The Knife and the Book
In our synagogue, perhaps like synagogues around the world the big issue we struggle with, perhaps every year, is why the Torah Reading for the second day of Rosh Hashana the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. It puts, quite literally, in “a bind”. How could God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac? How could Abraham agree to do it?
This past Rosh Hashanah, as the Torah reading progressed and Isaac’s danger increased, we stopped to read a poem from Hayim Gouri. The last lines of the poem read:
Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed. He lived for many years, saw what life’s pleasures had to offer, until his eyesight dimmed.
But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts.
As I interpret this last line, it says, in effect, that Abraham’s knife is our Sword of Damocles. As Jews, we are forever in danger. Certainly, the two armed off-duty policemen who stood at the synagogue’s entrance along with the iron fence and gate that surrounds the building and parking lot affirm both our current reality and, more broadly, Jewish history
But I would like to present another way of reflecting of on Jewish life and our Jewish identity.
Several years ago, as Executive Director of the Jewish Grandparents Network, I asked the author Mark Oppenheimer, who had just published his book Squirrel Hill about the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh to speak on how grandparents should talk to their grandchildren about antisemitism. To everyone’s great surprise, he said, “Tell them that they belong to the oldest book club in the world.” His words reminded me of something Rabbi Jim Ponet the former Director of the Slifka Center at Yale University once said, “We are the people who dance around their books.” I would add, “We are the people who adorn their books with silver and fine cloths.”
As Jews, we are the inheritors of a rich millennia-old tradition of learning and the love of learning. The meaning of the phrase “People of the Book” should never be underestimated. We do not simply read books we are passionately driven to find the deeper meaning in every word, every letter. We live by them and they frame for us lives of meaning and value.
We reflect on the words of Hayim Gouri and recognize that we are all members of the Tree of Life Synagogue. But the words of Mark Oppenheimer and Rabbi Ponet remind us that we are all beneficiaries of the Tree of Life: our Torah and our books. And while we may be born with a knife in our hearts, we are also born with a book in our hands.
