Each year our communities read the story of the Binding of Isaac twice. The first time is on Rosh Hashanah and the second is each year when we read this week’s Torah portion. Every year we are thus pushed to confront this painful episode that so many people much smarter than I have written volumes upon volumes about. Every year we look deeper and deeper into the text and try to find meaning in something that makes us all shudder and cry in thinking about. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel told the following story:
A young boy was once reading the story of the Binding of Isaac at home. He began to cry and his father asked him what was wrong. To which the boy explained: Abraham is a about to kill Isaac.”
The father smiled and said that he shouldn’t worry and that “you know how it ends, God sends an angel and the angel stops it from happening.”
But the child retorted: “What if God is late?”
The father understood his son and said: “Humans can be late (and we often are) but God is never late.”
Many scholars have remarked that the story of the Binding of Isaac is a polemic against the predominate culture of that time that practiced child sacrifice. In our story God commands such a practice only to intervene to prevent it and to demonstrate that such a sacrifice runs counter to His desires and to the way that monotheism sees the world. Child sacrifice is a reprehensible practice that thankfully we see very little to none of today in the concrete sense. But I worry at times that we have some great strides to make in defeating it all together. Look at how we treat our children as natural resources in our economic wars, and how we constantly remove more and more of their childhood so that we can assure a better future for our society. Look at how we have robbed them of so much innocence in a viewpoint that says that boundaries are bad, but perhaps those sacred boundaries were there for a reason…
So this brings us to the reality of the day and age in which we live. Joe Paterno, an incredible football coach, has lost his job. Not because of what he did or did not do on the field, but because of what he did not do off of the field. Every single person who works with youth has to take a sacred pledge to be advocates for them at all times. Every single person who dedicates their lives to working with our little ones needs to see the enormous responsibility that we all have to guard them and to protect them. Anything short of this needs to be seen as being tantamount to child sacrifice.
It is an awfully sad thing that has transpired in Pennsylvania. It is an awfully sad thing to see such an impressive career brought to a screeching halt and to have it so tarnished. But that is not the sad thing in this saga… The sad thing is that the children who were victimized by a man who clearly was ill, were left on the alter that Isaac left all those years ago. Those children were sacrificed for the sake of college football. Those children were proof that we have not yet cleaned the world of this enormously shameful practice. And to add to the sadness of this is the response of the students at Penn State. In the 1960s students in the US rioted against bigotry, against a war, against a world that they saw as heading in the wrong direction. Surely it must be a worthy cause to strongly protest an athletic department that allowed for a predator to terrorize children… But unfortunately the riots have nothing to do with the children… They were sacrificed for the sake of college football and a career that many felt could never be tarnished. Those poor children still tied to the alter that Isaac left, they are still waiting for an angel to intervene on their behalf.
The victim in all of this is not Joe Paterno (and to be clear he is not the culprit either), he lost his job because he failed to do something every coach must do… Before a coach must win… Before a coach must inspire… Before a coach must mentor… A coach must be trusted with the safety and security of all of the people s/he comes into contact with as a professional. Joe Paterno lost his job because he neglected his chief responsibility and that was to protect children and players. The victims in all of this are the children who had no voice to stop the assaults from happening, and now that a voice has begun to speak, angry mobs accuse those voices of having ruined something that they find to be more important and more sacred than the lives of children.
Heschel was right, God is never late but we as humans clearly can be and in this case we truly are.
It is my sincere hope and prayer that God heal these victims speedily and that they find a voice and a salvation away from this modern child sacrifice.
