In preparing for this piece, I struggled with the idea of having to read The Binding of Isaac yet again. Surely, everything that can be said about this story has been said about this story. But that’s not right. We read The Binding of Isaac because it is a lens through which we observe our modern reality. When viewed in this way, we can see that there is clearly always more grist for the mill.
Think about how fast the world changes nowadays. Folks my age (I was born in 1988) came into existence at the tail end of the Analog Condition. We were born into a world of magnetic tape and local news, of physical media and 35mm projection. Every single moment in history, from the first cave painting, to the invention of agriculture, to the election of the first US president all happened in the analog world. But (relatively) recently we found that a new world had taken the place of our old one, a digital world of iMacs and the internet, of file sharing and floppy disks.
Where our view of reality had once been like looking through a keyhole, glancing at a thin slice of a gigantic world, we now all have our lips wrapped around the fire hose of the 21st century.
There’s a lot of stuff happening and the world is spinning very, very fast. It’s become difficult to keep up with its pace.
In this paradigm a few things can be said to always be true:
Number one: accessing information is not an act we perform, so much as it is an ocean we swim in. The world has been laid bare to anyone with a phone in their pocket or a computer on their desk. There is so much to see, hear, and read now, that we must make a conscious effort not to take in information. We no longer seek out information, information simply surrounds us and we pick out what we want from it, keeping the fruits we think ripe and throwing away the rotten apples.
Number two: this information changes at such a rapid pace that it is no longer possible to be certain that what you heard yesterday or this morning will be true this evening or tomorrow. Not only is the veracity of the information we take in dubious at times, but also the speed at which the culture absorbs that information, processes it, assimilates it, and then spits it out in favor of new idioms, expressions, practices, and beliefs is faster than many of us can comprehend.
Number three: in a world of information and of digital expression, the appearance of holding a certain kind of philosophy or politics, the appearance of performing an act of charity or going on vacation, is as important as actually holding those views or performing those actions. In our new world, we are not only building our idealized self images on Facebook and Twitter and Tinder and Bumble and Letterboxd and Xbox Live, but we are also transmitting that image out into the world and saying “Look at me. This is who I am. This is who I’ve always been.”
So what does this all have to do with The Binding of Isaac? As I said, we read this story every Rosh Hashanah. And for someone like me or whomever else might be ministering their flock on this day (that is, actual rabbis), you may have to read this story 12 times a year, just to prepare to speak on it and discuss it with your congregation. And when you read a short story like The Binding of Isaac over and over again, you begin to see things in it that may or may not be there. And then after that you begin to argue with yourself about those things being there, admonishing yourself for being so stupid as to think those things in the first place. The truth is that I’ve run out of time to admonish myself, so it will fall to you to take up the task after I’ve made my case.
For now, I’m going to go with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got is that The Binding of Isaac is a story about performance.
Take a moment and think about your favorite stories. From any medium and any format: movies, TV, books, games, the Torah, folklore, stories your friends tell you, stories you tell your friends, and on and on. I suspect that at the heart of some of those stories there is a character knee-deep in a performance of some kind. I don’t mean an actor in a movie playing a role, I mean the character in the movie playing another character, pretending to be someone who they are not or someone they may want to become. Think: undercover cop (Departed) or a slave playing the role of a freed man (Django: Unchained) or a servant girl playing princess (Cinderella). Think of robots pretending to be humans, monsters pretending to be men, think of the lies we tell, the stories we concoct when we want people to think we are something that we may or may not be. Once you start thinking about this kind of performance, you will begin to realize that it can be seen all over the place. This kind of performance is a trope and like other tropes, it is a reflection of our fears and anxieties and views of the world.
Where is the performance in The Binding of Isaac? First think of the way we usually look at this story. When we talk about it we often think of two perspectives: Abraham’s and God’s.
Abraham is, for lack of a better term, the hero of our story and its protagonist. As media literate 21st century humans, we automatically inhabit the point of view of our main characters, whether we like it or not. If we take Abraham’s piety at face value, as the overwhelming majority of people interpreting this story for an audience must do, then it makes perfect sense why a man like Abraham would be so willing—although some might say too willing—to off his son in order to please god. And so many sermons and commentaries have been spent on just that subject. The whys and wherefores, the justifications and the explanations.
And if we want to do something different, if we want to take our Judaism into the 21st century, then we are going to have to take Abraham’s POV and put it to the side, at least for today.
What about God then? Well, what about him? He’s God. He wants people to love him, he wants people to follow him, and perhaps most importantly he wants people to show other people that they love and follow him.
He wants people to perform.
And if we just consider God and Abraham, as we tend to do, the story makes, as I said, a kind of perfect sense. Everyone carried out their roles to perfection, bravo, encore, encore.
But what about Isaac? Can we imagine ourselves in his shoes? Think about this literally. From the God’s Eye View (the acronym of which might be pronounced JEW or GOO), we are looking down on all of creation.
And from Abraham’s view we are still looking down, knife in hand, on Isaac.
But which direction are we facing from Isaac’s perspective? We are looking up. We are looking up at our father, knife in hand, and ostensibly, we are looking up at the sky and all of creation and maybe even God himself.
What does Isaac know in this moment? If he is privy to any information at all, it is that his father is going to kill him. Think about this: Isaac has asked Abraham as to the whereabouts of the animal they are supposed to slaughter for God and the next thing he knows is that he is the animal!
What relief Isaac must have when his father stays his hand. Most kids get to go home after a Saturday morning activity with dad, but most do it after a game of catch or a trip to the museum, not after an attempted murder in the name of God.
So what does Isaac think of on the way home? What does he think he saw happen from his ground up point of view?
What does it mean to Isaac that Abraham has not gone through with what he set out to do? What does it mean for Isaac that God is happy with Abraham’s performance?
As I said, we usually privilege Abraham’s perspective. We usually take his belief and righteousness at face value. But we have no indication in this moment that Isaac has a vantage similar to his father’s, that he has heard the voice of god or seen evidence of his existence. We know that Abraham is aware of god, but for Isaac this day might be evidence, in a growing stack of evidence, that his father is quite mad, a man who hears voices that are not there and acts on the command of an invisible force that can be said to not exist.
What are the “optics” of this scenario? How are we meant to understand it?
Put another way—a contemporary way—where, along the entire sequence of events of The Binding Of Isaac might Abraham take his photo for Instagram? And what role would Isaac play in the photo’s composition?
If it were me, if I were trying to maximize my total amount of views, likes, and comments from God and his angels, I might stage a selfie with Isaac bound on the ground, with me standing above him, my knife hand clearly visible, a look of stoic determination burned into my face. My caption might read: Saturday morning sacrifice with the first born. Hashtag: Thank You God.
This is a cynical view, maybe even a sacrilegious one. But it is the world I live in now. The performance is what’s important. The belief and the action are incidental. In a digital world, in a world as connected and dependent on the interaction between all the little nodes in the system, it is no longer enough to believe. It is no longer enough to do.
What is important, what overrides all other impulses, is the need to let you know that I believe, to let you know that I’m carrying out that belief. When I go on vacation, I don’t relax—I document. When I go to dinner, I don’t eat—I capture. When I get married, I don’t just utter my vows in front of my friends and family, but I utter them in front of my family’s friends and my friend’s families. When I give to charity, I announce it. When I get into the MFA program, I send out the press release. When I think a thought, I don’t do what man has done for thousands of years, which is to move on from that thought and go about his life, just the opposite, I craft that thought into the perfect tweet, one so perfect that it will pass through the corridors of the internet with such speed and illumination that it will crack the entire infrastructure of the internet into a million little pieces. When I am gone, that Tweet will remain, and people will know that I had a really good thought.
In the culture of performance, we have been reprogrammed to act in a way to maximize the impact of that performance. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, can it be said to make a sound? No, I must show that it was I who cut down the tree. Not only that, look how nice my outfit is while I chop! Look at how fine an axe this is. Look, if you will, into the background of this image and see that my house is much larger than yours. If I don’t show you these things, you won’t know them about me. And if you don’t know them about me, can I be said to even exist?
In the culture of ME, everything that is important to me, must become important to you. History no longer starts with the Big Bang, but with my birth year. The pressing issues of our time are not pressing unless they directly affect me, or unless I can insert myself into those issues somehow, and then yes, they are quite important and I was the first one to think it as a matter of fact. As someone said to me recently, we are now constantly assaulted by the micro issue, the niche, the fringe, and we are told that this this is the biggest issue of all, to the detriment of the 99.99 percent.
When narcissism is electronically rewarded, when reality is confined to the perfect little Instagram square, it no longer becomes important to live by one’s conviction, because conviction cannot be depicted in a photograph.
What does it mean to be a Jew in the culture of performance? If Abraham had to make his sacrifice today, would he be able to keep his phone in his pocket? Would he be able to keep his mind focused on the task at hand? Or would he consider holding off a few hours, until the sun was just so, until the lighting was just right?
In a world as increasingly connected and digital and fragmented and unreal as ours, what is the responsibility of the Jew who believes? Not just in god or in the promised land, but in people, in the community, in the carrying out of acts of kindness, of charity, of open-mindedness, and yes, even of sacrifice.
The answer is that our responsibility is to be guided by what is right and not what people think is right. The answer is to live by a kind of conviction that cannot be contained by the Holy Square of Instagram. The answer is to push through performance, to push through image, to push through perception and to live something approaching a righteous life. This, to my mind, is the ultimate responsibility of the Jewish person in the 21st century: something approaching righteousness. You may never quite get there, but in the trying you might find some kind of grace.
Then and only then, as William Wallace might have once said, if he were Mel Gibson and also somehow Jewish, when you are dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all those likes and hearts and shares and retweets from your first day on the internet to your last, for just one chance to come back here as young men and women and live the life you pretended to have in other people’s pockets?
That is is the question I’ll leave you with today. Happy new year. It’s time for the final benediction, this year from the honorable prophet Charles Bukowski in the form of his poem The Laughing Heart.
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.