The Sound of Recovery

How blessed are the people who know the joyful sound! O Lord, they walk in the light of Your countenance.  Psalm 89:15  NASB

Joyful sound– But of course, it isn’t just any joyful sound.  This is the sound of tĕrûʿâ, the call of the Shofar to the assembly, the critical reminder of a community under Torah.

Why does this matter?

Remember Camille Paglia’s comment:  “. . . nature remains the supreme moral problem.”[1]  She might as well have written, “Life’s absurdity represented in death is the supreme divine-human problem.”  What is the point of life if it all ends in death?

This “unbearable lightness of being” is exemplified in the biblical life of Sarah. Perhaps you haven’t noticed the clues in the narrative, but when Abraham returns from the journey to Moriah without Isaac, something so traumatic happens to Sarah that we never see Sarah and Abraham together again until she dies. Zornberg draws our attention to this startling fact:

“For Sarah dies of the unbearable lightness of being: the restoration of Isaac in no way palliates the horror of what might well have happened.  For Sarah, this is not a ‘test,’ a three-day trial of faith, culminating in rescue and vindication.  She, rather than Abraham, faces the full anguish of the ‘already slaughtered’ one: his survival changes nothing.  Her invocation to him holds the full measure of her situation: ‘Woe to the son of the drunken woman!’  The image of her own unhinging, of an ecstasy (literally, a standing outside oneself), in which all stability is undermined, involves mother and son in a miasma of absurdity.”[2]

“Sarah dies of the truth of kime’at shelo nishḥat [literally, a little thing decided his fate]—of the hair’s breadth that separates death from life.  This is what Sartre calls ‘contingency,’ the nothingness that ‘lies coiled in the very core of being, like a worm.’ . . . This is the naked anxiety of ‘not being able to preserve one’s being.’”[3]

“The problem of Sarah’s death is, profoundly, the problem of her life, of ḥayyei sarah—of the contingency of the already born, the all but dead.  Her perception of mortal vertigo is displaced onto Isaac’s kime’at shelo nishḥat experience.  In a real sense, as the Sages put it, ‘His ashes remain piled on the altar,’ though he may walk the earth, as large as life.  What happened at the Akedah cannot be neutralized, though the sacrifice is not literally consummated.  The burden of the ‘all but’ condition is assumed by Sarah, who consummates its meaning in her howls and her death.”

Abraham knows that Isaac survives.  Abraham’s obedience is rewarded.  But how does this appear to Sarah?  First, her son, her one true love, is gone. Isaac and Abraham never share the same geography again.  Second, it is her husband who is the cause of this mortal wound.  Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac as a sacrifice isn’t a test for Sarah.  It’s a tragedy.  Once again, her husband betrays her.  Everything about her hopes and dreams are shattered.  It’s true that Isaac eventually returns to her encampment, but when he does she is no longer with Abraham (a very significant clue in the text). The marriage is over.  Trust is lost for good.  Sarah dies with the full realization that her husband’s God has been responsible for the entire saga of her tragic life.  Everything turned on the smallest of choices.  Joy and despair are separated by only a laugh.

Isaac is also traumatically mangled.  We see the results in his sons and grandsons.  Life has turned from destination to escape.  Who is this God of my father who wanted to kill me?

“Isaac . . . lives his life within the parameters of the abyss, and survives for posterity as the realization of this possibility—total nihilation, the burnt offering, the knowledge of ‘it would have been better for man never to have been created.’  This is the Tohu, the Nothingness of which Isaiah speaks, and which ultimately he rejects (45:18): ‘He did not create it [the world] a waste [tohu]; but formed it for habitation.’  The absurdity, the inhuman waste of the world of Tohu, ruled by the Greek ‘moira,’ the malevolent gods of fate, necessity and silence, is countered by the denegation of lo tohu.  Rashi’s comment spells out the existential force of this denegation; against the meta-silence of Tohu—in which human acts are gratuitous, have no effect—God gives Torah, which is founded in the promise of justice.  ‘Great reward’ is the affirmation at the heart of darkness.”[4]

What is the cry of the shofar?  It is the sound of sanity in a world gone mad.  God enters the tragic nothingness of human life and proclaims unity with Him in the Torah, which is not, by the way, simply the list of 613 commands. The Torah is the narrative of all these men and women who encounter the abyss, who tread the path of annihilation and meaninglessness but still find a God who cares.  Hear the shofar and rejoice.

Topical Index:  shofar, tĕrûʿâ, Sarah, Isaac, nothingness, Isaiah 45:18, Psalm 89:15

[1]Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 1.

[2]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 127.

[3]Ibid., p. 127.

[4]Ibid., p. 132.