Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [76]
Isaac, risen from the altar of Moriah, carries forth the legacy. He knows and embodies the fear of God just as fully as Abraham is the bearer of God's love. Isaac carries with him the constant awareness of mortality; his brush with death at God's whim and his father's hand is not forgotten. He sees God's face as one sees it lying face-up while bound on the altar. The “laughter” that is in his name (“Isaac” means “he laughs”) does not succeed in masking his burden of terror before God. Isaac again has two sons, seemingly repeating his father's pattern, but this time they are twins, born together of the same womb, underscoring their closeness. Esau is a hunter, like his uncle Ishmael. Isaac admires this, perhaps fulfilling through a son his own secret longing to have been more like his brother. Jacob is a man of the tents, his mother's favorite. He stakes a claim to the birthright in obvious acts of duplicity, even though he is the younger son.
Again progeny, tales of the clan, the need to choose. Biblical scholars claim that these tales reflect the insecurity and self-justification of the ancient Israelites, latecomers to the Land of Canaan, who nevertheless insisted that the country was theirs, the covenantal gift of God. God chooses the younger son. (Really? Always? What will we say today? Who is the younger son in today's Land of Israel?) Whether or not we accept this historical interpretation of the displacement of the firstborn, the discomfort Jews have long felt with the Jacob texts shows our awkwardness in being proclaimed God's chosen tribe. How else to explain the Midrashic discussion of Esau's tears after he loses the blessing? How else to account for the sages’ need to protect themselves from sympathizing with Esau's embrace of Jacob on his return, depicting it instead as an attempt to bite his neck?35
But the key moment of transformation in the midst of this difficult narrative is Jacob's wrestling (or is it lovemaking?) with the angel (or is it God? or Esau?) after he crosses the Jabbok. Jacob refuses to give in to the one who challenges him. He emerges from the struggle wounded, but having wrested a blessing from the other. It is in that encounter that Israel is formed, a word said to mean “wrestler with God” or “divine struggler.” Israel is defined as such by that struggle, one that has to balance the legacies of father and grandfather, the love and the terror in facing the God with which we humans live. “Israel is holy unto Y-H-W-H” (Jer. 2:3), knowing both of these, love and terror, to the fullest.
So Jacob, the most beautiful human since Adam36 (and perhaps just as multigendered as Adam/Eve before the fall), already husband and father, has an all-nighter, fighting, loving, and struggling with a nameless stranger who knows him better than he knows himself. If Jacob and Leah are the source of our Judean/Jewish bodies, our Israelite souls are born of this encounter between Israel and the One beyond name.
The tribe has always insisted that Jacob and Israel are one. It was Jacob's sons, “the Children of Israel,” who went down into Egypt and there were forged into a people, the ones who were to receive the Torah. “Moses commanded us the Torah, the legacy of Jacob's clan” (Deut. 33:4). The name belongs to us, all of us, and we to it. It belongs to us across history, no matter where or when we live. We have earned it by lots of suffering. ‘Aseh le-ma'an ba ‘ey ba-esh uva-mayyim ‘al qiddush shemekha: “Do it for the sake of those who have gone through fire and water to sanctify Your name.”37
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