We stand here on the shoulders of giants such as Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Job. This year’s High Holyday sermons will explore what they continue to say to us.

This morning we explore lessons our ancestor Isaac taught us.

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You think you’ve got tsuris? Yitzchak ben Sarah v’ Avraham, Isaac, son of Sarah and Abraham, now he had tsuris.

I’m pretty sure that there’s no one in this room who hasn’t had a divorce either in their immediate family or in their extended family. You can add Abraham’s son, Isaac, to that list. Sure, divorce was a little different in a polygamous society, but many of the effects were similar. Here’s what happened:

For many years, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, didn’t get pregnant. Finally she told Abraham to father a child with an Egyptian woman, presumably an indentured servant or even a slave in the household, named Hagar. He does, a boy is born, and they call him Ishmael. But Sarah finds that what seemed like a good idea at the time, wasn’t. Sarah finds that she is jealous. She feels like she’s been displaced in her own household, and treats Hagar harshly, even to the point of throwing her out. It is only at God’s behest that Hagar goes back.

Sarah finally conceives and gives birth to a boy. They name him Isaac, Yitzchak, in Hebrew, which can be translated as “He will laugh,” possibly because Sarah being pregnant at her advanced age was a source of laughter, even to her. “Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?” she says.

A few years later Sarah sees Isaac and his older brother Ishmael together. Some sources say they were playing a kind of William Tell game with Ishmael shooting arrows at Isaac. Others think it was some sort of sexual activity. Whatever it was, Sarah becomes incensed and urges Abraham to divorce Hagar, which he does. He sends Hagar and her son Ishmael away.

But that’s not the end of the story. With families it never is. According to one source, Abraham had Hagar dragging a large rag that made tracks in the sand so he knew where she went. Another had her pulling a wheeled bucket filled with water, both to quench her thirst and to let Abraham know where she was. More importantly, to let him know where his son Ishmael, was.

So Hagar goes off on her own, a single mother. When Abraham decides to visit his son, Sarah makes him promise that he won’t even get off his camel. On this visit, Ishmael isn’t home, nor on a second one. We can only wonder if Hagar, hearing that Abraham was coming, made sure that her son wouldn’t see his father. Both Sarah and Hagar, for different reasons, want to keep Abraham away from Ishmael. Disagreements over visitation rights still make their way into our courts with painful regularity.

Isaac? He misses his older brother, even as an adult. Maybe consciously, maybe not, Isaac spends a lot of time in a place in the Negev called Be’er lahai roi, the place to which Hagar fled with his brother Ishmael that first time Sarah forced her out of the household. According to the text, Isaac and Ishmael met again only one last time at Abraham’s funeral. I have been with some of you at funerals where feuding members of the family are together only because a death has taken place. Once I helped break up a fist fight between two brothers. Sometimes I was able to facilitate at least a partial reconciliation. Most of the time I can do nothing.

You think this is tsuris? It pales by comparison to the Akedah, the story of the binding, or tying, of Isaac prior to placing him on an altar to be sacrificed. No matter what miserable, rotten, horrific things you may think your parents did to you, even if they are all true, I doubt anyone here ever had a parent hold a knife to their throat.

Isaac did. Abraham heard God tell him to take Isaac and sacrifice him on a certain mountain, Mt. Moriah, it turns out. The offering was called an olah, something completely consumed in fire. Abraham was ready to kill him, and would have used the knife had not an angel, some say God, some say Isaac, roused him from his reverie so that Isaac was spared. Isaac was the first survivor.

But there are always wounds, deep, searing wounds. Isaac and his father never again had the same relationship they once had. When Sarah heard what Abraham intended to do, and believed he did it, she died of grief. Isaac grieved for years until he finally married Rebecca. His grief over his mother’s death was magnified by his guilt at still being around while she was not. Survivors often feel such guilt. It clouds many homes even today, and the children of many Holocaust survivors try to deal with it in groups like Second Generation.

What happened to Isaac after that? Listen to the very beautiful words of Elie Wiesel:

What did happen to Isaac after he left Mount Moriah? He… did not break with society. Nor did he rebel against life. Logically, he should have aspired to wandering, to the pursuit of oblivion. Instead he settled on his land, never to leave it again. He married, had children, refusing to let fate turn him into a bitter man. He felt neither hatred nor anger toward his contemporaries who did not share his experience. On the contrary, he liked them and showed concern for their well-being. After Moriah, [our legends say] he devoted his life… to the defense of his people. [Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God, Pages 109-110]

They only couple the Torah says loved each other is Isaac and Rebecca. Of all the Matriarchs and Patriarchs, they are the only truly monogamous couple. In a world where polygamy was totally acceptable, Isaac had only one wife: his beloved Rebecca. And, as Wiesel points out, the Temple was ultimately built, not on Mt. Sinai where Moses received the Torah, but on Mt. Moriah where Isaac was almost sacrificed.

How did he do it? How did he keep from being bitter and vengeful? Listen:

… the Philistines stopped up all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with earth. Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham… [The Philistines,] the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac's herdsmen… [So] He moved from there and dug yet another well… [Genesis 26:13-22]

That’s what the Torah says.

Let me share with you a brief modern version of the same thing:

I walked down the street today. I came to a very large hole. I fell in and had to wait for someone to pull me out.

I walked down the street today and fell into the same hole, but this time I was able to pull myself out.

I walked down the street today and when I came to the hole I walked around the edges very, very carefully and I didn’t fall in.

I walked down a different street today.

You see? It’s no secret. Isaac started with his father’s wells, his parents’ influences, as we all must. He had to deal with the Philistines, the evils of the world, as we all must. But he didn’t hang on to them. He moved on. Could he have continued to try to “solve” the problems of being a child of a divorced family? Sure. Could he have stewed and fumed over the fanaticism that almost led his father to kill him? Sure.

But he didn’t. Instead, he dug new wells. Nothing special, nothing that different from the past, but new nonetheless. You think it’s impossible? It isn’t. If he could do it, so can we.

And there’s one last piece: his name. Isaac, Yitzchak, He will laugh. To move on from suffering, not to conquer it, because that’s impossible, but to move on, let yourself laugh, most of all, at yourself. You know I use humor an awful lot. When people comment on it, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, I often respond, humorously, I hope, that with all the funerals I do, if I didn’t have a sense of humor one of them would surely be mine. I mean it to be funny, and I believe it is absolutely true. I agree with Nicholas de Chamfort that “The most thoroughly wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.”

I want to share with you one last bit of teaching from Elie Wiesel, who speaks so beautifully to the heart as well as the mind. I want you to remember that this is said by a man who personally experienced the unfathomable tortures of the Holocaust:

Suffering, in Jewish tradition, confers no privileges. It all depends on what one makes of that suffering… As the first survivor, [Isaac taught us] that it is possible to suffer and despair and still not give up the art of laughter.

And in spite of everything, he did laugh. [Ibid.]

And, like us, sometimes he cried. As William Hazlitt once said,

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”

 

So when we sound the Shofar, I’d like to ask us all to try and hear at least two things: the joyous sounds of laughter as we let go of our tsuris and move on, and the cries of birth at this New Year as we are partly reborn, still human, still vulnerable, but new nonetheless.