ABRAHAM WAS LISTENING NOTES
words and music (c) 1998 Nancy E. Abrams

My career in Hebrew school began and ended in the second grade. The first story we read was about Abraham smashing all the merchandise in his father’s religious idol store, and we were supposed to sympathize with Abraham when his father consequently threw him out. The next story was about Abraham not batting an eyelash at taking his son to a mountaintop to kill him. This was too much for me. "Who is Isaac supposed to pray to?" I asked, in perhaps a less than respectful tone of voice. This question elicited an icy stare and a long silence. I was never called on again and eventually I stopped going. That was the end of my Hebrew education. But that story continued to haunt me, and over the years I read many interpretations of it, none of which made sense to me. I wrote the first part of this song long ago, up to the point where Abraham hears the voice say, "Stop!" But I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say after that, and the song sat unfinished for years. Then I read Michael Lerner’s book, Jewish Renewal, in which he argues that although Abraham thought he heard the voice of God telling him to sacrifice his son, it was in fact the voices of his own society and their religious practices, and that it is all too easy to confuse these with the will of God. Lerner concluded that the key to the story was that Abraham stopped the sacrifice, and this was the beginning of Judaism as a religion of transformation. The moment I read that, I knew how the song had to go.

What was God really testing in Abraham? Whether Abraham would be unwaveringly obedient, as I was taught in second grade? Countless fanatics would have passed that test, then and now, and so would many dogs. The founders of great religions are never fanatics, although their followers may be. The story makes sense to me if I assume that what God was testing was not whether Abraham was obedient but whether he was awake enough to hear truth, despite tremendous distraction, which God may even have set up. Was Abraham’s channel cleanly open at all times, or open only intermittently, as it is with most of us? Abraham would surely have failed the test if he’d followed through with the momentum of his plans and carried out the sacrifice, since there would have been no Jewish people and no Bible to tell his story.

There is a popular image of human freedom as being like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering in your ear, clamoring for your loyalty, and freedom is choosing between them. But in my own experience, if the angel and the devil fight, the angel automatically wins. The devil wins when there is no fight, because I don’t or won’t hear the angel.