After he finishes his homework and various types of practice, and his younger brother is asleep, each night my 12 year old son and I watch an episode of Ted Lasso together. This is my first time watching it, I know I am a few years late to the game. And I ask that you reserve judgement on my parenting decisions. One of the things that is most fascinating and enjoyable about watching together is noticing which parts strike him as funny, he frequently laughs out loud. We respond to very different parts of each episode. In case I had any doubts, watching this has confirmed my understanding about myself that I am not a 12 year old boy. 

For those unfamiliar, Ted is a soccer coach transplanted from Kansas to England, whose commitment to his team and his job is tested repeatedly through the first season. He’s woefully unprepared, placed in impossible situation after impossible situation, betrayed, insulted, humiliated. And yet… his strong sense of obligation to the team, to something greater than himself, to helping the players be their best versions of themselves on and off the field is unwavering. He just keeps showing up. The extent of the sacrifices Ted is willing to make for his team is a bit radical, not unlike the display of obligation we read about in the Akedah.

What can we learn about how to best direct our commitments, about healthy and unhealthy forms of obligation, from these two characters?

I hope that few are overly familiar with the types of tests of commitment that Ted Lasso and Avraham encounter. I suspect for many, instead, our lived experience of obligation and testing is pronounced most strongly in our relationship with our children, if we have them, or to something that we are nurturing or coaching in the world. 

Dr. Mara Benjamin, in her book The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought, proposes that one way of understanding the nature of religious obligation and commitment is by reversing the idea of Gd as our father, to thinking of Gd as our infant. She writes: 

“If the rabbinic notion of obligation comes into felt experience most viscerally in caring for young children, then God is not an overlord but a vulnerable, dependent being who needs virtually constant attention. This concept inverts the biblical metaphorical economy, in which God is parent, not infant. But since these are metaphors, one in which God is imagined as a baby invites us to name the condition of being obligated to God as being compelled and beguiled, shackled and infatuated, all at once. The care of an infant perfectly captures the pairing of command and love at the heart of rabbinic thought.” 

This idea that Avraham might be relating to Gd as a needy infant helps us to better understand Avraham’s seeming complete willingness to make any sacrifice, even unimaginable ones. His eagerness is encapsulated by the word heneni – the story of the Akedah opens and closes with Avraham saying the word heneni to Gd – I am here – I am ready – I am open to anything you ask. I am obligated. I am shackled and infatuated, all at once.  

Perhaps by having a bit more empathy for Avraham in his misadventures in exercising obligation by entertaining this approach gives us a bit more openness into examining our own obligations. Are we sacrificing the right things, in the right amounts, in the right ways, in healthy ways? When might we be giving too much, too blindly? Where should we be asking more questions? 

I’d like to posit that one of the messages here is that the type of obligation and presence Avraham displayed toward Gd is best and most appropriately directed not toward Gd, but to our actual and not metaphorical children. An angel of Gd corrects Avraham and his hand is stayed as he is about to sacrifice Isaac – or maybe he misunderstood what he was being asked to do all along. According to one way of understanding Rashi, perhaps he was never even supposed to sacrifice in that way at all. Either way, after the Akedah, Gd never speaks with Avraham directly again. Their relationship seemingly distances. 

Furthermore, we learn here not only that the Jewish way is that we do NOT sacrifice our children – but even more than that – it is to them and to future life that we are supposed to sacrifice FOR – to show our most intense version of obligation and attention. This is the reminder and re-direction we end with – that Avraham should have descendants as numerous as the stars and sands: כִּֽי־בָרֵ֣ךְ אֲבָרֶכְךָ֗ וְהַרְבָּ֨ה אַרְבֶּ֤ה אֶֽת־זַרְעֲךָ֙. Rashi says the double use of the word barech is to show that the blessing for life and future is for both father AND son. And the parasha ends with a doubling down on this message by, in great detail and at length, naming future generations that are being born. This is the point. This is where we should focus our attention. This is how we choose life. 

Our story closes with an angel correcting Avraham. Yet the angel praises him, almost in the same breath. Perhaps this is because Avraham had the right approach, though not the right object. As we open up to what we might learn from Avraham’s difficult-to-understand posture in this story, we see that he models for us the ways that a sense of true obligation, commendable obligation, is not only about what particular sacrifices we are prepared to make in a given moment. Rather, we see that honorable commitment is also about an ongoing practice of willingness. 

A practice of affixing yourself to something greater than yourself not once, but over and over. Of saying over and over, as Avraham does, as Ted Lasso does, henini – I am ready, I am with you. I am here for it when you are testing me, for when you change your mind about what you want me to do. When I misunderstand, or I get it wrong, when your moods shift, I am still here, I am open, I am listening. I will rise up for you early in the morning when you call, יַּשְׁכֵּ֨ם  בַּבֹּ֗קֶר. to nurse you, or when you have nightmares, or when you have an emergency need for chocolate chip pancakes. I will stay up for you late at night, offer up my sleep, and watch a show about sports. This is how we choose life, how we sacrifice, how we access holiness: we will sit next to each other, night after night, shackled and infatuated, watching Ted Lasso together, laughing, and saying nothing at all.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)