There are a thousand ways to exile your inner child. In an earlier essay, we explored how Hagar did it – by casting her crying child under a bush and running in the other direction. The other central Rosh Hashanah story, the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, also tells a story about how we hurt our inner child, in this case, by binding her up and offering her as a sacrifice for the sake of something other than her, for the sake of God, religion, or any other ideology.
Binding Up Laughter
Who is it that is being bound and offered up as a sacrifice here? It is Yitzhak, whose name means Laughter. It is our Laughter, our playfulness, our joyful spirit that is being bound up. While Hagar cast aside the pain of the inner child, Avraham binds up the laughter of that child, trying to squash the aliveness in him to such a degree that he almost literally kills him. He almost kills laughter. He almost kills playfulness. This is what we do to our own inner children, what we have learned to do from our families, communities and society at large, to bind up and constrain the playfulness, the exuberance, the joy, the aliveness, the life energy.
Maybe you can bring to mind that playful child in you and sense her urge to sing and shout with joy at the top of her lungs, to dance and run free every which way, to play with spirit, to eat with gusto, to laugh a big, hearty, unbridled laugh. What happened to that child in you? What happened to your excitement, to your uncontrollable giggles, to the spirit in you that is as light and bright and joyful as a butterfly fluttering about? What happened to her?
She got tamped down. She got told she was too loud and showy. She got silenced. She got told – not now, or – that’s not appropriate. She got sent to school and forced to sit in a chair all day, bent over a desk, almost a kind of akedah, a binding. She learned that her exuberance and laughter were not welcome, not treasured, but on the contrary, were considered a bother, sometimes even a transgression. And sometimes this shutting down of spirit happened in the name of religion. She was subtly taught that God wanted her to be more proper, more humble, more restrained, more studious, more obedient, more orderly, that there was this rigid box she needed to conform to in the name of God, and her laughing, playful self would not fit into that box. Can you feel that binding, that restraint in your body? Maybe you can sense the inner child’s joyful exuberant energy wanting to push out and break free, and at the same time, you can sense what holds her back, the internalized norms that bind her, like ropes tied around her body.
The Temptation to Think This is What God Wants
The temptation to restrain our inner child this way is strong. It often seems like the right thing to do, the religious thing to do, that we need to be more responsible and sensible and circumspect. Maybe that temptation is precisely the test here for Avraham. The Torah announces that Avraham is about to be tested and then God appears and says to him – go sacrifice your son. Perhaps that instruction is a temptation, the temptation to believe that this is what God wants from us, to live this type of restrained life, to sacrifice our joy out of weighty obligation, to be ever obedient, to be subservient automatons without creativity or argument. That is how we hear God’s message sometimes, as the internal voice that tells us to shut down our most precious source of aliveness and joy for some other “higher” purpose, to close off the play and get serious.
Maybe That’s Not God
But I believe that Avraham was mistaken in how he understood God that first time. It is often hard to distinguish inside ourselves which voice is truly God’s voice. We usually think it is the voice that speaks of obligation and guilt, the heavier voice, the harsher voice; we falsely impute to God the desire for the restraint and sacrifice of our inner child’s aliveness.
Perhaps we are as mistaken as Avraham was that first time. Perhaps the true divine voice inside us is the second one, a more mature understanding of what God wants of us, not the restraint and sacrifice of our inner child, but her aliveness. Don’t touch him, the angel calls to Avraham, don’t you dare do a single thing to him. He’s perfect just the way he is. Let him live and be free. There is nothing that matters more than him, no ideology that could trump that child’s essential value. Unbind him.
Unbinding Her
Tatir tzerurah, untie the bound up one, we say to God (Friday night prayer). Maybe you can let the great force, the great koach, of God enter your system as a force not of binding up and restraint, but as a force of liberation, of release, of opening, like a powerful wind blowing through you, breaking all the chains and ropes that have inhibited and held back your inner child. Like the power of the shofar blasts outside Yericho to break down walls, feel how the walls of the box that has imprisoned your little one are also blasted open now. Let her emerge from that box, from those ropes, let her stretch and be free inside you. Give her room to dance and to sing. Later, we can figure out how to bring her carefully into the world. For this moment, just allow her to live and breathe and run free inside you.
Can you feel how much you have missed her, how much you love her and have yearned for her, this little one that holds our life essence, holds our sense of what makes life worth living, the laughter and the joy, the lightness and the play and the pure innocent love of the child, our very heart?
God’s Yearning For Her
God, too, has this deep yearning for that child. Haben yakir li, Ephraim, truly, that child is so dear to me, God says in the second day Rosh Hashanah haftarah (Jeremiah 31:20). He is a yeled sha’ashuim, a child of play and delight. Hamu me’ay lo, my innermost being yearns for him, God says. I yearn for this yeled sha’ashuim, for this Yitzhak, for this child of laughter and play. Perhaps the yearning we feel is really God’s own yearning welling up inside us, a divine call for the child to be released and returned.
A King Who Desires Life
We thought, like Avraham, that what God wanted from us was to trudge obediently up the hill, day in, day out, fulfilling our obligations and putting our inner child slowly to death. But this is not what God wants from us. On Rosh Hashanah we remind ourselves that God is a melekh hafetz bahayim, a king who desires life, who desires our aliveness. If we put Yitzhak, our child of laughter, to death, then we are also killing our divine spark of life, our vitality, our will to live and be creative and joyful. Melekh hafetz bahayim. God desires our liveliness, our joy, the spirited child inside us who wants to sing and dance and love and laugh. God delights in her.
Choose Life!
On this road of life we are faced so often with choices, forks in the road, small and large, should I go this way or that way. We want to follow God, to do the right thing, to choose in a way that aligns with what is good. But how do we know which way to turn? Uvaharta bahayim (Deuteronomy 30:19), Parashat Nitzavim tells us. Choose life. Choose the voice inside you that desires life. That is the voice of God. If it sounds like God is telling you to bind up and sacrifice your inner child of laughter and aliveness and joy, be wary. That is not likely to be the voice of the king who desires life. That king wants you to live into your aliveness, your precious inner child spark, not to bind it up and kill it.
What would it mean for you to choose life? Maybe you can imagine your inner child’s bright smile and feel into her infectious boundless energy, her zest for life, and ask her what she would most like to do, what her wildest dreams and longings are. We don’t necessarily follow exactly what the inner child wants to do, but we go with her energy, her aliveness, her passion. We trust the direction of her aliveness, of your own bodily sensation of the life force. We choose life. We choose what feels good and brings us joy, and we do this as a sacred act of devotion to the God whose greatest desire, we know, is not death, not restraint, but life. We worship God by loving our inner child, by releasing her and allowing her to run free and show us the way, to teach us again how to live and love and be joyful.
For Your Sake, God
Lema’ankha, for Your sake, God, we say during this season, for Your own sake, write us into the book of life. I want to say to God – For Your sake, we retrieve our inner child, for Your sake, we retrieve our own aliveness. Lema’ankha, For Your sake, because You, God, come alive in the world through each one of us, each of us a unique living manifestation of Your Glory. If we stuff down that glory, that vitality in ourselves, we do not allow You to come fully into being in this world. Tending to our own aliveness is an avodah, an act of devotion, which we do lema’ankha, for Your sake, Elokim Hayim, for Your sake, O God of all life.
A New Birth
So many of our Rosh Hashanah texts have to do with children, abandoning them, sacrificing them, birthing them, and deeply yearning for them, as God calls out for the yeled sha’ashuim and as Rachel cries for her children to return and Hannah for the birth of a child. Collectively, the experience is of one giant yearning for all our inner children to be released and returned so that we can be born again into the new year, fresh and more alive. This is a day of teshuva, of return, and also a day of birth – hayom harat olam, “on this day the world was birthed” (Rosh Hashanah prayer). We participate in this global return and rebirth by welcoming back into ourselves that exiled inner child, both the crying one of Hagar and the laughing one of Avraham. They are one and the same, two sides of the same spirited child of aliveness, our vital life essence. Through them, we are indeed born anew, returned to hayim, to a fully alive life. Uvaharta bahayim. We choose life. O God who desires life, we, too, choose life.
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