Do The Right Thing , a Rosh Hashanah sermon
Religion is not in vogue right now. When friends realize the extent to which I am involved in Jewish life here on campus, they’re usually surprised. When they further realize the extent to which I actually believe in the Jewish faith, and believe in God, and accept the commandments of the Torah as my own, things tend to get a little uncomfortable. My secular friends don’t know how to reconcile this information about me with the rest of who I am.
So I wonder what exactly about me tells the scores of secular atheists I call my friends, that someone like me isn’t religious? Is it that I’m openly queer? That they’ve seen me go to parties, and flirt with strangers, and dye my hair blue? That I have tattoos and edgy piercings? That they enjoy my company? That they think I’m too smart for religion? Too woke? That I am not someone who simply accepts the things I am told.
Religious dogma has given religion a bad name. The culture that values independent thinking, and free and informed choice, rejects a version of religion that teaches its children what to think and what to believe, so that they will go on to have their own children and teach them the exact same thing. That because the contents of the Bible are so incompatible with science and history, that anyone who has a religion must be either deluded or brainwashed, but they experience me as a lucid and autonomous person.
Contrary to popular belief, held by many Jews and atheists alike, the purpose of the Torah is not to tell you what the absolute moral law is, or the fixed meaning of the world. There’s a perception that religion has ceased to be relevant, because it is not generative, and doesn’t create pluralities of ideas, let alone new ones. I disagree. I want to suggest that the Torah does not give you a moral compass, but rather, that it gives you the tools to build one. It allows for the likelihood that the same tools, given to different people will assemble a variety of compasses with a variety of true Norths. There are Ten Commandments, that tell you what you can and can’t do, but they don’t tell you why. You need to decide for yourself.
On Rosh Hashana, we jump backwards in the chronology of the reading of the Torah, to revisit the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which the first Jew is commanded by God, to take his only son up to the top of a mountain, and sacrifice him. We revisit this story for what I think is a singular reason.
New year’s resolutions are as old as the concept of cyclical time. We celebrate the new year because it’s our chance to reset the clock, and do better this time. We recommit ourselves to our morals, and rededicate our perpetual journey towards doing the right thing.
But the hard part isn’t deciding to do the right thing. The hard part is deciding what the right thing is, because in this life there is so much more grey than there is black and white.
So to kick start our journey, at the beginning of every year, we come together as a community, and stick our heads in the fog. It’s like, “Hey, happy new year- so do you think you should you kill your kid if God tells you to?”
I truly believe that the point of the story of Abraham and Isaac is not to say, in a very cut and dried fashion, that you should do whatever God tells you to do. One reason I think the story is more complex than that, is that most of us never have God calling us up to tell us exactly what to do, so it’s not really applicable life advice — it wouldn’t merit this special a role. Additionally, needless killing is not supported by the Torah. We are supposed to have an intuitive and visceral discomfort with God making this demand. We should understand this task to be a supreme perversion of nature. But to me, the thing that proves that this is supposed to seen as an extremely tough call, is that the preceding chapters before God instructs Abraham to kill his son Isaac, are centred largely around how important Isaac is. How badly he was wanted. How much his mother loved him. How clearly he was the last lifeboat: because God promised Abraham that he would have descendants that would be multitudinous like the stars in the sky, and that they would prosper. Sarah laboured to birth a child at the age of 90. At the point that Abraham is being told to sacrifice Isaac, it is clear that there will not be another Isaac. The stakes could not be higher, and it’s an impossible decision.
Now, I was raised on Torah stories and the platitudinal ethical imperatives they are often used to teach. When my mother read me this story, I asked her if she would kill me if God directly told her to. She didn’t waste a second: No. Absolutely not. My mom believes in God, and believes in God as the most high, but would not take my life for God. Because there is no difference between loving God and loving a child, between loving God and loving the promise of a future, between loving God, and hating death. In households with a stricter religious upbringing, I don’t know what parents tell their children when asked the same question. I imagine that for many parents, this is the one story that will cause them to agree to the open disobeyal of God’s command.
But Abraham goes the other way. He takes Isaac up the mountain, and doesn’t tell him why. He prepares to kill his son. He’s ready to do it, and then God stays his hand. God says, just kidding! I don’t actually want you to kill your kid. So why did I put you through this? Because I wanted to see what decision you would make.
To be clear, God supports the decision Abraham made, and promises to reward him for his obedience. But the decision was Abraham’s and Abraham’s alone. That’s why the choice was meaningful — it wasn’t predetermined. It required free, independent, and critical thinking. It required a sophisticated moral pallette — an intricate compass. Abraham could have made different choices, and God wanted to see which one Abraham would make.
Right now, and for the duration of the ten Days of Awe, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. God wants to see which decisions we’re going to make. The story goes that on Rosh Hashanah, God sits down at God’s desk, takes a swig of coffee, opens up the Book of Life, and the Book of Death, and starts writing names. The books are sealed on Yom Kippur So the clock starts now: this is our chance to earn our spot in the Book of Life.
And I don’t think it’s about making the objectively right choices. I don’t think there are objectively right choices — I think we’re little organisms in a swirling, chaotic web of lights, swimming in the darkness.
But I think we put on a good show for our creator. We try. We strive. We light fires and charge through the wilderness. Our hearts break for each other. We breathe, we make, we love. We are restless and we struggle, and we must continue to struggle for as long as we’re alive. We need to make hard decisions. We need to decide what the right thing to do is. We need to do it. We need to start now.
Shana tova.
Martine is a sophomore in Tisch studying Dramatic Writing. They currently serve as the Religious Vice Present of Kesher: Reform Jews at NYU.
