What Are We Willing to Give Up?

Political campaigns reward certainty. Governing requires compromise. After a succession of elections in Vancouver, British Columbia and Israel, with American midterms still ahead, the question feels especially urgent: what can we afford to give up, and what must we hold onto?

There should probably be a limit on how many democracies one person can worry about in a single week.

[Writing to my congregation this week], I tried to offer some reassurance amid the uncertainty. “Whatever your vote or your reaction to the results,” I wrote, “there is a place for you in this community.”

That promise raises a difficult question of its own. How do we preserve belonging while taking our disagreements seriously? Governing requires compromise. So does marriage. So does belonging to a synagogue. The difficult question is knowing what we can give up, and what we must hold onto.

This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, contains two encounters that make that question painfully vivid.

In the first, God tells Abraham about the impending destruction of Sodom. Abraham objects. What if innocent people live there? Will God destroy them along with the guilty?

“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” Abraham demands of God.

That might be the first evidence of chutzpah in the whole of Jewish history. It certainly wasn’t the last.

Imagine the nerve. Abraham challenges God to live up to God’s own standards.

And God listens. The conversation continues. Abraham presses his case, bargaining down from fifty righteous people to ten.

As Rabbi Ed Feinstein observed in a Torah study he taught at my congregation, Temple Sholom in Vancouver, God accepts a challenge to divine authority in order to have a human partner in the pursuit of justice. God makes room for Abraham’s conscience.

That is an extraordinary understanding of covenant. Abraham’s responsibility includes questioning the One with whom he is in relationship. His moral judgment matters enough to be heard.

Then, a few chapters later, God tells Abraham to take Isaac, his beloved son, and offer him as a sacrifice.

And Abraham says nothing.

The man who argued for strangers offers no recorded objection on behalf of his own child.

What happened to that Abraham, the one with the chutzpah? Where did he go?

The story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac has become so familiar that perhaps we have grown dulled to its horror. God tells a man to sacrifice his son, and the man sets out to do it. In any other setting, we would be horrified. Yet generations have celebrated this as an example of faith. Abraham arguing for the innocent in Sodom I understand. The Akedah has always left me with far more questions than admiration.

Torah leaves room for many interpretations of this terrible story. One traditional reading celebrates Abraham’s willingness to surrender everything in obedience to God. But consider the cost: what happens when obedience becomes so absolute that conscience falls silent?

Rabbi Harold Schulweis, a neighbouring rabbi when I served in Los Angeles and a remarkable Jewish theologian, offers another way to understand Abraham’s test. Perhaps the decisive achievement comes when Abraham hears the angel telling him to stop, and puts down the knife.

Abraham can still hear a moral claim that interrupts what he has become certain he must do. He can still stop. He can still change course.

There is something profoundly hopeful in that possibility. Even after the journey, even after building the altar, even with the knife in his hand, Abraham can hear another voice.

We need that capacity too. Politicians who seek to lead us need it especially.

Candidates make promises about what they will do and whom they will never work with. Sometimes those promises express essential moral commitments. Sometimes they make cooperation nearly impossible once the votes are counted.

Israel’s coalition dilemma brings that tension into sharp focus. What does a leader owe the people who voted for a promise? What does that leader owe the wider country when keeping it may prolong paralysis?

Vayera cannot tell us which coalition to form. It does ask us to examine what our commitments serve, and what keeping them will cost other people.

Some partnerships would demand a price in rights or dignity that we should refuse to pay. Cooperation has moral limits. The work is to identify those limits honestly, while admitting that our preferences and our pride do not all deserve the same degree of protection we owe our deepest principles.

A leader who reconsiders a position owes the public an honest explanation. A leader who refuses to reconsider owes us one as well.

There are principles we must defend at considerable cost: human dignity, the protection of innocent life, the equal application of justice. Abraham teaches us to speak up for those principles, even before God.

There are also things we can afford to surrender: the last word, the satisfaction of humiliating an opponent, the insistence that changing our minds means losing ourselves.

Earlier in this same portion, God offers a surprisingly domestic lesson in that distinction.

Sarah hears that she will bear a child and laughs. She mentions her own age, and Abraham’s. When God reports her reaction to Abraham, the part about Abraham being old disappears.

Apparently, even God knows that “Let me tell you exactly what your wife said about you” can make a long evening considerably longer.

The Talmud notices the edit. So great is peace, the rabbis teach, that even God alters the account for its sake (Yevamot 65b).

God lets an unnecessary hurt end there.

This small act of restraint belongs beside Abraham’s great act of protest. Together they suggest a demanding discipline: speak when justice requires your voice, and exercise care with words whose chief accomplishment would be to wound.

We live in a culture that keeps those hurts circulating. Someone says something contemptuous. We forward it. Someone on the other side behaves badly. We make sure everyone sees. Each new insult becomes further evidence that those people are beyond conversation, making change harder.

Sometimes we need to expose what has been said. Sometimes we need to challenge it forcefully. We should also ask what passing it along will accomplish. Will this help anyone understand, or simply help us despise?

Making room for one another in a community includes the possibility of serious disagreement, of being challenged, of discovering that someone we respect sees the world very differently.

A friend, relative or fellow congregant may be frightened by a result you welcomed. You may have good reasons for your relief. They may have good reasons for their fear. Learning what those reasons are takes more patience than assuming we already know everything about each other.

Our task is to keep enough trust between us that an honest conversation remains possible.

Feinstein offers an interpretation that resonates with my own decades of sitting with people who are hurt, grieving, frightened or angry. He imagines that the voice Abraham hears on the mountain is Sarah’s.

The Torah identifies the speaker as a mal’akh Adonai, a messenger of God. Feinstein invites us to imagine that divine message arriving in a familiar voice. Perhaps someone who loves us, who calls us back to our humanity when we have lost our way, can also be a messenger of God. More than once in my own life, that messenger has been my wife.

Sarah is someone who can remind Abraham what all those promises about the future were for.

We each need a voice like that. Someone who can reach us when our certainty has carried us too far. Someone whose concern we trust enough to pause and listen.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts we can offer one another.

We will argue about Israel. We will disagree about governments and policies and what justice requires. I hope we will bring our convictions fully into those conversations. I also hope we will remain willing to hear the person who asks us to reconsider.

Before the altar and the knife, before the argument over Sodom, this portion begins with Abraham opening his tent to strangers and offering them something to eat.

He does not yet know what they have come to tell him.

He makes room for them first.

We can begin there. Make room. Ask how someone is doing, and be present long enough to hear the answer. We may hear something that helps us recognize a principle we must defend. We may discover that what we have been defending is our pride. We need one another to learn the difference, to know what we can give up, and what we must never surrender.