Kafka’s Binding of Isaac

Of all the Jewish people’s many stories, perhaps none has more captured the world’s imagination than this morning’s Torah reading: the story of the Binding of Isaac.

We likely are familiar with the narrative. God instructs Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah, where he is to offer the boy up as a sacrifice. Abraham dutifully follows God’s command – and it is only at the very last moment that an angel of God intervenes, and instructs Abraham not to lay his hand upon the child.

For the past 2500 years or more during which this story has been told and retold, it has captured the imagination of countless philosophers, poets, artists, and scholars. For the ancient Rabbis, it became a story about the courage of Isaac – who, like themselves under the shadow of the Roman Empire, was willing to give his life as a martyr for the sake of his faith. For the early Church Fathers, it became a story that foretold the life of Jesus – where, according to their belief system, once again a father would be willing to part with his beloved son. For the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, it became a story about the terror that Israeli parents face as they send their children off to the army – aware that they may sending them to their deaths. For the contemporary Bible scholar Phyllis Trible, the story is a warning about the dangers of biblical patriarchy – where the victim is not only Isaac, but also his mother, Sarah, who watches from the margins as the horrifying scene unfolds, silenced and powerless.

But among all these and many other stirring interpretations, a particularly striking take on the Binding of Isaac comes to us from Franz Kafka – who was, of course, himself Jewish.

Kafka’s version of the narrative comes to us in the form of a short story called “The Judgment.” According to his diary, Kafka wrote the story in a single night – in one fitful sitting at his desk. The date of composition: September 23, 1912 – which, that year, was the night of Kol Nidre. We can almost imagine Kafka hearing the Binding of Isaac chanted aloud in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah morning the previous week, the terrible themes brewing inside of him over the course of the next ten days – until, on the night of Kol Nidre, his version of the story came boiling forth, unable any longer to be contained.

Like many things Kafka, the story is highly surreal. But also like many things Kafka, the story probes something deep about the human condition.

Kafka’s version of the story is told from the perspective of Isaac – who, in Kafka’s retelling, is cast as a young man named Georg. All his life, we are told, Georg had been a shy and meek person, lacking in all confidence. It is only recently, now that he has reached young adulthood, that Georg has started to come into his own – at last finding success in the family business, and becoming engaged to a young woman in town. One morning, feeling pleased about his new-found good fortune, Georg goes to visit his father. But immediately upon entering the old man’s darkened room, Georg’s confidence disappears. His father berates him – accusing him in a thundering voice of stealing money from the family business, of having not properly mourned his late mother, of slowly poisoning the father to death. And in the story’s climactic ending, Georg’s father proclaims that the punishment for these crimes shall be death by drowning. In Kafka’s surreal style, a violent wind stirs the room – which sweeps Georg out the door, across the street, to the town bridge, and over the railing, where he plummets to a watery death.

Through Kafka’s pen, the Binding of Isaac becomes a story about the existential conflict that arises between one generation and the next. At first, a child is dependent on its parents – as Georg had been for most of his life. Eventually, the child’s confidence grows – until, at last, like Georg, the child finds success both in business and in love. But at the very same moment that the child is becoming independent, the parent, by contrast, is aging and growing frail. The child, it seems, no longer needs the parent. The next generation replaces the previous one. And in Kafka’s retelling, the parent’s twisted defense is to kill off the child – as Abraham nearly does to Isaac.

In Kafka’s fever dream, we recognize the mortal angst of living and dying. We know that time only moves in one direction. We fear that those who come after us will soon forget us after we are gone – that the entirety of our existence will be silenced by oblivion.

This fear, our Torah reading reminds us, is a very real part of the human condition. But it is not the only part. Because although in Kafka’s story, the father does kill his child, our Torah story ends differently. “Do not lay your hand upon the child,” an angel of God cries out to Abraham.

As we read the Binding of Isaac, we acknowledge the angst of being mortal – but we also affirm the goodness of lives yet to come. Isaac has not come to replace his father. Rather, he has come, in part, so that through him, Abraham and Sarah might continue to live.

Our Crisis of Community

Like all the most important innovations in Jewish life, Rosh Hashanah was born of a crisis.

Here is how things unfolded. Our ancestors did not always celebrate our New Year in the fall. If we look in the Torah, we will find that the Israelites originally observed the New Year in the spring – seemingly a more obvious time to mark the beginning of the year, as the days grow longer and warmer, and the world seems full of potential. For the first 500 years of Jewish history, that was the structure of our calendar.

But then, a crisis occured. The Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judea, and the leaders of our people were taken captive to far away Babylon. And by the time they were allowed to return home again three generations later, they had adopted many elements of the Babylonian culture in which they had been living – bringing back with them to the Land of Israel the Babylonian language, Babylonian names for their children, and also, the Babylonian custom of celebrating the New Year in the fall. Rosh Hashanah as we know it was born.

Like our ancestors, we too have just experienced a crisis – the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. And while it is not yet fully over, many commentators have noted that, at least here in the United States, we seem to have reached a new stage of the pandemic. Last month, the CDC published a statement saying that the virus is “here to stay.” Accordingly, they also issued a new set of guidelines intended to widen our public health objectives – so that we are no longer focused only on minimizing the spread of the disease, but rather, are now focused also on how we as a society can learn to live with the disease.

Like our ancestors who returned home from captivity in Babylon, we, it seems, have now hopefully made it through the worst parts of this crisis. And just as they returned home with some of their cultural customs changed – most notably, moving the New Year to the fall – we too must now take stock of all the ways in which the pandemic has changed our world, so that we can begin the critical work of recovery.

One important piece of that project will be working together to recover from our crisis of community. Since the pandemic began, many of us have spent less time meeting up with friends at the local coffee shop, less time catching up with a neighbor at the oneg, less time getting to know the parents of the other kids with whom our children are in school. As a result, our communities have suffered widespread isolation and loneliness, a hidden pandemic of anxiety and depression, increased incidents of substance abuse and self-harm, and extreme political polarization. Before the pandemic, we depended on our communal spaces for our collective wellbeing: to help bring us joy, to help kids and adults alike make friends who feel like family, to help support us through tough times, to help us recognize that ours is not the only family where sometimes there is tension.

For the past two-and-a-half years, these critical social interactions have largely disappeared. If we are to help our society build back some of what we have lost, then now more than ever, we need to be in community.

Towards that end, synagogues, in particular, will have an important role to play. Among all the many types of communities that we might be a part of – say, for example, the PTA, or a hiking club, or a book group – the synagogue community has one thing that makes us unique. In a synagogue, we understand that community is not just good for us. Rather, here we believe that community is sacred.

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For us Jews, community has always been at the center of who we are and what we do. Consider, for example, how we American Jews sometimes have trouble describing our Jewish identity. We say things like: “I feel really Jewish, but I am not at all religious,” or, “For me, it’s not about the religion, it’s just about the traditions and the values” – though we often struggle to articulate precisely what we mean by the distinction. Or, consider the statistics from the Pew Research Center, showing that one in four American Jews identify as “Jews of no religion” – a description that, when applied to any other religious group, would seem to be a contradiction in terms.

To help us make sense of this confusion, we might look to the 20th century Jewish thinker Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan was himself a student of the French thinker Émile Durkeim, the founder of the modern field of sociology. Durkheim demonstrated that religions don’t come from the top down, but rather, they form from the bottom up. In contrast to the traditional view of religion – where a divine being reveals a set of beliefs and practices to a prophet, who, in turn, articulates them to the people – Durkheim showed that, in fact, the exact opposite is true: that religions begin with the people. A group of individuals unites around a set of shared experiences, which develops into a set of shared hopes, fears, and aspirations, which, in turn, are expressed through the structures of organized religion.

Building on Durkheim, Kaplan made the case that Judaism is, first and foremost, a communal identity. Kaplan’s most famous book is called Judaism as a Civilization. In it, he argued that Judaism is much more than just a religion – but rather, as the title suggests, is a multifaceted civilization: the sum total of our languages, our literature, our history, our connection to specific places, our recipes, our humor, our social mores, our ethical principles, our taboos, our art, our calendar. Within this composite, certain elements express our most cherished ideals. We call these our “religion.” It is an extension of who we are, an outgrowth of the Jewish people.

We can find this idea expressed in our Torah narrative. The Exodus story, our foundational myth, begins not with a set of religious principles, but rather, with a group of people. At the beginning of the story, the Israelites are nothing more than a sprawling extended family – with a shared ancestor, a shared language, and the shared experience of enslavement. It is not until much later in the story, when they reach Mount Sinai, that they develop any sort of spiritual insight. Before they become a religion, they are first a community.

But why, we might ask ourselves, do we believe that community is sacred? When we can find community in the PTA or in a hiking club, what is it that makes the synagogue unique?

To help us answer this question, we might look to the contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han asks us to consider the process by which a flower blooms. It begins with a seed, which sprouts into roots, grows a stem, forms into a bud, until, at long last, the bud bursts forth into petals – at which point, we tend to say that the flower has fully blossomed. But even then, Han argues, the flower is not yet complete. There are aspects of the flower that are not fully realized until the flower is brought into relationship with something else. Can a flower see its own color? Can a flower smell its own fragrance? A flower is not fully complete, Han argues, until it is beheld by an Other.

So often, we go through our lives like a flower that has not been seen. If we are lucky, we have, on occasion, experienced moments in which we felt deeply seen: by a friend who listened, by a mentor who brought out the best in us, by a partner who loved us even with our faults, by a sibling who understood us deeply on account of knowing the long arc of our life’s story.

The 20th century Jewish thinker Martin Buber wrote about encounters such as these. Buber argued that when a person is fully seen, three things are momentarily transformed: the person who has been seen is transformed, on account of their beauty having been realized; the person who is seeing is transformed, for having experienced so rich an encounter; and as a result, for both people, the world is transformed, because they recognize that all things contain the potential for beauty. Or, as Buber would put it: when a person is fully seen, God is made present.

This idea, too, is expressed in our Torah narrative. When the Israelites finally do reach Mount Sinai – the moment in which they at last become a sacred community – their transformation occurs not because God reveals to them some set of dogmatic principles, not because God legislates for them some set of arcane rituals, but rather, because they and God enter into a relationship. God appears to the Israelites, and addresses them by name. God decides to enter their camp, to dwell among them, to travel with them wherever they will go – a relational partner, who sees and understands them deeply.

It is only when we are seen and understood that we can become fully human. This is why we Jews believe that community is sacred.

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In order to help our society recover from the pandemic, we will need synagogues to remind us of this important principle. What should a synagogue do in order to fulfill this unique role? What would a congregation look like if we were to channel all our resources towards building sacred community?

It would mean, as is already the case here at Temple Beth Shalom, supporting a culture in which each person feels comfortable to come as you are – where we can bring our fullest, most authentic selves, where we can show up not only with our joys, but also with our doubts, our worries, our life challenges, and know that still we will be embraced, that our whole self is welcome here.

It would mean congregants showing up for other congregants at every stage of the life-cycle – delivering a home-cooked meal to a family that has just welcomed a new baby, cleaning up the dishes at the end of the shiva visiting hours, bringing those little battery-operated Shabbat candles to a fellow congregant who is in the hospital, making a tzedakah donation in honor of the recent Bat Mitzvah celebrant.

It would mean investing in reusable name tags for every congregant, to be worn at every synagogue gathering – because no one knows everybody; because everybody, on occasion, forgets a person’s name; and because every single person deserves to be known.

It would mean fewer lectures by guest speakers, and instead, more small group conversations – fewer gatherings with rows of chairs, and instead, more gatherings in one another’s living rooms.

It would mean, like we do here, that in our religious school, the first thing that our students learn is one another’s names – that our educators recognize that just as important as the curriculum is the person who is learning it.

It would mean building a culture where those of us who are parents don’t just drop our kids off at the synagogue, but rather, have our own compelling reason to want to come inside: to catch up with friends over bagels and coffee, for a conversation about parenting or about current events, and maybe even for our own Jewish learning.

It would mean that we can talk about hard things, that we are committed to staying in relationship with one another even when we disagree about a political or a social issue, that we can learn to listen to each other.

It would mean that we are not siloed by age cohort – but rather, like we do here, that our teenagers help to teach our children, that our seniors read stories to the kids in our pre-school, that, outside of our family, the synagogue can be the one place in our life where we have relationships with people who are not in our own life-stage.

It would mean that each person’s gifts and passions are a critical part of our recipe for success: that, as has long been the case in this community, artists in the congregation have their work displayed in the synagogue; that writers deliver remarks on Shabbat and holidays; that congregants with interesting ideas to share and interesting stories to tell lead the conversation at Torah Study; that whether your professional background is in finance or in interior design, we need your expertise; that if you have ever lived in Israel or if your family survived the Holocaust, we need to hear your story; that if you know how chant Torah or know how to blow the shofar, or even if you don’t but would like to learn how to do so, we need you on our bimah – because each of us is needed to make our community strong, because there is no Temple Beth Shalom apart from what each and every single one of us contributes to the life of our congregation. 

Building upon our strong history, we can do all of these things and more. Not all at once, not without hard work – and most importantly, not without each other. It is for this reason that we are launching two new committees this year: a Caring Committee, in which congregants will provide care for other congregants at all stages of the life-cycle, and a Family Engagement Committee, who will work towards strengthening a culture of belonging among families with school-aged children Please watch your email or reach out to our office for more information about how to get involved in either of these two efforts – and stay tuned, in the years to come, as we continue to build other initiatives aimed at strengthening our sacred community.

The American Revolutionary Patrick Henry famously said: “Give me liberty, or give me death.” And although his zeal for liberty helped pave the way for our democracy, it also had an unintended negative consequence. Ours is a country that hallows a person’s independence above all else – believing that we can go it alone, that we do not need anybody else.

But Judaism has long been a force for counterculture. Long before Patrick Henry spoke those familiar words, the Rabbis of the Talmud had their own memorable phrase about the topic. They wrote: o chavruta, o mituta – “Give me community, or give me death.”

Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to be the collective embodiment of that countercultural message. We need to remind the world that community is not just good for us; it is sacred. And it is how we will recover.