Читать книгу Deathless - Andrew Ramer - Страница 10

In which you will learn the long-forgotten

story of what really happened to Isaac

The story of Isaac in your Torah is very brief compared to the tales of his father Abraham and his son Jacob. Almost all we know about Isaac relates to his father almost sacrificing him to God, the way that his marriage was arranged, and the manner in which his wife Rebecca and their younger son Jacob tricked him into blessing Jacob rather than his older twin brother Esau, who was Isaac’s favorite. The rabbis of the past speculated on why we are told so little about him and concluded that his near-sacrifice was so traumatic that he never quite recovered and accomplished very little in his life. As in many things, the truth is other than that, as I shall tell you in short order. But before I do there are a few other matters that need to be attended to.

Your Torah, (and please pardon me if I keep calling it that. Kindly remember how many torahs I’ve seen in my time) is very much the story of a people’s relationship with God. Up till now I’ve left God out of the story, so let me backtrack and fill in a few vital points here, which will illuminate your understanding of the text and perhaps infuse your spiritual life with some radiance, if we both are lucky.

People of your time tend to view people of my time as if we were little children, imagining us to be primitive, unsophisticated hicks wandering about in the desert looking at the sky, waiting for a miracle. You fail to credit us with any level of intelligence or sensitivity and don’t realize that our world was interconnected in amazing ways. Did you know, for example, that the tin used in the Middle East to make bronze came from the British Isles, or that the ancient Mesopotamians traveled by sea to India to trade for spices, and by land to China as well? Some of the words for different spices in Hebrew come from ancient Sanskrit and our people have loved Chinese food for many centuries. It’s encoded in our DNA. And we had trade routes that extended all the way to the tip of Africa, but I’m sure you didn’t know that. And you also think, I am certain, that our religions were primitive and highly superstitious. So before I go on I want to fill you in on the basics of religious faith three thousand years ago.

The Bible is filled with talk about idols and idolatry, and you perhaps believe that the little statues we kept in our homes, and the large images installed in shrines and temples, which represented this and that goddess or god, really were those deities in our hearts and minds. Well, the truth is, some of us did believe that, but most of us didn’t. Archaeologists have found female statues and figurines in every level of excavation, all over the Middle East. In fact, there are more of these statuettes than anything else. They assume that they were goddesses and that they were worshipped. Not entirely.

People then were not so very different than people are now. You go off on vacation. We went off on vacation. You visit Paris and come back with a tee shirt of the Eiffel Tower and with post cards of the Arc de Triomphe and Notre-Dame. Or you visit New York City, take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, and come back with a little copper statue of it, which you keep on the windowsill in your bathroom. And two thousand years from now, when archaeologists dig up the remains of your home, they’ll find that little statue and say of you, “The 21st century inhabitants of this domicile worshipped a mother goddess, a fusion of two earlier goddesses, whose attributes she carried. One was the guardian of enlightenment, hence the torch she was holding aloft, while the other was the patron deity of scribes, indicated by the book she holds in the crook of her arm.”

A lot of the statuettes dug up in modern Canaan were souvenirs as well, mass produced in clay molds, sold by vendors near all of our shrines and temples, and set up in our homes to remind us of our travels. Some of us believed that they were real, and others of us didn’t. If you look into the back and front yards of America you will find countless statues of the Virgin Mary mounted on cement, or standing in glass boxes under a tree or next to a rose bush. (Mary, Miriam actually, was a lovely woman, but more about her later.) Now some of the people who have those statues pray to them, and some don’t. Some think of her as the Mother of God, others see her image as nothing more than a comforting presence, while for others that statue is a tribal symbol. “My grandmother had one in her yard. My mother has one. I have one.” And some, a minority I believe, put her statue out there because they see her as kitsch, a word and concept that I am very fond of.

We, your ancestors of three thousand years ago, were exactly the same. For many of us those goddess statuettes were simply souvenirs—artistic, decorative objects that we kept on a special shelf in our homes that some might call an altar. Others of us used our goddess images as what today you call “visual meditation devices,” and some of us had those statues in our homes because everyone else did. Some had bigger statutes than everyone else, because they could afford to, and others had no statues at all and still believed in goddesses, or didn’t, just as you might.

I now live a half a block from the Pacific Ocean, in a four-room apartment in a very diverse complex. Across the courtyard from me live the Rodriguezes, a large Mexican family of four generations. They speak almost no English but my knowledge of Ladino is useful here. They’re fervent churchgoers and believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible. Their crowded apartment is filled with images of Mary and numerous saints, with candles burning in front of them. They pray to them constantly, talk to them, invoke them. Upstairs from me is an old hippie couple. Bob teaches yoga, Shelley is a massage therapist. Their home is filled with paintings and statues from Tibet, of Buddhas and other deities. Although he is Jewish by birth and she a former Lutheran of German and Scandinavian background, they approach their Buddhas with the same devotion (if not the same mind- or heart-set) that the Rodriguezes have for their saints.

Then there’s old Mr. Rallway next door. He’s a fiery atheist socialist, in his late 80’s. His lesbian daughter Martine and her lover Patricia live around the corner. Their home is filled with images of goddesses from all over the world, including a museum reproduction of one by Kalyah. Martine’s father is always teasing “the girls” about them. The Tomlinsons across the way are Baha’i, Tina Phillips next door, and her mother Betty, are Fundamentalist Christians. The DeBecques are from Haiti and follow an Afro-Caribbean faith. The Rams family are Hindu, and I am—well, what am I? Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Spinoza was a splendid man, the first truly modern secular Jew, and his God comes close for me too. But I tell you all of this so that you get a sense of the diversity of the present, with the hope that you will use it as a lens into the past.

Although we lived in a complex world, we didn’t have television or movies or radio. For us stories, especially the ones that were told at night around a fire, were our primary form of entertainment. Because we loved to hear and tell stories we always had multiple versions of them, and that didn’t bother us. In some ways it was like what happens to you when you compare a book with the movie made from it, the remake of that movie, and the opera that was created around them: multiple versions of the same story, some of which you like better than others.

I remember an experience I had when I had first moved to North America. Being fluent in several languages including English, I got a job teaching music in a private school in New York City. One day not too long after I arrived I was invited to the birthday party of one of my students, a sweet little girl named Lissy. Her father Bruce led all the children in a game that I had never heard of before—Telephone. There were more than a dozen boys and girls at the party, all seated in a circle on the living room floor. My student’s father whispered to his daughter a sentence that she then whispered to her neighbor, who passed it on and on around the circle. The sentence Bruce whispered to Lissy was, “My father’s new car is shiny and red.” Imagine my surprise when the final student said out loud what he’d heard: “My mother’s new dog was run over and killed dead.” Lissy burst into tears when she heard it, as a sweet little puppy has been her father’s birthday present to her. Well, scripture is sometimes like that, stories passed around a circle for hundreds and even thousands of years, changing and changing.

Am I making sense here? Are you following me? I hope so. Now let me get right down to our own history. You may have read those stories about how Abraham first discovered God, but even the redactors of the Torah didn’t think so. They had Adam and Eve talking to God, along with Enoch and Noah and all of Abraham’s ancestors. In their eyes monotheism came first and idolatry came later. In some ways the religion of your ancestors was more like Hinduism than what you think of as Judaism. In Hindu scriptures you will find the most exalted writings about the absolute unity of God, sometimes known as Brahman, alongside a great riotous conflagration of deities with the kinds of biographies that are found in all of the world’s mythologies. The religion of Sarah and Abraham was rather like that.

For eons all of humanity considered God, the Absolute, to be Female. But just as many of you, born as Jews or Christians, have become Buddhists like my neighbors, or are studying with Native American or Sufi or Wiccan teachers, my ancestors were also dabbling in new and trendy religions. God hadn’t become absolutely male yet, although that was the general direction in which things were going. Sarah and Abraham belonged to a fairly new syncretistic religion that worshipped an androgynous deity known as Shaddai or El Shaddai, which literally means, “God, My Breast,” and can be interpreted as God the Nurturer, or God the Sustainer. While they built altars to Shaddai, they didn’t make images of him, but they talked about him and thought of him as a man with woman’s breasts, rather like the Egyptian god of the Nile, Hapi, who will show up in our story later on. Given that Hebrew was and is dual-gendered it was difficult to talk about and write about a Being who is both female and male, or neither. Shaddai was their best attempt to do that, an androgynous being who was never shown in pictures or statues. The closest we came to thinking of him in form was as light. Not firelight or sunlight but the primal spiritual light of the universe, from which all other things emerged.

In our mythology Shaddai, the Absolute and Unknowable Unity of all that is, had two children, which he/she birthed without another parent. One child was female. Her name was Asherah and she was the chosen deity of our ancestors. The other child was male and we called him Yah, Yah-El, or Yahweh. They were the Yin/Yang of the ancient Hebrews, or like Shiva and Shakti in Hinduism. No one made images of them but they worshipped Asherah in sacred groves, and felt the presence of Yahweh manifest through certain big rocks. Both of these elements will reappear in my story so don’t forget them. Asherah and Yahweh were the creators of the physical world and the parents of all the other gods, of which we had many. We called them the Elohim, which means “the gods,” and we saw all of them as manifestations of Shaddai, the one ultimate Creator.

Now let’s get back to the heart of the Torah story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. It’s a very moving story in some ways, and it’s maddeningly horrific in others. That it never happened should comfort you, and yet fiction is a marvelous mirror of the soul. Sometimes we can only tell the truth about human life though artifice, which you may have discovered yourself. So I ask you now, how many children, some in body and many more in spirit, have been done in by their parents? You perhaps are one of them.

Writing was still uncommon in my childhood, and it was even more rare in the days of Sarah and Abraham, except by scribes in temples. Stories about their lives were told by all of their descendants, but they were first written down about three hundred years after they died. So think about what you know of your ancestors from three hundred years ago. Most of you probably know nothing about them, not even their names, unless they came over on the Mayflower or were titled nobility, or if you’re Mormon or have done a lot of internet research on genealogical sites. Given that we didn’t yet have books, or radio, movies, or TV, we did a lot more storytelling than you do, but three hundred years is still three hundred years. And stories evolve just like playing Telephone, a whole story emerging from a single misheard word or phrase. So let me tell you the story that morphed into the sacrifice of Isaac. (Isn’t morphed a marvelous word? From Ovid, to Kafka, to visual morphing in films.)

Isaac was spoiled by his father, his four big sisters, his mother, and by Hagar and Ishmael too, when they were all still living together in the same encampment. The Torah isn’t clear on this, but Ishmael was three years older than Isaac, and the two brothers adored each other, the younger following the older about like a puppy, the older teaching him everything he knew. But the tension between their mothers increased. Hagar left for a time, returning to her favorite little village, but she missed the others and, hoping to be able to work things through with Sarah, she and Ishmael went back, as I said before.

Sarah had some reason to be concerned about Ishmael’s influence on her son. He introduced Isaac to drugs at an early age, to the resins and hashish other herbal blends that were popular at that time. Sarah found out from their servants and went to Abraham in a rage, insisting that Hagar and Ishmael leave for good, which they did. Hurt and enraged when he found out, Isaac confronted his father and shouted at him, “Everyone knows you’re not my real father. Abimelech is!” This deeply wounded Abraham, in spite of the fact that Isaac was the very image of him (or so my Aunt Dinah told me) so there was no doubt about his paternity. Abraham couldn’t persuade Sarah to change her mind. A few months later Isaac disappeared. No one knew where he was, messengers were sent off to Hagar’s village of Lahai-roi, but Isaac wasn’t there. Finally Isaac’s sister Davah broke down and confessed, when she saw how distraught her parents were. Her brother had confided in her where he was going and what he wanted to do. Below are a few passages from a long lost written account of what happened.

And Abraham heard that his son Isaac, the only son of his wife Innati the princess, had entered the temple of Asherah in the city of Luz, to be a novice priest there.

There were many Asherahs in our time, the same way that there are Mary of Lourdes, Mary of Guadalupe, Mary of Fatima, who are the same Mary but also different. So too with Asherah, who was, again, the primary deity of our family. The Asherah of Luz was a goddess whose male cross-dressing priests castrated themselves after they were initiated, and this is the “cult” that Isaac had run off to join. The priestess there, Hattanit, was a kind of local guru, and lots of young men and women were drawn to her and to her temple. She taught what you might call, “the old way,” the path of the Great Mother, and the young people who were drawn to that path were Luddite hippies from over three thousand years ago.

For Abraham, who believed in a modern new religion with its androgynous and main, male god, that was the last straw! Drugs he could deal with, but he’d waited too long to have a son with his sister-wife to see Isaac enter a community like that. A typical Jewish father in a world that was becoming increasingly male-focused and patriarchal, Abraham expected Isaac to take over the family business, and then pass it on to his own sons. Isaac’s castrating himself would rob Abraham of his grandchildren, so you can sympathize with his fury. Now you might think that from circumcision to castration isn’t such a long journey, but in those days the whole foreskin of a baby wasn’t removed, only a ring at the end, something I’ll talk about later, when I get to the story of Moses. But given what happened with Abraham’s expectations, since that time our people have been uncomfortable with anyone who isn’t married with children, and have been particularly uncomfortable with eunuchs, although they were popular in China, Ottoman Turkey, and were singers in the Catholic Church until not so very long ago. One of my best friends in the Middle Ages in Europe was a man named Fratello Solli, a short shy eunuch with a glorious voice! But let me go back to the old story.

And his wrath was kindled against his son Isaac, the son of his loins, the son of his wife Innati the princess. And Abraham took his chief steward and five of his servants, and they set out for Luz to the temple. When they arrived they saw Isaac and the head priestess offering a sacrifice to the goddess. And they hid behind the oracle tree till the sacrifice was complete. And while Isaac and the priestess were eating their portion of the offering, Abraham and his servants sprang out and grabbed and bound the boy.

Not only had Abraham gotten angry at Isaac, but he’d also had a huge fight with Sarah. She understood why he was upset, but felt two things. First, she understood why Isaac was doing what he was doing. She was the devout one and had long felt a calling in her only son. And getting castrated was a part of their world. Men did it all the time. (Although I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.) And second, as the product of a matriarchal lineage and the mother of four daughters, Sarah had her own heirs and she didn’t feel the distress her beloved husband did. In fact, she tried to talk Abraham out of going, but he was adamant. His argument was rather like one you may have heard. “The boy’s too young. He has no idea what he’s doing. I’m not going to sit back and do nothing, and let him ruin his entire life by entering this ridiculous cult.”

The priestess of Asherah of Luz raised up the knife of sacrifice, still bloody, and tried to cut Isaac’s bindings, but she was subdued. “You cannot have this son of mine,” Abraham bellowed. “His is not yet of age. He is still a son of my tent.” For Isaac had lied to the priestess about his age. “I will kill him myself before I see him become a priest in your house,” he shouted. The priestess was dismayed, however she had acted honorably, having believed the boy when he said he was of age. But she knew that she could not take in and initiate the youth against his father’s wishes, and she told Isaac that he must go home with him and obey him. She told him that he could come back in a year, when he had finally come of age, if he still felt a calling to the goddess Asherah, to be Her sacred priest in Luz.

Without the support of the priestess there was nothing that Isaac could do. He had to go home with Abraham. But what made it even worse for Isaac was that many of the Canaanite boys in the area had come to see him assist with the sacrifice for the first time. They were his new friends and he’d bragged to all of them about it, so he felt deeply shamed to be dragged off in front of them, jeering and laughing at him. And here you can see very clearly how a single remembered line, “I will kill him myself,” gradually over time turned into the marvelous story that you all know from the Torah.

As I said, over three hundred years passed before the stories about the matriarchs and patriarchs were first written down. And the story that you know wasn’t authored and edited for another two hundred years after that. The world had changed a great deal in that time. The faith of Sarah and Abraham was largely forgotten. All goddesses and especially Asherah were considered false, if not evil, and Shaddai had fused with Yahweh and several other male gods to become God the Father. The first writer of the story about Isaac’s sacrifice was living at the time of King Saul, our first king, the first to unify all the tribes. Saul wanted his chief scribe to craft a saga that would inspire a new nation and fill it with stories that would set it apart from its neighbors.

In some ways people then were no different than people are now. We praise our allies by exaggerating their good deeds, and we condemn our enemies by accusing them of actions that they did not commit. The false statements of several world leaders who went to war to destroy banks of weapons of mass destruction that they knew did not exist is a case in point. In the first spoken tales of the life of Isaac, his whole life was told as he lived it, but as time when on, and stories became garbled, and then written down, Isaac’s real life vanished just as his real name did. And later editors of the story used his life as a polemic against Israel’s idolatrous enemies. The implication of the story was that Abraham was exempted by God from committing the kind of sacrifice of his children that Israel’s neighbors were said to commit, offering up their daughters and sons to the fire on altars of Moloch and other gods. And it’s true that human sacrifice was done in various cultures, the Aztecs and Carthaginians, but the Canaanites did not practice it. The story is subtle—and defames them, which I say as the Hebrew daughter of a woman of Canaan.

It’s true that animal sacrifice was a part of our lives. But having been a vegetarian for most of my three thousand years, I was never a fan of it. The smell of burning flesh on our altars always made me sick to my stomach. But that’s another matter, so let me get back to my story, the many versions of which—if you are wondering—I memorized three millennia ago and have not yet forgotten. (I’ve spent many the night sitting around a campfire telling others—or just myself—these stories.)

Isaac and his father were not speaking to each other when they returned. Sarah and her daughters did their best to reconcile the two, without success. Father and son could scarcely tolerate each other. Mealtime was a nightmare and as soon as he came of age Isaac took off from his father’s camp and lived for some time in Hagar’s village. You can see this yourself if you read the Torah. Hagar called her village Lahai-roi, and that’s where Isaac was living before he was married. Eventually the family reconciled, thanks to Hagar, who let Isaac know how much his father and mother loved him and missed him. And as with many of us, especially when we’re younger, rage in Isaac turned into guilt at the way he’d treated his parents, and from that guilt and the obedience he imposed upon himself, the next chapter of his life unfolded, after he moved back to live with them.

It was Sarah who suggested to Abraham that they all go up to Haran for a visit. Their eldest daughter Atirat had already returned and gotten married there and she and Isaac had always been close. Sarah knew that her husband and son always got along best when they were traveling. It took a while for her to get the two of them to agree, but in the end they went. The trip was tense, and you have to remember that on camel, donkey, and by foot, it was a very long trip, a trip of many months. (A nomadic band can travel anywhere between ten and twenty-five miles a day.) When they finally got back to Haran they stayed with Sarah’s family, which made life even more difficult. Isaac sulked and spent as much time as he could alone, which only gave Sarah’s sisters more ammunition for their criticism of her.

About two weeks after they arrived Sarah finally persuaded Isaac to join the rest of the family when they went to visit Abraham’s nephew Bethuel and his family. Bethuel and his wife Kahinah had a son Laban, and a daughter Rebecca, plus an older daughter named Ezob, who has fallen out of the story. Rebecca and Isaac were close in age and they had a lot in common. She too was that day’s version of a hippie, a rebellious child who was also interested in the old ways, although from all I’ve heard the spiritual content of the goddess revival groups back then was as new as that disseminated by most of the ones that are popular today.

Isaac and Rebecca hit it off. (Does it bother you that I’m using colloquial expressions? I enjoy them. English is my twenty-seventh language, and there is much to be said for it, some of which I may go into later on.) Anyway, the relationship between those two young people was not romantic. It began as friendship, the two of them linked by shared values. Seeing what was happening, and hoping for more, Sarah took Rebecca aside and gently encouraged her. Rebecca was the one who proposed. She genuinely liked her cousin and saw him as a good catch. Abraham and Sarah’s business in Canaan was doing very well. She knew that she’d be comfortable there, while under her father’s control the old family business was faltering. And Isaac, knowing that his parents approved, and needing their approval as much as he needed to rebel against them, because he was still too ashamed to go back to Luz—although he wanted to in his heart of hearts—decided instead to marry his cousin and new friend Rebecca.

It took a while for Sarah to persuade Rebecca’s mother Kahinah to let her daughter travel back to Canaan with them. But like Sarah, Rebecca was a younger daughter, not her mother’s heir, and so she was willing to allow Rebecca to marry her troubled but rich and charming cousin. I can’t say that things were ever smooth after that between Abraham and Isaac. To the day that Isaac died, my father told me, he never quite forgave his father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz and embarrassing him in front of his new friends. But Isaac loved his wife, never took another wife, nor had any concubines like most of the rest of the men in our family at that time. Instead he fully entered into the family business and maintained an awkward truce with Abraham.

From time to time, when tempers threatened to flare up again, Sarah would find a sly way to remind Isaac, “If your father hadn’t brought you home that day you would never have met Rebecca. And you know she’s the best thing that ever happened to our family. Where would we all be without her?” After their twin sons Esau and Jacob were born, Isaac mellowed a bit, and Abraham, now having male heirs, was able to finally forgive him. At night, in bed, on those nights when they shared a tent, Sarah would sometimes whisper to Abraham, “Isn’t it nice how things worked out? Even better than we could have hoped for, all those long years ago when we set out from Ur with nothing to call our own. And look at us now, with children and grandchildren and flocks and herds and friends to share our joy with.”