In Memory of My Dad’s 37^th Yahrzeit:

A Tale of Two Isaacs

A few weeks ago Anne and I went to a reading for the Men’s Initiative of Jane Doe. Craig Norberg-Baum founded the project to get men and men’s voices  involved in preventing violence against women. Three men read poetry and stories about male violence. One of them, a local poet named Richard Hoffman, wrote with incredible pain and anguish, as if he were pouring out his blood. He told the Abraham and Isaac story through the lens of Isaac’s anger. His poem said:

For the Record

Never tell me again an angel
of your God, that nameless lover
of slit throats, burnt flesh,
stayed your hand. Do not insist
the hapless ram died in my place;
lost to desire, tangled in thorn,
he is more your totem than mine.
No covenant, no matter what,
you tell yourself, requires our
bloody signatures, no sacrament
requires a knife. My mother’s veil
you twisted and used to blind me
slipped: no one was there but us.

So Isaac is angry, as he should be. And look at the last line: “no one was there but us.”

We almost always read the Isaac and Abraham story as if it is mostly about God. Because that’s our problem. How could God ask Abraham to do this? But what if we read it as the story of a father and a son … and the story of the father acting on his deepest dreams and values … and the story of how he transmits those dreams and values to his son?  What if we take the veil of tradition off our eyes and take God out of the story? And just tell the story of Isaac straight on, Isaac and his dad. Whose story is, of course, also the story of Isaac — me, Richard Isaac Meirowitz — and my dad, Elihu, also called Al Meirowitz. And whose story is also the story of each of us who is a son — and our fathers … and perhaps each of us who is a daughter and a father and perhaps mothers and daughters too.

But, with your permission, I’d like to tell this story — my story — within its most specific context, the story of two sons named Isaac, and their fathers. You can extrapolate into your life as you see fit.

The story of our first Isaac starts in silence. He is the Isaac we know from the Torah. One day his dad wakes him up. We don’t know if his dad always woke him up in the morning. We only know it was “v’yashkam Avraham baboker” — and Abraham awoke early in the morning. The text is silent regarding what Isaac’s father said to him. We just know that they left for a silent, three-day journey. 

We, the readers, know that it is strange that Abraham is so quiet. He is the man who argued with God regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. He is the man who didn’t want to kick his son Ishmael out and went and talked to God about it. But he got quieter and quieter as he got older. Perhaps it became too difficult to put into words what he thought about God’s request. He certainly didn’t say anything to God — at least we only have God’s side of the conversation: “Take your son, your only son, the one whom you love — Isaac.” Abraham’s voice is silent.  And like so many of us, he is silent when it comes to the big issues.

The story of the second Isaac — me, Richard Isaac Meirowitz — also starts off in silence. I’m about five years old and it is my earliest memory. I’m outside looking up at a hospital and out of the third floor window is my father waving. My father is recovering from the first of what will be three or four heart attacks. And I’m outside because this time is before they let children into the hospital. And before they had heart attack victims up and walking around within a few days and at cardiac rehab within two weeks. Then, they kept you laid up for months. I saw my father’s wave. No words came from anyone.

Of course, it wasn’t just my father who was quiet. It was the ’50s, a quiet time, filled with fears about the bomb. My father shared with President Eisenhower, the “wave from the window after a heart attack” scene. The silence around illness continued long after that, of course. Seven years later my wife Anne’s mother died of cancer — never having been told she had cancer, always told it was arthritis. 

The next step in the Akeda tells us another important fact about fathers and sons. Silence alone does not define them. They do things together. They go to ball games or play music or learn how to drive. We teach our sons through doing with them, perhaps more often than through talking. We seek the connection in action. And it is in those actions that we often learn our father’s deepest meanings and values.

Abraham and Isaac do things together and talk while they do it. Let’s return to the story. “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and gave it to Isaac, his son, to carry, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife and they both walked on together. And Isaac said to Abraham, his father, ‘My father.’ And he said, ‘Here I am my son.’ And he said, ‘Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ And Abraham said, ‘God will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they both walked on together."

This is all they say to each other. But notice the language. Isaac breaks the silence — “Hey dad” — and Abraham responds using the same word Henini — “Here I am” — with which he, Abraham, responds to God. Abraham responds to his son as he responds to the deepest motivations in his life: “Here I am.”  Then Isaac asks the question: “Where’s the lamb?” And Abraham says an ambiguous sentence: “God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Is that “my son” a noun of direct address — as they say in the old formal grammar they don’t teach anymore?  “God will provide the lamb for the sacrifice and I’m talking to you, my son.” Or is the “my son” a noun in apposition (a phrase I checked out with my Yale English major daughter). That is, does the “my son” rename the noun “sacrifice”? So Abraham is saying: God will provide the lamb for the sacrifice, which is to say “my son.” Does Isaac get a hint from his father — as Rashi thinks he does — about his father’s plan? And yet the two of them walk on together…

The walking on together of the father and son, of all fathers and sons, encloses their conversation.

So I walked on with my father as well. His deepest joy was his music. He had auditioned for the Glenn Miller band in the ‘30s and made it, but my mother didn’t want him back on the road so he didn’t sign on. A band he once played with played the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was good. His brother Bill played trumpet with Paul Whitman. But his heart attack kept him from ever playing much again. My sister tells the story that when his doctor told him that he couldn’t play, he said that he would rather have his arm cut off.

So he wanted me to be a musician. But it was, to me, like so many of our parents’ dreams, a mixed blessing. I wanted to be a great musician, as my mother said, but I didn’t want to practice. As my mom said: “If you could take a pill in the evening and wake up in the morning a musician, you would do it.” But work I wouldn’t do. My parents made me take piano lessons. This was in the day when parents could make their children do things. And whenever my piano would make a mistake, I would bite it out of frustration. This nice little upright we had — all homes had uprights in those days — had all these teeth marks on it. And when I asked to quit, my parents told me stories of people who came into their music store and said that they wished their parents had made them practice. So I could quit whenever I was willing to sign a pledge that I would never hold my lack of music against them. I never had the courage to do that.

I learned piano and can still play blues in B flat, but no other key, and I played saxophone well enough to be in the marching band in high school, which was worth it because of the cheerleaders, and I have a bass fiddle, which is always cool to have and whose notes are low enough that no one notices if they are wrong. So my recent purchase of my banjo ukulele was a kind of healing for me. An expensive instrument I bought just for fun and for myself. 

So my dad gave me music, one of his most important values.

But that wasn’t all I learned from my dad through doing. When I was 11 my sister started having children. She had five kids in six years — one of them was planned. And I saw my father love each of them with a love that was unstoppable. No matter how sick or well he was, he would play with them and take his false teeth out for them when they would push his nose. My mother would yell: “Al, put Holly or Peter or Howard or Susie or Julie down.” But my father said: “I have a deal with God. I’ll never die while holding my grandchildren.”

And he never did. So I watched and learned a gigantic truth: Never be afraid to love. Loving is hard and frightening, and whomever you love might die and it might even kill you. But never be afraid either.

So while I walked on with my father, I was dissatisfied with the conversation. I longed — and still long — for more. Was Isaac satisfied with the ambiguous statement: “God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son?” I wanted to know more. How did it feel to be so sick? 

I know he was courageous in the face of his illness. He had contempt for another man in town who retired in the face of his own heart attack and who lived in fear. My father would have none of that. And yet, through his series of heart attacks, I never had a real conversation with him about them. 

Perhaps Isaac was also dissatisfied with the conversation with his father. That sentence — God will provide a lamb for the burnt offering, my son — was but a hint of the deep love, fear, and connection that Abraham had to his God. In the midst of walking on together, Abraham did talk to Isaac, but he couldn’t articulate the essence of his faith. Or perhaps that sentence is the essence. Or perhaps he had gotten to that point in his life where the essential truths of his life were no longer speakable in clear sentences. Doesn’t it seem sometimes like that to us: that our lives are complexly constructed and if we were asked to say in a few sentences what we most deeply believed, we might be silent, or at least not as clear as we want to be, for the truth is so complex. Abraham’s truth of taking Isaac must have been so complex for him, more complex than he could have explained.

Sons, of course, go on and live their own lives. They leave their fathers. They don’t stick around to wait for the wisdom.

After Abraham does not kill Isaac, it says: “And Abraham returned.” Isaac is missing for a while. Did he just get up and leave his father? Was he so angry at who he finally understood his father was — or at least who his father’s God was — that he left? Could he no longer continue to be connected to this deepest truth that his father knew? That conversation that Richard Hoffman wrote, that scream of Isaac to Abraham, never happened in the Torah. Isaac went away.

And I went away too, even as I still long to know what my dad thought life was about. What is the answer here, Dad? What’s the truth of life? What’s it all about? Who knows? Silence. If my children asked me these questions, could I tell them? Can I hear the answers to those questions in my dad’s life?

Perhaps I can. Perhaps Isaac did. Abraham’s involvement with Isaac doesn’t end when he comes down from the mountain, perhaps alone. Abraham sends his servant to get a wife for Isaac — Rebecca. Isaac has evidently returned. And Abraham does for his son.

And my father continued to love me and get me things. Maybe that’s another way fathers and sons connect. The fathers get things for their sons. In addition to the musical instruments, he bought me a 1965 Barracuda — remember that car, one of the first hatchbacks? — that he bought me when I went to college. That was always cool and wonderful. And he was so proud that he could buy it for me.  This man who never graduated high school sent his son to college and gave him a car. As my mother said, “My son has a rich father, while I have a poor husband.” My mother was the person to put words to these things. And then Abraham died and Isaac and Ishmael — the son who was kicked out — come together to bury their father. I have always, always wanted to be at that shiva. I want to know what these two sons talked about. How did they feel about their old man? Did they argue about which one of them had the tougher dad? Did they wonder about what the ultimate values were of this literal patriarch? Ishmael, after all, knew Abraham for years before Isaac was born. Like my sister he grew up with a younger father. But still…his treatment was tough as well. He also was sent away — early in the morning — once again: Vayashkam Avraham baboker, without a word from his dad. 

And so too my father died. And my sister and I and my mother and a host of people who loved him buried him next to Rabbi Marvin Weiss of whom I’ve also spoken in the past and whose yahrzeit is this month as well. And I sat shiva on my 20th birthday, so my talk tonight is because he’s been dead 37 years and tonight I’m 57.

But the stories of fathers and sons — all children and parents — don’t end with the death of the parents. Isaac goes on and has children, and in one little-noted phrase: digs up the wells of water that his father had dug, and he calls them by the names his father had called them. After his father’s death he returns to the sources that sustained his dad and has that strange and terrible relationship with that God who asked his father to kill him and who asks his son Jacob to trick him.

So too, I’ve dug the wells of my father. He was a musician who was sustained during his illness by his art. Not by his playing, which the doctor forbade, but by his teaching. This man who played tenor sax would sit in his pajamas and write out scores for his six-piece accordion band. Everyone in the coal regions wanted to play accordion. And he taught them when he was able. And he wrote out these scores, not big band swing — but “Love Makes the World Go Round” for six accordions. Imagine what it took to make that sound good!  But he put his students and their needs first.“ Just because page 3 comes after page 2 doesn’t mean the student should get that page.” These words I know from my father. 

And if a student showed up not having practiced, he would say, “I don’t want to waste your time and money or my time. Come back when you’ve practiced.” He cared about the students and the material and wouldn’t give up on anyone. But he maintained his standards as well.

And when a man came into the store who pushed himself on a board because he had no legs my father would give him money. When it was pointed out to him that this man had lots of money, my father said, “But he doesn’t have any legs.” He and my mother did the good that was in front of them. They weren’t advocates trying to change the world. And the revolutionary ideas of the ’60s — to say nothing of the Beatles — did not please them. But if there was good to be done, they did it, in a clear and simple and immediate way.

So I try to do this as well. I’m not the musician my father wanted me to be. But I do my rabbinate as he did his teaching. I do the good that is in front of me. I try to know what page is needed next by my students. I don’t, however, send everyone away who hasn’t practiced — at least I don’t think I do. 

On this anniversary of my father’s death and my birthday, I just want to say that I love him very much and we still walk on together.

—Rabbi Rim Meirowitz