Pilupul “Caught in the thicket”: An Allegory of the Complexity of Faith

By Yaakov Mascetti*

The month of Adar is for me a moment of personal reflection, a niche in time where I can stop for a few instants and reflect. True, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur have that valence, and they certainly are significant moments in which the collective may come together and reflect – but those are moment of collective gathering, of general prayers and systematized (and extremely long) liturgy. What I wish to present in this article is a personal niche in time, something more similar to a base in baseball, where the player can stop and safely wait till the next phase opens new possibilities for (rapid and instinctive) movement to the next base.

The month of Adar is a base for me because this is when I converted in Milan with the Orthodox rabbinical Beit Din at the head of which was, at the time, Rav Laras z”l – it was Rosh Hodesh Adar and I remember it as one of the most significant days in my life. Every year, around Parashat Teruma, the first three aliyot of which I proudly read in the Trieste synagogue, after I enthusiastically davened Kabalat Shabat in the evening, I take a moment and I look around, trying to think what I have done, what can be improved, and where I’d like to be next year.

Call it a mid-life crisis, call it what you will – but for God’s sake let me say that my faith and compliance with the orthodox halacha underwent significant rethinking more or less in 2011, and I have never been able – nor have I wanted to, in all sincerity – to go back to what I used to be: a God fearing individual with a purpose. What I have become is less like the purpose-driven Isaac, and more like Abraham, yet not the Abraham who follows blindly the voice of his God, presented in many commentaries, but rather an Abraham which I like to imagine confused, debating within himself and with himself, bringing together an often dissonant concert of voices, struggling to understand how to leave the land of his fathers for a new home, and then distraught by the Divine request to sacrifice his own beloved son. The Abraham I see in before and after Genesis 22 is a man who tries his best to fare in the thicket of confusing thoughts a man has when it comes to life, to the things he has to do, the people he loves, and mostly his children. The Abraham I’d like to re-present here is, in sum, me.

The parasha in which the trial of Isaac’s sacrifice takes place is VaYera, a portion of Genesis which apart for being one of my very favorite parts due to the exceptionally interesting uses of the sense of sight (which I am known to be obsessed with – scholarly and outside the academia), is mostly one of appearances, of sudden unexpected appearances. Upon perceiving the things of everyday life, we rarely “lift up” our eyes to see things differently – we mostly keep our eyes glued to the black mirror of our phones’ screens, to the screen of our PCs, to the road as we drive, to the list of groceries we need to buy, etc. When Abraham lifts up his eyes he does so voluntarily, he does so out of the blue – an act of volition which is apparently disconnected, but which, as I’d like to argue here, is actually one of the may possible acts one could choose to perform. The Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent by the terebinths of Mamre “as the day grew hot” is a man, in my eyes, who is in pain, not only physical but mostly spiritual. Undergoing a circumcision in an adult age is not a simple matter – it impinges on a critically sensitive part of the body and is forever. Also, it is extremely painful. So Abraham is sitting there at the entrance of his tent and is in pain – “Why have I done this again?” or “What was I thinking?” Within the cracks of his pain-ridden thoughts resounds God’s presence / absence, and takes the shape of three men standing near him. These men are not approaching – they are standing near him, and despite the fact Abraham then runs from the tent to greet them and bows on the ground, one cannot ignore the fact that this presence was there right in front of him, and all Abraham had to do to perceive it was to lift up his eyes. This Divine visit is riddled with doubts, with prophecies Abraham and Sarah have a hard time dealing with – Isaac, the unexplainable pregnancy Sarah will have despite the fact that she “has withered,” and ultimately the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Abraham is not one who quietly complies with Divine decisions, and neither is Sarah – they are both profound believers, but they fare relentlessly through unbearably confusing thickets of doubts and questions. So Abraham does not hesitate one instant before he asks God, the self-revealed God, if he is actually going to sweep away the innocent along with the guilty. Abraham’s divine interlocutor is brought, in a sense, to comply with his own standards – shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly? The Divine interlocutor is, more likely, hidden in the thickets of doubts and questions Abraham has, and peeps out of the total confusion of what appears to be the illogical turn of events in history only to echo Abraham’s request for justice. And the Divine interlocutor Abraham has to deal with here is one which leaves him once again to all his doubts and to the complexity of life – for, as it is written, “When the Lord finished speaking to Abraham, He departed; and Abraham returned to his place” (Gen. 18:33).

En passant, on my way to Isaac’s missed sacrifice, I wish to say that Abraham is also caught in his doubts when it comes to the exile of Hagar and his son Yishmael, a horrific act which the commentators struggle with in order to justify the decision and to support Sarah’s request – but before Abraham decides to actually listen to Sarah’s voice, and he does so only after God confirms her request, he is distraught – for “the matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his.” One can imagine how painful and saddening it must have been for Abraham to take some bread and a skin of water and send her away, watching her slowly moving away in the wilderness of Beer Sheva.

The real test comes in chapter 22, when God calls him “Abraham” and the latter responds “Here I am.” I am here, right here where you left me last time – and now you are asking me to take my son, my favored one, my own beloved Isaac, and offer him as a burnt offering. The space between this commandment and the next verse, is a void, temporally definable as the night before his departure for the locus where the offering will take place, and which cries out with the ear-splitting silence of doubts. Why is he asking me to do this? Why am I supposed to kill my son? What is the point of all this? But this time Abraham does not have the luxury of sitting at the entrance of his tent, but forces himself to get up early in the morning, saddle his ass and depart with Isaac and two servants, without explaining anything to anyone – I will leave it to the reader to speculate on the impossible thicket of doubts, questions and fears this silence of Abraham’s leaves Sarah in. The questions, doubts and fears act here as a background noise, a confusing chaos of random thoughts which freeze the individual, make his performance of acts impossible at best, and senseless at worst. The silence that characterizes Abraham as he walks up the mountain with his son, catalyzes questions and doubts in Isaac too – Father, here is the firestone, here is the wood, and where is the sheep to be offered? Abraham has no idea what to say – God will see to the sheep for his burnt offering, my son, is not an answer but a declaration of principle. This is what will happen, son, and I do not know if you are to be the sacrifice or what will actually happen. But the two continue walking together, because doubts and questions have this nature – they can destroy the unity between two people when left unsaid, but they strengthen bods when externalized. Abraham’s doubts are there all the time – even as he arrives to the place of which God had told him, even as he builds an altar, even as he places the wood on the altar and then binds his son. The doubts, the unbearable loudness of his internal cries are all there as he lays his beloved son on the altar and then picks up the knife to slay him.

The Divine call to “Abraham! Abraham!” ordering him to refrain from raising his hand against the boy, is a sudden crack in the darkness of Abraham’s solitude, one in which he has been left since the moment, four days before, in which God ordered him to sacrifice Isaac. Now, says God to Abraham, and not before, do I know you fear me – within the thicket of your doubts, questions, fears, those of your wife, within the chaotic appearance of things as they happen and the random requests I make and revelations I present you with, you have stood “here” within yourself, stable in your instability, fixed in your confused search for meaning where there is none. Your fear of God is the capacity to stand, to continue standing within the necessary confusion of things – and the true sacrifice does not come from a clear-cut reality, one in which things are transparently revelatory of Divine meaning and intention, but rather from the thicket of chaos. In this moment, yet once more, Abraham looks up, and there where he saw nothing a moment ago now stands a ram “caught in the thicket by its horns,” which he promptly takes and offers “as a burnt offering in place of his son.” This is the one true nature of a man’s and a woman’s sacrifice – the peeping light of Divine revelation from the confusing thicket of questions and doubts. Certainty is for idol worshippers.

So where does this leave me with my Adar-based introspection as a self-made Jew? I am chaotically doing my very best to stand and see God peep out of the thicket of things, rarely patient enough or firmly believing to stay there and see things I had not perceived before. I have doubts, God lone knows how many doubts – every day as a Jew is a trial, every moment in Israel is an ordeal, every day away from my origins is a crack in my heart. To those who think, stupidly, that this is an unbearable demonstration of childish weakness and the ridiculous result of a perpetual state of crisis (“a walking crisis you are” as one called me once), I will not answer – all I will say is that the God I hear is one made of questions, of objections, of doubts and fears. My faith, unswerving in its fragility and tribulated nature, is one that wrestles with Divine agency every day, every night. This is the Jew I am – one who does his very best to lift up his eyes and ask God “Is this your Justice, God, Judge of all the earth?” So as some say, “Be kind: for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Be kind, because my path is mine and nobody else’s. And when God decides to peep out of the thicket of my doubts and questions, he will talk to me and me alone – and I will be right. Here.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.