Laughter and Ambiguity

The following was preached on the second morning of Rosh HaShanah at Kolot Chayeinu.

This morning, we’ll be reading the story of the birth of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael.

Let’s consider first the birth of Isaac. The birth of Isaac represents one of the most critical moments in our Biblical myth. God has already fulfilled one part of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: God has blessed them and made their name great—their bravery in leaving behind their home country to start in a new life in a new land, their perilous encounters with kings up and down the Mediterranean coast, their arguments with God to do justice for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the hospitality they show to wanderers in the desert. But the other part of God’s promise—and perhaps, the more important part—remains as yet unfulfilled: to make of Abraham and Sarah a great nation, so that the blessing that they’ve brought into the world might be shared with future generations.

Twice before in our story, messengers of God have come to Abraham and Sarah to inform them that they will have a child. And in both these instances, Abraham and Sarah laugh at the possibility of such an idea. After all, they are both quite advanced in years—Abraham 100 years old, and Sarah 90. We might characterize their laughter as a kind of bemused skepticism. And such a reaction is warranted. After a life committed to the pursuit of truth, having born witness to the random and sometimes absurd way in which suffering manifests itself, Abraham and Sarah carry with them a healthy dose of realism. Their laughter serves as a safety valve. Like any good satirists, they take a look at their own particular slice of suffering, and rather than sinking into despair or denial, they speak the absurd truth by pointing at it with a joke. We might call this brand of humor: “It’s funny because it’s true.” We might associate it with the work of Jon Stewart or Amy Schumer.

In the verses we’ll read this morning, laughter once again plays a central role. Abraham and Sarah’s fortunes are reversed. The seemingly impossible comes to be, and the child they’ve always dreamed of is born. Now, a different kind of laughter is heard in their camp, a sort of delighted surprise. It’s a simpler kind of laughter—without the dark undertones of the laughter they’d known before. It’s the kind of laughter we might imagine coming from the mouth of a toddler in a game of peek-a-boo: you thought one thing was going to happen, but look!, something else did. We might call this brand of humor: It’s funny because we didn’t expect it to happen. As it goes in the joke: Why did the chicken cross the road? We expect to hear about a deep motivation, not a simple explanation of the cause. This unexpected outcome is funny.

Literary critic and rabbinical school professor and Wendy Zierler notes that laughter—like birth—is a sort of mysterious outpouring. We don’t really know why it happens; we don’t really control when it happens. It sort of just erupts from within our bellies. You can’t really plan for a laugh, and anyone can tell a forced laugh from a real one.

It’s appropriate, therefore, that Abraham and Sarah should name the child of their bemused skepticism and delighted surprise Isaac—in Hebrew, Yitzchak, meaning, “he will laugh.” Like a laugh, Abraham and Sarah couldn’t really plan for Isaac. He kind of just came out, uncontrolled, mysteriously, unexpectedly.

But so far, we’ve dealt only with the first part of this morning’s Torah reading: the birth of Isaac. Let’s turn now to the second part of our Torah reading, where laughter is a little more complicated: the banishment of Hagar and her son Ishmael.

The text tells us that Sarah saw Ishmael doing something that Sarah didn’t like. What exactly Ishmael was doing is unclear; the Hebrew verb that’s used there—m’tzacheik—is not such a common one. One translation uses the word “playing”—hardly an offense worthy of banishment. To better understand the meaning of this verb, we might looks to other places in the Torah where m’tzacheik is used.

In the incident with the Golden Calf, the Israelites are described as m’tzacheik—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael was engaged in some sort of idol worship. In the Joseph narrative, the nameless Mrs. Potipher wishes Joseph to m’tzacheik with her—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael was engaged in some sort of sexual impropriety. In the court of King David, m’tzacheik is used to describe an assassin’s plot—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael had committed some act of murder.

The classical Rabbinic tradition goes to great lengths to make the case for any one of—and in some cases, all of—these offenses, for which Ishmael and Hagar are banished. After all, the Rabbis were strong moralists and apologists—creating backstories to explain the sometimes-offensive behaviors of our patriarchs and matriarchs.

But, as is often the case in good art—as well as in life—a helpful clue may be hiding in plain sight. The word m’tzacheik shares a root with the word tz’chok—laughter. What’s more, m’tzacheik is different by only one letter from the name Yitzchak.

Was Ishmael Isaac-ing? Was he laughing at Isaac, pretending to be Isaac? Laughter, after all, can carry with it the power to hurt, to mock, to tease, to humiliate. Just as it shakes the belly of the one who laughs, so too can laughter shake the ground upon which the one who is laughed at stands.

But it’s also possible that Ishmael was merely laughing; perhaps someone had just told him a knock-knock joke; perhaps, like Abraham and Sarah, he was surprised and delighted at the arrival of this newest member of the family: “finally—a playmate!” I’ve heard it said that jealousy is when we see that someone else has something that we think rightfully belongs to us. “That’s my thing,” we think to ourselves. Perhaps Sarah thought that she and Abraham had a monopoly on laughter.

Unfortunately for those among us who have a low tolerance for ambiguity, the text isn’t clear. In art as in life, there are no perfect heroes or perfect villains. And it’s this very ambiguity that makes life and art and laughter so difficult to make sense of. It’s almost comic how slippery is this whole enterprise—how every year we come back to read and reread these same stories, and how every year just as we think we’ve got their meaning nailed down, a new year rolls around and with it, a new meaning. How throughout these lifetimes of ours, we find ourselves wrestling with the same core struggles as we wrestled with from childhood. For those of us with a low tolerance for ambiguity, it’s almost enough to make you want to wash your hands of the whole business—to banish ambiguity, with Hagar and Ishmael, into the wilderness.

But we banish at our own risk. We need the Jon Stewarts and Amy Schumers of the world, to keep on us telling the truth. We need that chicken to cross the road, to keep on surprising us about what we had assumed was the truth. And we need Hagar and Ishmael, to keep reminding us that the truth is rarely ever THE truth, but maybe only a truth—loaded with ambiguity, keeping us on our toes, laughing as it darts in and out of focus.