Carrying the World. Alone.

The following d'var torah was delivered on Rosh Hashanah morning at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you see a friend and you can just tell that something is not right? She looks worried or tired, as if she’s just been crying or she’s mad about something. So you walk up to your friend, and in as supportive a way as you know how, you say to her, “How you doing?” And then, shrinking inside of herself as if she’s been found out, your friend puts on the least convincing calm-face you’ve ever seen, looks you in the eye and says, “I’m OK.”

If you’re like me—and I would guess, if you’re like most people—you’ve been on both ends of that situation. All of us have an inclination to sometimes conceal the truth, in order—we imagine—to protect ourselves and those we love. It’s hard to admit it when we’re hurt. It’s hard to be so vulnerable. A coworker gets a promotion instead of us, and rather than acknowledge that we’re disappointed, we say, “It’s probably for the best.” A friend can’t make it to an important life event, and we wave it off as if it’s no big deal. We keep our disappointments inside. We put on a happy face. And while we quietly carry our bundle of worries, we imagine that we’ve got everybody fooled, most of all, ourselves.

On Rosh Hashanah morning, we read about a character who thought he had everyone fooled. For whatever troubled reason, our forefather Abraham heeds God’s call to sacrifice his son Isaac. He doesn’t tell Sarah where he’s going or even that he’s going. He, Isaac, and his servants set out early one morning, walking in uncomfortable silence for three days, the dread of the thing hanging over him. “The boy and I will go worship and we will come back,” Abraham says to his servants. He knows that if he tells the truth, his servants might try to stop him, or Isaac might run away. Or perhaps he imagines that so long as he doesn’t say it out loud, he doesn’t have to face the horrible truth of the deed. “It’s not real, as long as you don’t admit it.”

But then comes Isaac. He knows his father too well. Isaac senses that something is wrong. His dad is not usually this quiet. He doesn’t usually look so sad, so conflicted, so deeply torn. And then Isaac, who’s known in our tradition as a shy man of few words, utters perhaps the bravest words in the entire Torah—brave, not because he willingly goes along with his father’s plan like some sort of martyr, but brave because he risks breaking the silence in order to name what everybody else seems too scared to ask: “Dad, is everything OK? Ayeh haseh l’olah? Where is the sheep for the sacrifice?” But again, Abraham conceals the truth. “Everything’s OK, my son. Don’t worry about the sheep.”

Elie Wiesel, in his book Messengers of God, notes that although Abraham—as the first monotheist—is a visionary, he is also a complete loner, unable to form lasting relationships with anyone. “Abraham,” Wiesel writes, “the first angry young man. Abraham, the first to rebel against the establishment, a minority of one, alone against the world” (70-71).

Our trials may not be as severe or as obvious as Abraham’s, but like our forefather, we all too often act as if we too are alone against the world. We don’t want to burden others with our “stuff,” and so our burden grows. But we’re not Atlas; try as we might, we can’t carry the whole world on our shoulders.

Abraham is ultimately prevented from carrying out his horrific deed. Instead of his son Isaac, he sacrifices a ram that happens to be caught in a nearby thicket. Jewish tradition teaches that this ram was created at the end of the sixth day of Creation and lay in wait through the generations of Adam and Noah to be found at this exact moment—a safety net that God created from the beginning, in case Abraham should choose to actually go through with the sacrifice.

Abraham was lucky. God had pre-ordered a ram. But the rest of us can’t afford to silently carry our burden and hope for a divine intervention.

Rather than wait for some miraculous ram, on Rosh Hashanah we blow a ram’s horn and read the story of the binding of Isaac. My hope is that the story will remind us that we can’t carry our burdens alone. And the ram’s horn—the shofar—my hope is that the sound of the shofar this Rosh Hashanah will wake us up, jolt us into awareness, open our ears to the chorus of Isaacs all around us—who, even when we remain silent, are perceptive enough, and more importantly, caring enough, to ask if everything is OK.