The Bomb and the Binding of Isaac
Yesterday, as I was walking into the room where my fourteen year old was doing algebra, the voice on the news said, “Iran has the bomb.” My daughter looked up at me with those eyes, those eyes I remember from my own youth at the revelation of Chernobyl, the eyes Isaac – or was it Ishmael? – turned to Abraham when he realized what was happening. The “Is this it?” eyes.
First, and beyond all things, I weep for the fact that my children already know that the end will come in a blast from a bomb. They know certainly, and they are certainly right, that a creation - a sin - committed during the lives of their grandparents will be visited on them with Old Testament wrath. And if it is not they who are punished, then they will bear the nearly as horrific burden of looking into the eyes of the most beautiful thing in the world and having to answer, as I do, “Maybe.”
It makes me angry to think that we’ve done this to ourselves. We were stupid and if our leaders had listened to our scientists at the time, they would have put away the knife on VE day. (And if it strikes you as strange to find conscience in science, it is as a result of this very sin. Historically, science and conscience were not thought of as mutually exclusive.) In the past, we were stupid, and now we are angry at the result.
That leaves for the future only one thing: smart. We’ve got to be smart to save our children. But what does that look like? At the risk of defining things in the negative, we know what it isn’t. The “us and them” mentality that got us here in the first place will not help us to get out of this troubling, trembling nuclear detente. We must address our fear and our fear is at its foundation: Other.
Setting aside the obvious threat of a madman at the helm of a country hurtling into the nuclear age – after all, it has been a long eight years for the rest of the globe – lets address the underlying fear of the Otherness of our perceived enemies. During his lifetime, Mohammed’s followers prayed once a day with their backs toward Mecca and their faces toward Jerusalem, the holy land of the other people who had received a revolutionary revelation. Let us take a moment to do the same.
We are afraid of a desire in our enemies to end our lives in wholesale slaughter. In her very insightful book, Islam, one of a plethora of very brilliant books, Karen Armstrong describes how the revelations of Mohammed were spoken to a people burdened by social and economic poverty. They described a world of fairness and equality, where “the least the last and the lost” were upheld by their clan, their community, their political system. Community, therefore, and politics, became sacramental. Moses lifted his people out of slavery and Jesus of Nazareth preached his gospel to a people society had forgotten. The Jewish community has long set the standard for tzedaka – gifts of protection for the helpless. As faithful Christians we believe that we are our brothers’ keepers and try to live out that faith in public life. Christians and Jews believe, as do faithful Muslims, that we cannot realize the goals of our faiths where we turn our heads away from suffering. We are all called by our sacred scripture to heal what is broken. We are all flawed in our ability to realize those demands. We are all called upon to forgive that weakness.
We all fear coercive religious evangelism. We are afraid that that which makes us special and unique in the eyes of our faith will be stripped from us. Coercive evangelism, we must admit, is largely a Christian domain. In the same way that we do not torture our prisoners because we do not wish to be tortured, let us say that the days of missionary slash and burn are at an end. There are many good rooms in my father’s kingdom. Judaism is a blood faith, and as one of every two Jews born since the life of Christ have been killed for their faith before they lived out their days, in the interest of time, I will just excuse them from this discussion. Armstrong tells us that Mohammed viewed his contemporary Jews and Christians as ahl al-kitab: “the people of other revelation.” All revelations are legitimate, all paths of righteousness lead to God. I don’t think we bomb a person to convert them. We bomb them to kill them.
In these and many ways, the people of Iran, Israel, Palestine, Europe and the West are not “other” at all. We are bound, in fact, by a binding. The father is called upon by agents of his deity to take his son to a mountain and ritually sacrifice him. The father proceeds to do so, as a sign-act of his faithful submission to the word of his deity. Though we think of him as a child, according to (admittedly laughable) Biblical time keeping, the son is a man in his thirties in this story. In some stories the son does not know what is coming. In others, he knows and begs his father to “bind my arms so that I may not cause the knife to slip” and “take off my garments so that my mother is not troubled by my blood on them and, most movingly, “cover my eyes so that I may not cause you to hesitate.” The father proceeds to the brink of the destruction of his son. The deity relents. The God of Abraham, and therefore the God of all Jews, Christians and Muslims, would not do what nuclear weapons are created to do.
Now it is important to note that in this story another sacrifice was made in place of the son. Something was taken away which can never be given back and while we routinely minimize that aspect of the story, I think it is critical. A ram which was trapped in shrubbery nearby was taken in lieu of the son. Readers of my work will know that my theology rests iconoclastically on a concept of balance, of lamed vovnik, the turtle’s back and the Gaia principle. God left the son in the care of the father. What He took in exchange, I believe, is a trapped beast. We are no longer enslaved and ensnared by the precarious position in which we find ourselves. The trapped beast has been given up so that we may live, so that our progeny is not sacrificed in vain.
This morning I am thinking of the binding of Isaac – or Ishmael – and the leaders of the world’s nations entering into negotiations with Iran as they hurtle themselves into a nuclear 21st Century. I will pray for these leaders, I will pray for them to be guided by the principles that founded their governments, the guidelines that form their unity and the small still voices in their souls whose eyes are turned to them in childish dread. For all nations founded in Abrahamic faith it is true: the ram, desperate and struggling, powerless and irrational, is gone from the story. There is no need to sacrifice the child.
Yesterday, as I was walking into the room where my fourteen year old was doing algebra, the voice on the news said, “Iran has the bomb.” My daughter looked up at me with those eyes, those eyes I remember from my own youth at the revelation of Chernobyl, the eyes Isaac – or was it Ishmael? – turned to Abraham when he realized what was happening. The “Is this it?” eyes.
First, and beyond all things, I weep for the fact that my children already know that the end will come in a blast from a bomb. They know certainly, and they are certainly right, that a creation - a sin - committed during the lives of their grandparents will be visited on them with Old Testament wrath. And if it is not they who are punished, then they will bear the nearly as horrific burden of looking into the eyes of the most beautiful thing in the world and having to answer, as I do, “Maybe.”
It makes me angry to think that we’ve done this to ourselves. We were stupid and if our leaders had listened to our scientists at the time, they would have put away the knife on VE day. (And if it strikes you as strange to find conscience in science, it is as a result of this very sin. Historically, science and conscience were not thought of as mutually exclusive.) In the past, we were stupid, and now we are angry at the result.
That leaves for the future only one thing: smart. We’ve got to be smart to save our children. But what does that look like? At the risk of defining things in the negative, we know what it isn’t. The “us and them” mentality that got us here in the first place will not help us to get out of this troubling, trembling nuclear detente. We must address our fear and our fear is at its foundation: Other.
Setting aside the obvious threat of a madman at the helm of a country hurtling into the nuclear age – after all, it has been a long eight years for the rest of the globe – lets address the underlying fear of the Otherness of our perceived enemies. During his lifetime, Mohammed’s followers prayed once a day with their backs toward Mecca and their faces toward Jerusalem, the holy land of the other people who had received a revolutionary revelation. Let us take a moment to do the same.
We are afraid of a desire in our enemies to end our lives in wholesale slaughter. In her very insightful book, Islam, one of a plethora of very brilliant books, Karen Armstrong describes how the revelations of Mohammed were spoken to a people burdened by social and economic poverty. They described a world of fairness and equality, where “the least the last and the lost” were upheld by their clan, their community, their political system. Community, therefore, and politics, became sacramental. Moses lifted his people out of slavery and Jesus of Nazareth preached his gospel to a people society had forgotten. The Jewish community has long set the standard for tzedaka – gifts of protection for the helpless. As faithful Christians we believe that we are our brothers’ keepers and try to live out that faith in public life. Christians and Jews believe, as do faithful Muslims, that we cannot realize the goals of our faiths where we turn our heads away from suffering. We are all called by our sacred scripture to heal what is broken. We are all flawed in our ability to realize those demands. We are all called upon to forgive that weakness.
We all fear coercive religious evangelism. We are afraid that that which makes us special and unique in the eyes of our faith will be stripped from us. Coercive evangelism, we must admit, is largely a Christian domain. In the same way that we do not torture our prisoners because we do not wish to be tortured, let us say that the days of missionary slash and burn are at an end. There are many good rooms in my father’s kingdom. Judaism is a blood faith, and as one of every two Jews born since the life of Christ have been killed for their faith before they lived out their days, in the interest of time, I will just excuse them from this discussion. Armstrong tells us that Mohammed viewed his contemporary Jews and Christians as ahl al-kitab: “the people of other revelation.” All revelations are legitimate, all paths of righteousness lead to God. I don’t think we bomb a person to convert them. We bomb them to kill them.
In these and many ways, the people of Iran, Israel, Palestine, Europe and the West are not “other” at all. We are bound, in fact, by a binding. The father is called upon by agents of his deity to take his son to a mountain and ritually sacrifice him. The father proceeds to do so, as a sign-act of his faithful submission to the word of his deity. Though we think of him as a child, according to (admittedly laughable) Biblical time keeping, the son is a man in his thirties in this story. In some stories the son does not know what is coming. In others, he knows and begs his father to “bind my arms so that I may not cause the knife to slip” and “take off my garments so that my mother is not troubled by my blood on them and, most movingly, “cover my eyes so that I may not cause you to hesitate.” The father proceeds to the brink of the destruction of his son. The deity relents. The God of Abraham, and therefore the God of all Jews, Christians and Muslims, would not do what nuclear weapons are created to do.
Now it is important to note that in this story another sacrifice was made in place of the son. Something was taken away which can never be given back and while we routinely minimize that aspect of the story, I think it is critical. A ram which was trapped in shrubbery nearby was taken in lieu of the son. Readers of my work will know that my theology rests iconoclastically on a concept of balance, of lamed vovnik, the turtle’s back and the Gaia principle. God left the son in the care of the father. What He took in exchange, I believe, is a trapped beast. We are no longer enslaved and ensnared by the precarious position in which we find ourselves. The trapped beast has been given up so that we may live, so that our progeny is not sacrificed in vain.
This morning I am thinking of the binding of Isaac – or Ishmael – and the leaders of the world’s nations entering into negotiations with Iran as they hurtle themselves into a nuclear 21st Century. I will pray for these leaders, I will pray for them to be guided by the principles that founded their governments, the guidelines that form their unity and the small still voices in their souls whose eyes are turned to them in childish dread. For all nations founded in Abrahamic faith it is true: the ram, desperate and struggling, powerless and irrational, is gone from the story. There is no need to sacrifice the child.
