I’ve been suffering a lot lately over my children. Nothing extreme is going on with them, but each one has his or her life challenges and suffering to go through, and I find it painful to watch.
In looking through the readings for the two days of Rosh Hashanah, it strikes me that a lot of the texts deal with the theme of parents’ relationship to their children’s suffering. Sarah worries over the taunting of Yitzhak; Avraham is saddened by having to throw out his son Ishmael from the house; Hagar cries when she watches Ishmael dying of thirst in the desert; Hannah cries for want of children; Avraham resolutely brings his son to the akedah, to the ultimate suffering; and in the second day haftarah, Rachel cries over her children who are missing (in the Jeremiah words that have become a famous song, Rahel mevakah al baneha). Also, the gemara (Rosh Hashanah 33b) connects the shofar blowing’s sound to the crying of Sisera’s mother as she looks out the window awaiting the delayed arrival of her son, who has been killed in war. On Rosh Hashanah, there is a sense everywhere that children are suffering and their parents are looking on, struggling to grapple with it.
In the Jeremiah haftarah, and indeed throughout the Tefillot, there is another character who cries out over the suffering of His children, and that is God. “Is Ephraim not a treasured son to Me, My child of delights? As I speak of him, always, I remember him once more. And so it is that my insides cry out for him. I will be compassionate towards him, says the Lord.” Perhaps all of the human stories we tell on Rosh Hashanah about parents and children are actually a way to illustrate for ourselves how God feels about us — the same kind of love mixed with pain, the same sense, as someone once said to me of parenting, of having your heart walking around inside someone else’s body. In this context, we can understand and really believe in God’s tendency to compassion. Yes, He will be compassionate to us; we know it deep in our hearts.
But there is something else in these stories, too. It turns out that crying over your children’s suffering is not the only option. There is one person in all these tales who stands out for his fortitude in the face of his child’s suffering, and that is Avraham in the Akedah. He is not described as having any emotion at all as he sets out resolutely on the three-day journey up the mountain to sacrifice his son. He just keeps putting one foot in front of the other. His son, on the other hand, has some worries; but Pappa, he says — where is the sheep for the offering? Avraham’s answer is the key to an alternative way of being in the world with our children’s suffering. What he says is Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah, beni. “God will see to a sheep for the offering, my son.” God will see to it. The Torah highlights these words again later as Avraham names the mountain Hashem Yireh, “God will see [to it].”
What kind of a stance is this — God will see to it? It is trust, total trust that God is good and all that is needed will be provided. There is no crying here, no worry, no suffering over his son. Just faith and trust. He has handed it over to God, handed over the problem, handed over his son’s protection. He doesn’t understand it; things seem bad; but he isn’t worried. Avraham’s trust is like the mountain he climbs — solid and unperturbed by whatever comes its way.
Perhaps the Torah anticipates that such a stance with regard to our children will seem impossible to us– to let go so completely and trust. And so the Torah lets us know that even Avraham did not start out this way. There is a kind of pre-akedah akedah, where Avraham practiced and honed this skill. In the story preceding the akedah, read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Sarah wants Ishmael thrown out of the house, and the Torah tells us that Avraham was “greatly distressed” at this idea “because of his son.” God intervenes and tells Avraham that all will be well; he should listen to Sarah and both children will be fine. Hearing this, Avraham wakes up early in the morning to send them off, ready to trust God with his son Ishmael.
And so the akedah is Avraham’s second time round. It is a “test” of a skill that he has been practicing and working on, letting go and trusting God, even with his children. This time he needs no special assurances. He has learned that God comes through and provides and he can trust that.
Or if, for many of us, this still seems like too far a reach, we can always identify with Hagar, who learns the same lesson without showing Avraham’s extreme faith. Hagar is in the desert, alone with her young son and runs out of water. What does she do? She tosses him under a tree and sits at a distance away “so that she won’t see him dying.” How true! Sometimes we can’t bear to see our children suffering and so we create some distance, shut it out from view. Hagar, sitting at this distance, begins to cry, and an angel comes to her. What does He say? Don’t worry. God has heard the child’s cries. Note that God has heard the child’s cries, not hers. That is something we need to learn; if our child is in distress, it is not just us trying to take care of the child. There is something larger in the universe that cares. God will hear the child and we can rely on that, relax into the idea that there is a caring God who will hear the child herself. We are not the only parents here feeling the pain.
God then opens Hagar’s eyes so that she sees a well right before her. We are all blind to the existence of such a well — an eternal, everflowing source of sustenance that is always right near us, ever ready to provide for us and for our children without worry. If we could see this well, as both Hagar and Avraham learn to see it, we would be much less worried. Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah, God will provide the sheep for the offering, the water for drinking, whatever is needed on our children’s journeys. We can trust that.
In our High Holiday prayers we cite Avraham’s actions as a reason for God to be compassionate — just as Avraham overcame his natural compassion for his son by being willing to sacrifice him, so should God allow His compassion to overcome His judgment and be merciful with us. There is a strange inverse relationship here; Avraham’s lack of compassion leads to God’s compassion. Perhaps we can think of it this way — Avraham’s trust that God will take care of things actually leads God to take care of things and be merciful and allow his son to live. By trusting and not worrying, Avraham is making room for — allowing, really — a greater compassionate force to step in. The more we relax into God’s compassion and really learn to trust it — to surrender both ourselves and our children to it — the more we bring it into the world as a reality.
All of this is great, to be in such a cycle of trust and compassion with God. But unfortunately, such trust is not easy; there will often be an anxious child like Yitzhak around us worriedly asking about the sheep — how will this all work out? There’s no sheep! As parents, we are confronted not just with the real-life problems of our children, but also with their anxiety over those problems. And not just as parents. This anxious child can manifest as a real-life child or as another grownup in our lives or, for many of us, as our own inner anxious child, the place inside us that is full of doubt and faithlessness and despair about the way things will work out.
Avraham is speaking to this child. He does not just say “God will see to the sheep for the offering,” but “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son. “ Beni. It is natural for this child to be anxious; the reality does look pretty grim. All we can do is hold this child in all her anxiety and keep introducing her, again and again, to the idea of trust and to the sense of a presence as steady as a mountain, helping her gradually learn to see the well that is always out there and begin to trust that Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah. It’s ok; God will see to the sheep.
