It is also a parable about otherness. Adam’s poem about ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’ sounds beautiful, but it leads to moral failure because it fails to acknowledge the otherness of the other. Until Eve is Eve, not merely ‘woman’, the man does not know who she is.
The biblical word da’at, ‘knowledge’, does not mean in Hebrew what it is normally taken to mean in the West, namely knowledge of facts, theories, systems and truths. It means interpersonal knowledge, intimacy, empathy. The ‘tree of knowledge’ is about this kind of knowledge. True knowledge that the other is not a mirror image of me, that he or she has wants and needs of her own that may clash with mine, is the source of all love and all pain. To know that I am known makes me want to hide: that is the couple’s first response after eating the fruit. The turning point comes when the man gives Eve a proper name. Love is born when we recognise the integrity of otherness. That is the meaning of love between people. It is the meaning of love between us and God. Only when we make space for the human other do we make space for the divine Other.
God created the world to make space for the otherness that is us.
The second narrative is the binding of Isaac. The traditional interpretation of this passage, for Jews and Christians alike, is that the point of the story is to show that Abraham is willing to sacrifice his child for the sake of his love of God.
There is one difficulty with this interpretation, namely that child sacrifice is consistently singled out in the Bible as the most heinous of all sins. According to the Bible itself, there is nothing noble, honourable or worthy of admiration about the willingness to sacrifice your child. That is what the pagans do. It is what the king of Moab did, and was rewarded by victory in war (2 Kings 3:27).
Abraham, whose original name Abram means ‘mighty father’, is chosen ‘so that he will teach his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just’ (Genesis 18:19). Abraham was chosen to become the role model of father-as-teacher. To portray him as a man willing to sacrifice his child is at odds with everything else we know about the Bible’s moral vision of parenthood and child sacrifice. So there must be another interpretation.
The answer is given by context. God consistently promises Abraham, Isaac and Jacob two things: children and a land. Seven times God promises the land to Abraham, once to Isaac, three times to Jacob. They are promised children: as many as the dust of the Earth, the sand on the seashore, the stars of the sky.
Repeatedly, both promises are delayed and sidetracked. Abraham and Sarah have to wait until they are old before they have a single child. Sarah is infertile. So is Rebecca. So is Rachel. Repeatedly, too, they are forced to leave the land, through famine or family conflict. The land does not become theirs or their children’s throughout the whole of the Mosaic books. Abraham has to haggle to buy a cave in which to bury Sarah. Isaac is challenged by the locals for using the wells his father dug. Jacob has to pay a hundred pieces of silver to buy the right to pitch his tent.
Something very strange is being intimated here. Children and a land are the most natural of all endowments. Almost everyone has them. What makes the patriarchs and matriarchs different? Only this: that what everyone else has naturally, they only have as the gift of God. Most couples have children. The matriarchs, except Leah, were all infertile. Their children were seen as the gift of God.
Likewise with the land. Most people have a land. What made Abraham different was that he was told at the beginning of his mission to ‘leave’ his land, his birthplace and his father’s house. The patriarchs were nomads, Hebrews, travellers, outsiders. Israel becomes the people who have a land only by the grace of God. From this fact, the Bible draws a remarkable legal conclusion. ‘The land must not be sold permanently,’ says God, ‘because the land is mine and you are but strangers and sojourners with me’ (Leviticus 25:23).
The Israelites do not own the land. They merely inhabit it, and their right to do so is conditional on their recognition that it does not belong to them but to God. And what applies to the land applies to children likewise. Abraham, whose name means ‘mighty father’, is to live out an experience that will establish, once and for all time, that our children do not belong to us but to God. Isaac, the first child of the covenant, is the child who belongs to God. Only thus is parenthood to be conceived in the life of the covenant.
The trial of the binding of Isaac is ultimately about whether Abraham is willing to renounce ownership in his child by handing him back to God. That is what the angel means when he tells Abraham to stop, saying, ‘Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’
The story of the binding of Isaac is opaque to us because we take it for granted that children have their own legal identity and rights. But this is a very modern proposition indeed. Throughout the Victorian era, social activists had to work hard to mitigate the brutalities of child labour – children being sent down mines or working long hours in factories. In Roman law, the principle of patria potestas meant that children were the property of their fathers, who had the legal right to do with them what they chose, including kill them.
Only when we take this background into account can we begin to understand that the binding of Isaac is God’s way of teaching Abraham that patria potestas has no place in Judaism. The Bible is saying to the people of the covenant: Just as you do not own your land, you do not own your children. Thus is born the biblical idea of parent-as-educator as opposed to parent-as-owner.
This is also what the Bible means when it speaks of God as a parent. God is a non-interventionist parent. During the early years of his people’s history he intervened to deliver them from slavery, but increasingly as they matured he too moved from parent-as-owner to parent-as-educator. God does not do our work for us. He teaches us how to do it for him. For God himself abides by the laws he gives us.
* * *
This is not how either story has been understood in the past. I have offered these interpretations to show that they can, and I believe should, be understood differently. If my readings make sense, they show that the presence of God within a relationship prevents it becoming a struggle for dominance between two wills. Husband and wife must acknowledge the otherness of the other rather than seeing the other as a mirror image of themselves. Parents, despite the fact that they have brought a child into the world and nurtured and protected it in its early years, do not own the child. The presence of God in a relationship forces us to make space for the other.
All this, of course, is mere abstraction compared to the way it takes on vividness and colour, energy and passion, in the actual life of faith. Once, while making a television documentary about the state of the family in Britain, I took Penelope Leach, Britain’s leading childcare expert, to see what happens in a Jewish school on Friday morning. The children, as usual, were performing their ‘mock Shabbat’, role-playing what would happen that night at home. Penelope watched fascinated as the five-year-old parents blessed the five-year-old children and welcomed the five-year-old guests. When it was over, she asked one five-year-old boy what he liked most about the Sabbath. ‘I like it’, he said, ‘because it’s the only time Daddy doesn’t have to rush off.’ It was a revealing insight into how the Sabbath preserves time and space for the family against the pressures of the world outside. As we walked away from the school, Penelope turned to me and said, ‘That Sabbath of yours is saving their parents’ marriages.’
Of course you do not have to be religious to have a happy marriage or be a caring parent. No one would suggest otherwise. But marriage has ceased to be supported by the wider culture.
One of the turning points in my life was listening to the Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach deliver the Reith Lectures in 1967. I was just starting my second year at university, and I was shaken by his statement, ‘Far from being the basis of the good society, the family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all discontents.’18
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p; That, for me, was the moment I knew that our academic role models were making a mistake, and that I had to set out on a journey of my own, into the faith of my ancestors. ‘Narrow privacy’ and ‘tawdry secrets’ spoke to nothing in my experience. For me and most of my friends, family was our source of at-homeness in the world, the only place we could turn to for unconditional love. ‘Home’, said Robert Frost, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.’19 I sensed a great betrayal. None of us could have known then how high a price successive generations of children would pay for this high-minded abdication of responsibility.
If all faith did was show us how to sustain a marriage and a family in love and loyalty, making space for one another, I would count it as God’s great and sufficient gift. Religion sacralises relationship, which is why those who care about relationship will seek ways of investing it with holiness.
Faith, for the prophets, was a kind of marriage. Marriage is an act of faith.
10
A Meaningful Life
It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens1
The sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.
Rebecca Goldstein2
Max Ostro was a young Jew living in Poland when the Nazis came. He and his family were rounded up. Together with one of his brothers and his father, he was herded into a cattle truck in a train bound for Treblinka. No one came back from Treblinka. It was an extermination camp. There, many of Poland’s three million Jews were gassed, burned and turned to ash.
In the train, barely able to breathe, his father held his two sons. He said to them, ‘Mein kinder, if you stay on the train you will die. It belongs to malach hamoves, the angel of death. I want you to davven maariv – pray the evening prayer. Then I want the two of you, when the opportunity presents itself, to jump. The Nazis will shoot. But one of you will survive. This I promise you: one of you will survive.’
The sons prayed. Both jumped from the train. The Nazis saw the movement and started firing. Max’s brother was killed instantly. Max, under cover of darkness, survived.
The family had hidden a sum of money which Max was able to recover, and with it he paid a farmer to hide him in his hay barn. Max survived this way for some time. Then came November 1944. The Nazi effort to round up and exterminate all remaining Jews intensified. Max later told his son that he had a dream at that time. In it he saw the Rebbe, the holy teacher his father had admired. The Rebbe told him, ‘It is no longer safe for you in the barn.’
So Max came to an arrangement with the farmer. He had himself buried in a grave in the ground with only a narrow space open to the sky. Through it Max was able to breathe. Once a week the farmer would come and bring something for Max to eat and drink. He survived like that, buried alive, for two months until the war came to an end.
Max eventually came to Britain, built a business, married and had two children. He went to the synagogue regularly, prayed every day, lived his life as an Orthodox Jew and gave much of the money he made to charity. He never spoke bitterly about the Holocaust, and though he sometimes wept for the family he had lost – he was the only survivor – he and the other survivors in Britain became a kind of extended family to one another.
I did not know Max well – I saw him from time to time at gatherings of Holocaust survivors. I knew his face, but not his story. While I was writing this book, he died and I went to comfort his son Maurice, whom I knew. That was when I heard his story. A book has been written about it.
Louis S. was not a Holocaust survivor. His family had left Poland long before, after a succession of pogroms and a wave of antisemitic incidents. He came to Britain when he was six. The family were poor. Louis had to leave school at the age of fourteen and work to help support his parents and siblings.
Eventually he was able to open a shop selling remnants of cloth, schmatters as they were known, to local tailors. It was not a successful business. Days would pass without a customer. Louis would listen to the radio and read. Eventually he too married and had children.
Louis went to synagogue every day. He did not understand much Hebrew, but this he knew: he was a Jew, he believed in God, and his fate was in God’s hands. That was enough for him. Louis walked tall.
Towards the end of his life, in his eighties, he had to undergo five major operations. Each sapped his strength and he grew progressively weaker. In the hospital he had with him his tallit and tefillin – his prayer shawl and phylacteries – and he would put them on as best he could, and pray. At other times he would read from a little Hebrew copy of the book of Psalms. God was watching over him, and Louis trusted him. He knew his days on Earth were nearing their end and God was about to take him to himself.
He died peacefully, one of his sons holding his hand. He told me later that he had been saying the morning prayers and had just reached the passage, ‘The soul you gave me is pure …’ when Louis died.
Louis was my father.
I tell these stories because Max and Louis were ordinary people – Max who, through no choice of his own, had a quiet greatness thrust upon him by surviving the darkest night in history, and Louis who remained ordinary and yet whose life had a dignity and thankfulness to which I, his son, could barely aspire.
They believed in God and they lived their lives in his presence. That fact gave their lives meaning. They were here through God’s love, they lived on God’s Earth, they breathed God’s breath, what they had they owed to God, and therefore whatever they could they shared with others, they came to God’s house, the synagogue, and thanked him for their lives, their families and the freedom to thank him.
Their lives had a kind of radiance and gravitas, a belongingness. Neither Max nor my father suffered existential angst. They lived each day as God’s blessing and saw no need to philosophise beyond that point. When asked, ‘How are you?’ they would reply, as Jews of their kind always did, Barukh Hashem, ‘Thank God.’ They did good to others unostentatiously, because that is what you do, that is why we are here. They did not trouble heaven with their bootless cries, desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, with what they most enjoyed, contented least. What they had they gave thanks for, and what they lacked did not trouble them. God knew what was best, and they trusted him. They accepted fate. They made a blessing over life. They were a blessing while they lived.
Their faith did not rest on the principled belief that God created the world in six days, or that the ontological argument was true. They had not read Kierkegaard and made a reason-defying leap into commitment. In fact, had you wanted to discuss any of these things with them, they would probably have poured you a whisky and said, Zog a lechayim, ‘Drink to life.’
They were religious because that was the commitment their ancestors had made and stayed true to for more than a hundred generations, because that is how a Jew lives, and because people who live that way are somehow more real, more honest, than those who pursue the idols of fame or wealth or success, which always have a habit of coming back and biting you.
Nu, their lives seemed to say. God exists. The universe exists. We exist. What more do you want? There is a simplicity in that faith I respect.
Not everyone consciously raises the question of the meaning of life. Max was too busy trying to stay alive. My father was too busy trying to make a living. It takes a certain freedom and spaciousness, a reflective calm, to ask whether life has meaning. Ironically, life has to be quite good for people to think it is quite bad. But so it is. Everything that exists has a drive to go on existing, said Spinoza. So it is only relatively rarely that people ask, at a level both philosophical and existential, both abstract and real: Why, given the nature of life as such, should I go on living? Three people who famously did so were the biblical author of the book of Ecclesiastes, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Albert Camus.
Let’s begin with Tolstoy. The year is 1879. Tolstoy is fifty-one. He ha
s published two of the greatest novels ever written, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He has, in his own words, ‘a good, loving and beloved wife, good children and a large estate’. He has wealth, partly inherited, partly earned by the success of his writing. He has not the slightest doubt about his genius or his place in history. He writes, ‘Well, fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, more famous than all the writers in the world.’ One question, though, obsesses him: ‘So what?’ So I have everything, wealth, fame, work, love, the recognition and respect of others. But what does it all add up to? Why should I carry on living? ‘I had’, he writes about his mood at the time, ‘absolutely no answer.’3
Tolstoy’s Confession, the book he eventually wrote about his inner search, is by any standards an extraordinary document. Most people would have found satisfaction in any of the myriad ways he occupied his time, writing, bringing up a family, pursuing experiments in education, running his vast estates, caring for the peasants under his aegis. Yet we can sense something of what Tolstoy is speaking about. When we are young we say, ‘If only I had X, or achieved Y, or did Z.’ We locate the meaning of life in our aspirations. If we are lucky or work hard or both, eventually we acquire X and achieve Y and do Z. Yet we can find that still the question remains. ‘Is that it? Is that all? Why, with all the success and acclaim, do I still feel empty, unfulfilled?’
The Great Partnership Page 19