeing--I began thinking of Greta Thunberg's comments at the recent United Nations Climate Summit:

For Thunberg, science is the ram in the thicket that the representatives of the world's nations are willfully refusing to see because of their greater commitments to their "fairy tales of eternal economic growth.***** Rightfully indignant, Thunberg chided the diplomats: "How dare you!" Her implication: Your fairy tales are going to cost my generation our lives.

Rabbi Cohen's poem includes the following lines about the importance of serious threat, and not just as an intellectual concept but as a lived feeling that makes clear what's urgent:

The sacrifice has to be offered.
The child will have to die.
This is the power of the ram’s horn.
It beckons us back to this moment in the story.

For many Jewish worshipers, it's just as Rabbi Cohen says: the sound of the shofar prompts a visceral response, a shared sense of the importance and immediacy of both the present moment and that early biblical moment. The real tragedy of our present-day moment may be that the children of the world and the national leaders of the world disagree that this is the moment of serious threat in which a change in collective behavior must occur or else the child, or the children, will die. Today's climate-activist children are right, according to the scientists. But the Ram of Pride is winning against the Ram of Life nonetheless. A teenage girl's voice isn't like the blast of a shofar, unfortunately.

So shofar or not, we move on/ And as we do, Rabbi Anisfeld urges us to

. . . think about the path we are all on together
The altars at the end of the road
The children we love but seem prepared to sacrifice.

Look up.
Listen.

This holiday season, may we all wake up and smell the altars. May we raise our heads and look around, and see what rams there are that we can sacrifice instead of the world's children. Meanwhile, it's never a bad thing to see and seize life-affirming opportunity in the thickets of our own lives. May we all be inscribed for long, long life, especially the children!
 

* Chagall, M. (1966, January 01). The sacrifice of Isaac, 1966 - Marc Chagall. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.wikiart.org/en/marc-chagall/the-sacrifice-of-isaac-1966

** Anisfeld, S. C. (2016, October 06). Listening to the Call of the Shofar. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.jewishboston.com/listening-to-the-call-of-the-shofar/

*** Owen, W. (n.d.). The Parable of the Old Man and the Young--Poems | Academy of American Poets. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://poets.org/poem/parable-old-man-and-young

**** Yestervid. (2015, October 19). WWI - 20 Iconic Photos in HD (Trenches and Front Lines). Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiHvu2T4Vls

***** Npr. (2019, September 23). Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.wunc.org/post/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-un-climate-action-summit