This is the sermon I presented tonight at Temple Sinai of Cranston, Rhode Island.

Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well, Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

Bob Dylan’s song, “Highway 61 Revisited,” is hardly the first time that someone has taken the biblical story of the Akeida, the Binding of Isaac, and applied it to contemporary circumstances. Jewish tradition has been doing that for more than 2,000 years. For centuries, we have been trying to make sense of the story in which God, to our horror, tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and, to our horror, Abraham obeys. Isaac is saved only at the last minute when an angel stops Abraham with the command, “Do not raise your hand against the boy!” (Genesis 22:12).

This week, as we again read the Akeida in the weekly Torah portion (Vayera), I want to look at it again and listen again to Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s interpretation of the story is interesting to me – and, perhaps, to you – for a few reasons. First, of course, is because Dylan – born, Robert Allen Zimmerman – is Jewish and grew up hearing Jewish interpretations of the story. Second, is because Dylan is recognized as a significant literary figure of the 20th and 21st century. You may or may not agree with the committee in Sweden that recognized him in 2016, but Bob Dylan will forever be known as a Nobel Laureate for “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Third, and most important to me, is the fact that Bob Dylan helped shape my life. Through his music, Bob Dylan served as a spokesperson for the attitudes and ideas of people like me who grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s.

So, what does Dylan have to say about the Akeida that speaks to our circumstances? The song begins by removing the story from its usual reverential treatment. He turns it into the story of ordinary people, desperate people, and even unsavory people. Abraham becomes “Abe.” God is transformed into a bullying authority figure: “You can do what you want, but the next time you see me comin’, you better run.”

Yet, notice that this line is ambiguous. On one level, it is a threat of violence, like what you might expect from a corrupt sheriff in a small town who uses rough language and intimidation to work his will on others. However, there is another way to hear the line, too, one that plays upon classical theological ideas. God says, “You can do what you want,” meaning, you have free will. You are permitted to choose whether you will act according to God’s will or not. Yet, as in classical theology, God also says that wrong action carries consequences.

“The next time you see Me coming, you better run,” is a reminder that we are seen by God and we are expected to see God in our lives. If you don’t, your actions – and God – will eventually catch up with you. There might even be a suggestion here of the classical Jewish statement from Pirke Avot that a person should “run to do even a minor commandment and flee from a transgression” (Pirkei Avot 4:2). God tells us, and sometimes in harsh words, “You better run.”

At the end of this first stanza, we hear the repeating theme of the song. Where does God want Abe to kill his son? Out on Highway 61.

Highway 61 has significance in the history of American music and it has tremendous meaning in the life of Bob Dylan. U.S. Route 61 is the "Blues Highway" that connects New Orleans, Louisiana; to Vicksburg, Mississippi; to Memphis, Tennessee; to St. Louis, Missouri; and then all the way up to Dylan’s home state of Minnesota.

To the young Bob Dylan, Highway 61 was the road to the music of Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, and Bessie Smith. It was the road, according to legend, where bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to master the guitar. And Highway 61 was the stretch of asphalt that led Dylan away from his home to the several birthplaces of American blues, jazz, country, and folk music. It was the escape route from comfort, safety, and suburbia in the upper midwest, away from the squeaky-clean dullness and conformity of white America, and into the unbounded world of creative expression, rebellion, confrontation, struggle, racial diversity, and danger.

Well, Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose.
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes.
He asked poor Howard, “Where can I go?”
Howard said, “There’s only one place I know.”
Sam said, “Tell me quick, man, I got to run.”
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said, “That way down on Highway 61.”

Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King,
“I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?”
And Louie the King said, “Let me think for a minute, son.”
And he said, “Yes, I think it can be easily done.
Just take everything down to Highway 61.”

Now, the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right.
“My complexion,” she said, “is much too white.”
He said, “Come here and step into the light.” He says, “Hmm, you’re right,
Let me tell the second mother this has been done.”
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61.

The stanzas that follow the first tell a story of increasing danger and conflict. It is the real America of the mid-1960s beyond the wallpaper veneer of domestic tranquility. It is the America of subjugation and racial animosity. It is the America of violence and intimidation directed against the poor and the marginalized. It is the America of capitalism run amok, looking to make a quick buck by selling useless goods. It is the America of moral decay and flight from a society that had grown stale and soulless.

Dylan here is playing the role of the Hebrew prophet – the man who is willing to tell his people the truth that no one else dares to speak. He is like Jeremiah who risks the wrath of his own tribe by telling them, “This is what the Lord says, ‘Stand by the roads and consider. Ask about the ancient paths. Which is the road to happiness? Travel it and find your tranquility.’ But you say: ‘We will not go.’” (Jeremiah 6:16).

Dylan’s use of the Akeida to frame this story of flight from dullness to danger is a familiar reading of the biblical narrative. Jewish commentators of the Torah have seen the story of the Binding of Isaac as a kind of a warning against blind faith. Franz Rosenzweig saw the story as God’s challenge to Abraham – and to humanity – to become more than timid and fearful automatons. Real piety, according to Rosenzweig, is not to be found in mere obedience. Rather, it is the difficult path of freedom – free thinking, willing to question, able to defy even God. In Rosenzweig’s words, “God obviously wants only those who are free for his own" (The Star of Redemption, p. 284). 

Bob Dylan’s vision of God in “Highway 61 Revisited” is a God who challenges and goads us out of our comfort and into confrontation. God threatens us and chases us out of our sleepy acceptance of the world as it is, and forces onto a journey that will allow us to see darker truths – a journey along Highway 61.

It is in the last stanza that Dylan reveals the greatest danger that lurks beyond the curtain of the familiar and comfortable:

Now, the Rovin’ Gambler, he was very bored.
He was tryin’ to create a Next World War.
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor.
He said, “I never engaged in this kind of thing before,
But, yes, I think it can be very easily done.
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.”

There are those, Dylan suggests, who will use our blindness to destroy us. If we don’t see the truth of the poverty that squelches the human spirit, the racism that turns people into social pariahs, the way that authority uses violence and intimidation to control society, and the way that rampant capitalism makes us suckers to buy things we don’t need – if we don’t see any of that – then we also won’t see the way that power will corrupt the entire fabric of society. Dylan raises the specter of a “Next World War” as a warning about nuclear war that was a real fear in the mid-1960s. Today, we can see the threat also in the corrosion of democracy. We are mindful today of hyper-partisanship that threatens to keep us permanently divided, permanently suspicious of each other, permanently angry, and permanently willing to ignore the real beneficiaries of our division. The final irony is that when our society’s dearest values are taken from us, we won’t even see it coming. We’ll just think that the “Rovin’ Gambler” is putting on another show for our amusement with the bleachers set out on Highway 61.

This song, that was written more than fifty years ago, that retells a story that was written more than 2,500 years ago, still tells a tale for our times. The Binding of Isaac is God’s whispered message to us across the centuries and across the millennia that we must always be watching to see God coming after us. We must always be awake and aware just at the moment when we fall into the trap of merely obeying and conforming without thinking. When we do see and notice what is really going on around us, we better run.

Shabbat shalom.

The book of Genesis begins with God deciding to create human beings to rule all the other created things: "Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth" (Genesis 1:26). It seemed like a good idea at first … until it went horribly wrong.

In the chapters that follow, God came to see the downside of creating humanity. Adam and Eve ate the one thing God told them not to touch. Cain murdered his brother Abel. Violent behavior convinced God to drown (almost) all of humanity. Even after the Flood, human beings tried to challenge God by building the Tower of Babel. 

God was frustrated by humanity, beings whom God created to rule creation who could not even rule themselves. God then selected Abraham as a moral and spiritual exemplar – someone who could show the world what it means to be a righteous person. Through Abraham, God would let human beings know what was expected of them. What happened next, though, may have come as a surprise even to God.

In this week's Torah portion (Vayera) God decided to trust Abraham, his exemplar,  with some insider information – the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. God asks, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him?" (Genesis 18:17-18). Maybe God thought that, given Abraham's mission to teach the world about God's ways, he needed to know about the plan to use Sodom as an example of how not to behave. Yet, instead of accepting God's plan to punish Sodom, Abraham questioned it and challenged God's own morality.

Abraham protested, "Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the  earth deal justly?" (Genesis 18:25). Abraham turned the tables on God and told God that the plan did not measure up to God's own standards of justice. The story has a certain flavor of comeuppance. God is hoist by the Divine petard. The very human being God designated to teach humanity how to rule over creation, almost inevitably, ended up trying to overrule God.

That may not be such a bad thing, though. Abraham is presented as the ideal man of faith, and faith is not understood by the Hebrew Bible as mere blind obedience. To be truly faithful, one must be willing to question, to argue, to look deeply into the nature of morality and faith. Even God's actions should not be exempt from our consideration.

After all, God must have had a reason to create us. Maybe God put us here to keep God in line. Maybe God created us because God needs to have a friend who will speak up and let God know when things are going wrong. All of us need a friend like that once in a while. Why shouldn't God?

This, I believe, is one of the central defining qualities of the Jewish relationship with God. Maybe it is a quality that is unique to Judaism. To be a Jew is not just to obey God. It is not just to submit yourself to God. It is not just to accept God's rule. For Jews, that is not enough. 

The God of Abraham expects us to know that we are not God, yet also expects us to rise above our human imperfection by engaging with God in a conversation about what it means to be human. This ongoing, back and forth argument with God elevates us to a level beyond the limitations of flesh and blood, beyond our animal inclination toward violence, disobedience and arrogance.

For a Jew, it is no sin to argue with God. It is a necessity. It makes us God's partner and, paradoxically, it makes us God's trusted friend.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Vayishlach: The Closest We Can Get to the Face of God
Toledot: Letting Go of the Struggle

This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida.

How do you treat a perfect stranger? When someone you don’t know and have never met comes walking up to your door, how do you treat them? Do you approach them with polite but visible suspicion and say, “Yes? How can I help you? What is your business here?” Or, do you put on a cheerful smile and a warm demeanor — at least, for the moment — until you find out what they want?

In this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, Abraham went way beyond that approach in welcoming three men who came walking by his tent. When he saw them, Abraham begged them not to pass by until they had come into his home to share his hospitality. He called them “my lords,” and fetched water to wash their feet and to sooth their throats from their journey through the desert. He asked Sarah, his wife, to prepare food for them. Nothing was spared to make the strangers comfortable, even though Abraham did not even know their names.

As it turns out in the story, it was a good thing that Abraham treated them this way. The men were really angels sent from God with a message for Abraham about how his wife, the barren Sarah, would give birth to a child. But Abraham didn’t need to know that they were angels to treat them with the highest level of hospitality. He just treated them the same way he treated everyone — with genuine caring, compassion and decency.

Hospitality is an ancient Jewish value and it is a reflection of one of our most fundamental Jewish ideals. We are the people who taught the world that all human beings are created in the image of God. How, then, could we possibly turn away another human being, created in God's image, who came walking by our door? What could be so important to us that it would outweigh the need to show kindness and love to another person who is, like us, a reflection of the Divine?

So, think about it. What did you do the last time you encountered a stranger? Did you make that person feel welcome? Did you genuinely try to do everything you could to assure that person’s comfort? Did you see them as you might see yourself — a miracle of life and awareness in a world filled with wonders?

I don’t need to tell you that this is not the way that most people treat each other today. Maybe, it was never the way most people treated each other. However, it remains an ideal for us to keep in mind when we make our own choices about how to get along with the people we encounter in life. That is because — beyond being a polite or courteous way to behave — it is a way of living that makes life better for everyone. When we treat others with dignity and respect, we greatly increase the chances that we will be treated the same way. When we aim to create peace between people, our own lives are likely to become more peaceful.

Only, that’s not the way people usually see things in our society. We tend to be skeptical about calls for greater kindness and we are quick to label them as naïve or Pollyannaish. When we think about peace — in the Middle East, for example — we tend to think that resolution of conflict is more likely to come about if we are strong and able to intimidate than it is if we are kind and able to genuinely care about others. What a shame. Again, think about it. When has this been true in your own life? When have you been able to make a situation more genuinely peaceful because of your ability to intimidate or overpower others? When was the last time you found that happiness is achieved by not being kind to the people in your life?

So, forget about the Middle East when we ask the question, “Is peace possible?” Think instead about more immediate situations you face. When the technical support representative puts you on hold for a half hour, or when the teenager working the supermarket register miscalculates your change, think about creating some peace in your life in those moments. Think about the way that Abraham saw the image of God in the face of every stranger who walked by his door. Do you think you'll make yourself a sucker when you treat a person kindly in those situations? Or, rather, do you really do yourself a greater favor by not giving in to the temptation to get angry, upset and self-righteous?

Over the last two weeks, we saw the United States Congress cost the U.S. economy an estimated $24 billion just by refusing to treat each other with basic decency. Five hundred and thirty-five Senators and Representatives acted like a classroom of eight-year-olds who refused to play nicely with each other if they couldn’t get their own way. You may think, “Well, that’s just politics and politics is played a lot tougher than second grade.” But I don’t think so. I think it’s exactly the same. 

Our leaders misbehave in this way as a reflection of a society that often forgets that genuine kindness to others is often the best way to serve your own interests. Aggressive, angry, self-righteous behavior may get the adrenaline pumping in our system, but it doesn't usually result in a better outcome for ourselves or the people around us. 

When we don’t teach our children that it is more important to be kind than it is to get our way, we are not preparing them for success. We are preparing them for a life of bitterness and anger that gets worse every time they choose to treat another person harshly. It sets them up for failure every time they get put on hold for too long, when they get the wrong change, or when they can’t stop pouting until they get their way. We teach our children to be successful in life when we teach them to genuinely get along with others, and to practice sincere patience and forgiveness. We teach them to have happier lives when we encourage them to see each stranger as a being created in the image of God.

Three strangers came walking by Abraham’s tent, and he instantly treated them as the messengers from heaven that they truly were. It is not that Abraham had some weird, saintly ability to know the difference between angels and mortal men. It was much more simple than that. He had the insight to recognize that everyone you meet, every day, has a message for you that comes straight from God. However, you will only hear the message, and you will only be touched by miracles in life, if you are willing to see how the face of each stranger you meet reveals a little bit of God’s presence. When you do, you will know real happiness and you will know real peace.

Shabbat shalom.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Behar: Do Not Wrong One Another
Welcome to the Silly Season

The Torah has commandments against giving false testimony and there are commandments not to harm people through deception, but there is no commandment not to lie. In fact, lying sometimes is a very important thing to do.  In this week's Torah portion, God tells a lie.

When the three divine messengers came to the tent of Abraham and Sarah at the beginning of this week's portion (Vayera), one of them announced, "I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!" (Genesis 18:10). When Sarah heard this, she thought to herself, "Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment, and with my husband so old?” (verse 12). Sarah, it seems, had a chuckle over the idea that Abraham, 99 years old, would be able to perform sexually and father a son for her. God, of course, heard Sarah's thoughts. God responded to them immediately.

However, the words of God's response did not accurately reflect what Sarah had thought. The next verses tell us that God said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?' Is anything too wondrous for Adonai? I will return to you at the time next year, and Sarah shall have a son" (verses 13-14). What happened? God told Abraham that Sarah was laughing about how old she was, rather than telling him that she actually was thinking about how old he was. 

You might call it a moment of "Viagra sensitivity." God decided that it would be better to bend the truth a bit to spare Abraham of the knowledge that Sarah was laughing about his lack of sexual prowess. Some things are better left unspoken. A little white lie, in this case, did no harm to either Abraham or Sarah, and it served to avoid resentment or hurt feelings between the two.

The classical rabbis noticed this moment of divine prevarication. From this incident, they came to a conclusion about the relative value of speaking the truth. A midrash teaches, "Bar Kappara said: Great is peace for even Torah twisted the truth in order to preserve peace between Abraham and Sarah" (Genesis Rabbah 48:18). Peace is a greater value even than truth.

Not all lies are excusable. Some lies are meant to keep wrongdoing hidden. Some lies are intended to prevent someone from avoiding a harm or taking advantage of a benefit. Some lies are merely for the convenience or comfort of the liar. These kinds of lies clearly are forbidden in Jewish law. They are regarded as "placing a stumbling block before the blind" (Leviticus 19:14), or they are ways of stealing a person's ability to make a reasoned choice (called g'neivat da'at in Jewish law; B. Chullin 94a). 

But there are other kinds of lies, too. A lie that offers comfort to another person, or that prevents a hurt without causing harm, is not a sin. A lie that spares a person from hearing a brutal truth, one that does him or her no good, may actually be a blessing.

When my grandmother's sister was elderly, near death, and in dementia's grip, she would ask about my grandmother. If someone told her the truth—that my grandmother had died—she would burst into inconsolable weeping. Every time she asked the question and heard the truthful answer, it was as if she was hearing the horrible news for the first time. It was terrible to witness, especially when it occurred multiple times in a single day. 

The family decided that we would spare her the truth. When she asked, "How is Betty?" we would just say, "Betty is doing fine. She's all right"—a lie— and my great aunt could sleep more peacefully. Could there be a commandment against a lie like that? No way.

Truth is great, and we have an instinctive desire to seek truth and to push away lies. But "truth at any cost" may come, sometimes, at too great a cost. Knowing the difference—between the times when the truth must out, and the times when truth should take a back seat to peace—is wisdom far greater than any truth.


Other Topics on This Post:
The King's Advisor
Ha'azinu: Who Can Force the Hand of God?

This week's Torah portion (Vayera), I believe, has something important to say to us about the values we apply when weighing the needs of the individual against the needs of society as a whole. There are lessons for us in the Torah about the way we think about wealth and its obligations.

We are presented this week with the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Christian tradition, the sin of Sodom is identified with sexual transgression. However, in Judaism, the emphasis is quite different. In forming their interpretation of the story, the rabbis read a passage from the prophet Ezekiel:

Behold, this was the sin of your sister, Sodom—arrogance! She and her daughters had their fill of bread and untroubled contentment. Yet, she did not support the poor and needy. In their haughtiness they committed abomination before Me. That is why I took them away when I saw it. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

To the rabbis, the sin of the Sodomites was not sodomy, as it is in Christianity. Rather, it was the sin of haughty greed. The rabbis embellished this image of Sodom and Gomorrah with midrashic legends about their selfishness:

After a while, travelers avoided these cities, but if some poor devil was betrayed occasionally into entering them, they would give him gold and silver, but never any food, so that he was bound to die of starvation.  Once he was dead, the residents of the city came and took back the marked gold and silver which they had given him, and they would quarrel about the distribution of his clothes, for they would bury him naked. (Ginsburg, Legends of the Jews, 1:247).

It should be painfully obvious how to apply this teaching to our own society. We, in the contemporary developed nations, are living in the most affluent society the world has ever known. The comfortable among us toss around miraculous electronic gadgets as if they were toys (I'm typing on one right now), and we are so used to the luxuries of modern life that we have come to think of them as necessities. Yet, we live oblivious to the poverty next door to us.

In the relatively affluent Florida county where I live, almost 15% of the population is at or below the poverty line. Almost 30% of children live in poverty. Thousands in our community live with hunger as a daily experience in the midst of wealth that would have made the pharaohs blush. Across North America, you do not have to go far to find today's Sodoms.

The rabbis teach in the Mishnah (Avot 5:10) that there are four types of people: the ordinary people who say, “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours,” the foolish people who say, “What is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” the pious people who say, “What is mine is yours, and what is yours is yours," and the wicked people who say, “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine.” 

Which of these four is the type we would find in Sodom? One might be tempted to say that it is the fourth type—the wicked people who lay claim to everyone's possessions. Curiously, though, the Mishnah says that it is the first type—the ordinary sort of people who neither share what is theirs nor claim what belongs to others. What is wrong with that kind of "ordinary" thinking?

Our society did not become a place where real poverty and extreme wealth live side-by-side because of rapacious robber barons. Rather, we are a society shaped by the ordinary behaviors of people who believe they are entitled to keep what is theirs and "let everyone else do the same." It is this attitude that is the recipe for Sodom. In such a society, the prevailing rule becomes "each man for himself" and the prevailing attitude toward the poor becomes "they have none to blame but themselves." Such ordinary, common evil is what the rabbis so much wanted to warn us against.

I cannot claim that Jewish tradition has specific policies to recommend to us for the creation of a more open-hearted and caring society. After all, there is no prescription in the Torah for the right tax code or the right welfare policy for our times. However, I can say that the rabbis have warned us against building a society on policies that focus more on property rights than on the obligation to care for each other. I ask you to think about the way that contemporary politics puts so much emphasis on keeping the hands of government off of the wealth of the wealthy, and so little emphasis on the immorality of allowing people to go hungry. When you do, consider that we have become the children of Sodom.