Vayera 2023: Pain and Prayer

In the end of this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, we read about the famous Akeidah, the binding of Isaac.  For millennia, people have written about the perplexity of this story—how could God command Abraham to kill his child? How could Abraham listen to God? What is the Torah trying to teach us?  

Sacrificing one’s child or oneself for Judaism, for the Torah, for the Jewish people, or for the Jewish land, is not unique to Abraham; Jews have done this in almost every generation. For millennia, even in the midst of horrific tragedy, there has been a sense of higher purpose.  One thinks of the Jewish people singing ‘Ani Maamin’ as they walked to be killed by the Nazis and attempts to light Chanukah candles and dance on Simchat Torah, even in the death camps.  But how does one retain a relationship to God and faith in God in the face of self-sacrifice or at such difficult times?   

One of the many great Chassidic rebbes who was killed in the Holocaust, Rabbi Klonomus Kalmen Shapira, the Pisetzner rebbe, was the rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 until its liquidation in 1942, when its Jews were sent to Treblinka. The ghetto, of course, was a horrific place to live; there was not enough food for the 460,000 Jews who were imprisoned there in an area of 1.3 square miles, but the rebbe brought light and hope to the Jews of the ghetto. Before the Jews were sent away, he buried his writings in milk jugs under the ghetto, with instructions for whoever found them.  

In the ghetto on Chanukah 1942, he wrote the following on faith: “Some have lost their faith, saying, how can we be faithful in the face of such tragedy and destruction?  Perhaps God is bringing us pain in order to bring us closer to His service and Torah? But on the contrary, the Torah and all holiness has been destroyed.  Behold though, if a Jew speaks these words of loss of faith in the language of prayer and beseeching, pouring out one’s heart to God, that is good.” 

For the Rebbe, taking our doubts, our pain, our fear, our sorrow, and utilizing precisely them as prayer from the heart before God, is the secret to retaining a relationship to God, to our people, to sanity and to ourselves in the face of dark times.  

May we see times of light and may God bless us and our leaders to remember what the Talmud says: “There is no way to facilitate blessing except for peace.”