We recommend lifting up this passage about Ishmael & Isaac on Yom Kippur as an example of peace-making
Especially for those of us who use the TorahThe Five Books of Moses, and the foundation of all of Jewish life and lore. The Torah is considered the heart and soul of the Jewish people, and study of the Torah is a high mitzvah. The Torah itself a scroll that is hand lettered on parchment, elaborately dressed and decorated, and stored in a decorative ark. It is chanted aloud on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbat, according to a yearly cycle. Sometimes "Torah" is used as a colloquial term for Jewish learning and narrative in general. passages on the expulsion of HagarAbraham's concubine and the mother of Ishmael, the patriarch of Islam. In the book of Genesis, when Sarah cannot conceive, she suggests that Abraham takeher servant Hagar as a concubine in order to conceive a child, which she promptly does. Feeling threatened by Hagar and her child, Sarah convinces Abraham to banish them from their home. God saves Hagar and Ishmael from dying in the desert. and Ishmael and the Binding of Isaac for Rosh HashanahThe Jewish New Year, also considered the Day of Judgment. The period of the High Holidays is a time of introspection and atonement. The holiday is celebrated with the sounding of the shofar, lengthy prayers in synagogue, the eating of apples and honey, and round challah for a sweet and whole year. Tashlikh, casting bread on the water to symbolize the washing away of sins, also takes place on Rosh Hashana., we want to recommend that you read from the Sefer Torah the passage in Gen 25: 7–11 on the reconciliation of the two brothers as they come together to bury their dangerous father Avraham/Ibrahim/Abraham.
We say “reconciliation” because the passage ends with Isaac going to live at the wellspring that saved Hagar’s and Ishmael’s lives, the one that Hagar named Be’er Lakhai Ro’i, Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. This is the passage, from Everett Fox’s translation in The Five Books of MosesThe quintessential Jewish leader who spoke face to face with God, unlike any other prophet, and who freed the people from Egypt, led them through the desert for forty years, and received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. His Hebrew name is Moshe. (Schocken, 1995):
Genesis 25:7 Now these are the days and years of the life of Avraham, which he lived:
Genesis 25:8 A hundred years and seventy years and five years, then he expired. Avraham died at a good
ripe-age, old and satisfied (in days), and was gathered to his kinspeople.
Genesis 25:9 Yitzhak and Yishmael his sons buried him, in the cave of Makhpela, in the field of Efron son
of Tzohar the Hittite, that faces Mamre,
Genesis 25:10 the field that Avraham had acquired from the Sons of Het. There were buried Avraham and
Sara his wife.
Genesis 25:11 Now it was after Avraham’s death, that God blessed Yitzhak his son. And Yitzhak settled by
the Well of the Living-one Who-Sees-Me.
It seems to us that the point of Yom Kippur is to make teshuvah and tikkun from mis-deeds of our lives. The reconciliation of the two brothers may be an example that should be lifted up for Yom Kippur, and treated with the importance of a formal Torah reading on that day.
That is pshatThe plain or simple meaning of a text; the face value of a text, as opposed to the drash (interpretation) of it.. On a more midrashic level, we might say that the ritual of the two goats echoes the dangers faced by the two brothers – one goat offered up precisely where tradition says Isaac was bound, almost to be offered; and the other goat is sent away into the wilderness, as Ishmael was. We might see this as “We do not do this to humans any more – God forbid, God forbade! – only to goats.” And then this becomes only a story-telling, not a physical act even toward goats – as if to say, “We don’t do this to animals, either: we only tell the story.”
But perhaps then we have grown enough in our awareness to say, “But even that is not enough. At this time of year we must lift up a positive act of peace-making, and let it find its way into our hearts and even our hands, as we seek to lift up a truer end of the story to affect ourselves in our own generation.”
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is an 87-year-old activist who regularly gets arrested for protesting. In 2014, he received T’ruah’s first Lifetime Achievement Award as a “Human Rights Hero.” He founded and directs the Shalom Center for justice, peace, and healing of the Earth. He lives in Philadelphia. Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman has co-authored Tales of Tikkun: New Jewish Stories to Heal the Wounded World; The Tent of AbrahamAbraham is the first patriarch and the father of the Jewish people. He is the husband of Sarah and the father of Isaac and Ishmael. God's covenant - that we will be a great people and inherit the land of Israel - begins with Abraham and is marked by his circumcision, the first in Jewish history. His Hebrew name is Avraham.: Stories of Peace and Hope for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; Freedom Journeys: Tales of Exodus & Wilderness across Millennia, as well as articles on new ceremonies for women and new midrashA rabbinic method of interpreting text, often through the telling of stories.. She lives in Philadelphia.
