All of My Heart
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by Ann Kline
In preparing to address my fellow congregants at the start of the Jewish New Year, I was struck by this quote from Dag Hammarskjold:For all that has been: Thank you
To all that will be: Yes.
Where does he get the chutzpah (the audacity) to say that, I asked. In a time of terrorism, corporate scandal, economic uncertainty and an increasingly escalating state of war, I wasn't feeling very thankful. And I certainly wasn't saying yes to more of the same. In fact, I was feeling that God needed a good drubbing, not praise and thanks. I felt a little of the heaviness I imagine Abraham felt walking up Mt. Moriah with Isaac, his heart. Did I, too, need to sacrifice my heart to survive in a difficult world?
As I studied the text of Abraham's walk, I learned a very interesting thing about the Hebrew. It seems God may not have been the one to ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The Hebrew word for God that is used when Abraham hears his final "test" is not Adonai, but Elohim, a word that can also mean false gods or idols. It could have been Abraham's despair talking to him that fateful day, driving him up Mt. Moriah to rid himself of the difficult task of bringing forth a new vision of the future through Isaac.
What Abraham learns on Mt. Moriah, when the angel - his inclinations toward good - stays his hand is something we all must learn to live in this world with meaning and purpose: God wants our hearts. We cannot destroy love. Love is stronger than fear and despair. It is, as Abraham's story shows us, not an easy lesson to learn. Hearing about a woman shot a few blocks from my home in a series of random shootings, I wonder again if love has much of a role to play in addressing the needs of these hard times. But times have always been hard. If love has nothing to say to us now, then it never did. And Abraham is there to remind us otherwise.
A song by David Wilcox goes: "In this scene set in shadows like the night is here to stay, there is evil cast around us, but it's love that wrote the play. And in this darkness, love will show the way." I believe that. I believe that this world can be a place where we care more about what we do for each other than what we do to each other. Am I merely naive? I think of the words Etty Hillesum wrote during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, when her community was being stripped of their possessions and their freedom: "I believe in God and I believe in people and I say so without embarrassment. Times are hard, but that is no bad thing. If we start by taking ourselves seriously, the rest follows."
She volunteered to be among the first Jews sent to Westerbork work camp. Was she naive?
Maybe. Maybe Mother Teresa and Mohandas Gandhi were naive also. After all, India is still oppressed, even if the oppressor now is its own divisive hatred. And Calcutta's streets are still filled with the poor and sick.
That doesn't stop me from praying that I take my belief in this world as seriously as Etty Hillesum, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. I pray to live into the difficult task of meeting the world's challenges not with doe-eyed sentiment or a bleak sense of futility but with the determined love of Abraham to be part of a more enduring vision. It is not the vision I see in the newspapers and television screens, but it is a promise I see in the faces of people who have not lost hope. What will it take for me to be able to say: For all that has been: Thank you. To all that will be: Yes?
It will take all of my heart.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.