Somewhere on the way up the mountain, the boy notices that something is missing. He is carrying the wood his father tied to his back, and his father walks beside him with the fire and the knife, and since they left the others at the foot of the hill neither of them has said a word. “Father,” the boy says at last, and the father answers, “Hineni, here I am, my son.” The boy looks at what they are carrying and asks, “We have the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” The father does not slow his pace. He tells his son that God will see to the lamb, and the two of them walk on together, as they have been walking all morning. The boy does not ask again and the father offers nothing more, so the question climbs the mountain with them unanswered, and they keep walking side by side, the son who has seen that something is wrong and the father who cannot see past his own certainty. This is the same father who once argued with God over the fate of a city of strangers, and who now climbs towards the sacrifice of his own son without a single question. They go on doing what they have been doing, step after step, until the knife is already in the father’s hand.
At the very last moment a voice calls out to him, and it calls him by name, twice: “Avraham, Avraham.” He answers with the word he has already spoken twice in this story, hineni, here I am. He said it first when God called him and gave him the command, and again on the path, when his son said “Father” and waited to be heard. Now he says it a third time, and something in him wakes, as though from a trance. He stops and looks at the place where he is standing. On the way there he had lifted his eyes and seen only where he was going. Now he lifts them again and sees what has been there all along: caught by its horns in a thicket, a ram.
The root for seeing runs through the story five times, from the place Avraham sees from afar to the name he gives the mountain afterwards, a name meaning that God sees. A midrash in B’reshit Rabbah, the classical rabbinic collection of interpretations of Genesis, relates that the angels who watched the father bind his son wept, and their tears fell into the eyes of the boy lying on the altar beneath them, causing him to become blind later in life. Another midrash in the same collection claims that Yitzchak, bound and looking upwards, saw the Divine Presence, and God, unwilling to take the life of Avraham’s son, decreed instead that his eyes would dim when he grew old. Both versions place the beginning of the son’s blindness on the altar to which the father’s certainty had brought him. The boy, who was the only one on that mountain able to notice that something was missing, carried a darkness from that morning into the rest of his life, and the midrash leaves us to wonder whether this is how blindness passes from one generation to the next, from those who could not see to those who had to lie still beneath their certainty.
Psychologists who study how people pursue their goals have found that a strong commitment to one aim can push competing aims out of awareness, so that the more firmly we hold on to the first, the harder it becomes even to bring the others to mind. They call this “goal shielding.” Once the father had fixed himself on obedience, protecting his child or questioning his own understanding of the command may simply have stopped occurring to him. A related finding has been called “inattentional blindness.” In a well-known experiment, people who were asked to count the passes of a basketball in a short video were shown a person in a gorilla costume walking through the middle of the scene, and about half of them never noticed it. Their eyes worked perfectly well, but with their attention given over to counting, what walked across the screen never reached them, much as the ram stood in the thicket for as long as the father’s attention stayed fixed on the summit. None of this is a failing of bad people or of one side. It is what devotion does to attention. The more a cause matters to us, and the more of ourselves we have invested in it, the harder it becomes even to see, let alone register, whatever does not fit the story we are carrying up the mountain.
What finally broke Avraham’s trance came from outside him. A voice he had not expected called his name, and he was able to answer it. Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, a dear former teacher, has described genuine pluralism as a willingness to leave open the possibility of being transformed by the encounter with someone different, to the point of being persuaded by an argument we did not accept before. By that measure most of our disagreements are not pluralistic encounters at all. We listen to the people we disagree with the way a chess player watches an opponent, attentive only to the next move we will need to counter, and we leave every conversation holding exactly the positions we brought into it. We know this habit well enough from arguments about politics and sports, and it becomes most entrenched when the subject is the one closest to our identity. For many of us in this room, that subject became Israel in the past few years.
The debate about Israel, both inside and outside the Jewish world, has become a case study in goal shielding and inattentional blindness. Many who march against Israel in the name of justice do not register the moment a chant about Israel becomes an attack on Jews, or when the target of a demonstration moves from an embassy to a synagogue or a Jewish school. Earlier this year Roedean cancelled a tennis match against King David, and in a recorded call its head described the problem as a “Jewish day school issue.” The school later acknowledged that the decision had been discriminatory and apologised, yet some commentators still hurried to defend the cancellation as legitimate political protest, unable to see that children had been turned away from a tennis court because they were Jewish. The commitment to a single cause has made it possible for people who would never excuse violence against civilians anywhere else to describe the murder of babies and elderly people in their homes on 7 October, documented in detail and in many cases filmed by the killers themselves, as resistance to occupation, and to walk past the hostages, the living and the dead, as if they were not part of the picture at all. None of this is hidden. It is right there on the screen, but for those whose attention is fully given over to counting the passes of one side, it is simply not there.
It would be comfortable to stop here, and many of us would leave this morning feeling that the blindness belongs to other people. Many of us have lived these years in mourning and in fear, waiting more than two years for the last of the hostages to come home and watching hatred of Jews grow all over the world, including here in South Africa. Some of us have spent them defending ourselves at work and online more often than we ever imagined we would. Our commitment to Israel’s safety is a deep one, and it has a place in the Jewish tradition that I would never want to diminish. But the same mechanism that prevents those who march against Israel from seeing the evidence in front of their eyes works inside our own community, and it works precisely because we love Israel.
Some of the criticism aimed at Israel in these years has been antisemitic and some has not, and too often we have not stopped to tell the difference, meeting criticism of decisions taken by the Israeli government with the charge of antisemitism before we had heard it out. In doing so we have worn down the one word we most need right now. At a time when hatred of Jews is rising dangerously around the world, our warnings are heard by many as one more cry of wolf, and when the wolf is real, fewer and fewer people believe us. During the war, when reports of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza reached us, many of us dismissed them as a whole. Some of the images that circulated were indeed mislabelled or misleading, and it was right to say so, but the hunger beneath them was real, and when the questions about it reached us, many of us answered the way the father answered his son, that it would all be seen to, and kept walking. We speak readily, as we should, about Palestinian violence against Israelis in the West Bank, while violence carried out by settlers against Palestinian civilians there is something many in our community prefer not to speak about at all, even though it is reported regularly in the Israeli press and condemned by Israelis themselves. The danger lies in how our commitment can push aside other commitments that are just as Jewish, among them the obligation to see the suffering of the stranger and to recognise when those acting in our name have done wrong.
Each camp sees the world through its own blinders, attending closely to every fact that confirms its commitment and letting the rest pass by unseen, and each gathers in spaces where only its own perspective is spoken aloud and those who hold another are regarded with contempt. This is not a description of somewhere else. Over the past months I have received messages from members of this congregation, some of them among our most active, who told me that they do not feel safe expressing here what they really think about Israel, because their views differ from what they perceive to be the consensus in this room. They are still coming to services, still sitting beside us, and they have stopped saying what they see. If people who love Israel feel they must hide that love, something has gone wrong, and if people who are deeply troubled by the actions of the Israeli government feel they must hide those concerns, something has gone wrong as well. It is easier to draw strength from confirming our positions to one another again and again, and perhaps from not having to sit with the people who would challenge them. But the hard truth is that our community could grow stronger through honest disagreement, and from allowing each of us to be fully seen in all we are and all we believe.
A survey of American Jews carried out last year for the Jewish Federations of North America found that more than eight in ten of those aged seventy-five and over agree that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, while among those under forty-five fewer than half say the same. A smaller study by For the Sake of Argument, an organisation that runs dialogue programmes about Israel, listened to some thirty young American Jews who have come to reject Zionism. Most had grown up in a Jewish education with Israel at its centre, many of them in day schools, Zionist summer camps and Israel programmes, and several had tried to bring their questions to a rabbi and been shown the door. Whether they are right is a question worth arguing about, and the story on the mountain asks something else: what becomes of the one who looked at what was being carried, asked where the lamb was, and was told, in one form or another, that God would see to it. Some of these young people have walked away from the mountain altogether. Others are still among us, young people in our own families and our own community who carry the certainties they were handed the way the boy carried the wood on his back and keep their questions to themselves; one of the voices in that study describes going to synagogue and learning “how to swallow, how to stay silent.” Another said that their parents do not realise “how sad I am that I am no longer a Zionist.” Some families in this room may know that sadness from one side of the table or the other, and some of the silence in our homes is an attempt to protect the people we love from it.
The opposite blindness exists as well. I know of Jewish communities where criticism of Israel’s conduct has hardened into hostility towards anything connected with Israel or Zionism, where the trauma of the massacre and of the hostages has gone unacknowledged, where Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut are no longer marked, and where the Israeli flag is a forbidden item. These spaces have achieved their own uniformity by exclusion, and the young Jews who love Israel and want to argue with it from within find no place in them either. Whichever direction a community narrows in, those who feel they cannot be seen as they fully are become the ones who stop speaking, and eventually the ones who leave.
Only after the voice had called his name and he had answered hineni did Avraham lift his eyes, vayisa Avraham et einav, and see the ram that had been caught in the thicket for as long as he had been climbing. In a few minutes we will hear the horn of that ram. The Talmud imagines God asking Israel to sound a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah in memory of the binding of Yitzchak, and Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and legal authority, heard in the shofar a call to sleepers to wake from their sleep. The same God who commands the sacrifice at the beginning of the chapter is the God whose messenger stops it at the end, and the story leaves us asking whether on that mountain God also came to see something differently. Which voices have I already decided are not worth hearing, and which questions, asked by someone sitting beside me, have I answered before I really listened? If even the certainty of that command could be revisited, the question for each of us this morning is which of the voices we have silenced we might now decide to hear and answer with hineni. When Avraham answered hineni, he did not yet know what the voice would ask of him. To answer it to one another is to be present first, before we know where the conversation will take us.
Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!
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