So Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who had married his daughters, and said, “Up, get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city.” But he seemed to his sons-in-law as one who makes sport (k’mitzachek). (Genesis 19:14)
Sarah said, “God has brought me laughter (Yitzchak). All who hear will laugh with me (Yitzhak-li). (Genesis 21:6)
Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham making sport (mitzachek). (Genesis 21:19)
Impermanence is a concept that is easy to understand abstractly, but difficult to internalize. We crave stability, and so do our best to minimize cognitive dissonance. Models, explanations, punditry, and grand narratives, inoculate us from the rawness of being shocked, the trauma of surprise (until they don’t). Theory is our best coping mechanism against what is new and unfamiliar. Each time we encounter the volatility, randomness, and unpredictability of life, we look to precedent for a sense that we have been here before. What does the Torah have to say to us this week?
The Chatam Sofer (founding intellectual father of Haredi Judaism) argues that the Torah forbids novelty or innovation (“chadash assur min haTorah”). One way to read his maxim—which was itself an innovation—is not that the Torah strictly limits novelty (which is impossible), but that it requires us to be more skeptical of narrative frames of progress and/or disruption.
If “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), then nothing should shock us or surprise us. The script is already written, the moves already prescribed. We live, on such a view, strictly in what James Carse calls “a finite game” (as opposed to an infinite one) and what Nassim Taleb calls “Mediocristan” (as opposed to Extremistan). On this view, we are not blank slates, as Locke would have it, but souls for whom, as Plato teaches, all knowledge is recollection.
This week’s parasha, Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24) offers a series of surprising plot twists. The same angels that tell Abraham and Sarah they will have a child in their old age make their way to Sodom and Gemorra to tell Lot that the cities will be destroyed. They deliver the first news—of miraculous fertility—in the heat of day. They give the second news—of civilizational collapse—at night. Even if there is nothing new under the sun, from God’s or King Solomon’s enlightened point of view, that is not how we experience it. In Vayera, Divine presence itself is the courier of shocking news. YHWH is a disrupter.
Isaac, whose name means laughter, embodies surprise. He is a miracle child twice-over, not just in that he is born to a post-menopausal mother, but in that he escapes becoming a child-sacrifice at the eleventh hour. Yet his name also bears a heavy undercurrent. M’tzachek, which can mean to play, or jest or make light of—but which literally means “To Isaac someone”—can also mean to make sport of, to tease, to mock, to denigrate. When Sarah sees Ishmael mitzachek with Isaac (21:9), her reaction is so harsh and seemingly over the top that Rashi comments that the word can even connote idolatry, sexual assault, or murder. Without Rashi and the Midrashic tradition to justify Sarah’s reaction as commensurate with Ishmael’s deeds, we would be left to think that Sarah is either cruel, mentally ill, or demented.
On a dramatic level, much hinges on what you think Ishmael was doing with Isaac. A maximalist interpretation makes Sarah seem justified; a minimalist interpretation makes her seem over-reactive. Yet on a psychological level, it may not matter what Ishmael is doing—what matters is that Sarah is “triggered.” The text asks us to look at the scene through Sarah’s biased eyes. Why else would it use the same root-word, mitzachek, to describe Ishmael’s actions that it uses to describe Sarah’s own reaction upon hearing that Isaac will be born? Why does Ishmael’s “Isaacing” set her off?
The psychodynamic read is that Ishmael is a mirror for something Sarah struggles with in herself. Sarah can banish Ishmael, but she can’t banish herself. She can remove the mirror, but not the reflection. So what does she see? Perhaps Ishmael’s making light of Isaac reminds her of her own making light of God’s message—her own disbelief?
A handful of commentators suggest Ishmael is boasting to Isaac that he is the first born, and thus the inheritor of the birthright. Could Ishmael’s boast press on Sarah’s own insecurity about her own worth and legitimacy? Perhaps Ishmael’s jesting reminds Sarah of her time as a barren woman in which she was the butt of both real and imagined voices dismissing her, telling her she’s merely a supporting role in Abraham’s show. If Sarah had resisted those voices of doubt, it’s unlikely that she would have proposed that Abraham have a child with Hagar. Ishmael himself is the incarnation and byproduct of Sarah’s self-doubt.
Regardless of how we imagine Sarah’s inner life—on which the text is characteristically silent—it seems that she can’t get over the surprise of Isaac’s existence, even after he’s come to be. (Next week, this surprise will prove all too tragic when, as the Midrash imagines it, Sarah dies upon hearing that Isaac was either sacrificed or nearly sacrificed). Her sense of shock puts her on the defensive.
The word mitzachek appears twice in Vayera. The other time is in the story of Lot. Lot’s son-in-laws think he is playing/jesting/LARPing (as they say) that their world will end. To them, Lot is “virtue signaling” or else having a joke at their expense. It’s as preposterous to them that Sodom and Gemorra would be destroyed as it was to the finance community pre 2008 that Lehman Brothers would go bankrupt. As preposterous as if I told you that in 100 years Harvard would wipe out, while some random tween Tik-Tok-er you’ve never heard of would take its place as the new gold standard in elite credentialism.
The fact that mitzachek first appears in a narrative context in which the onlookers are wrong in there judgment should give us pause. For it suggests that we can’t know, in advance, whether a contrarian hypothesis is crazy and wrong or crazy and right. If we could distinguish, it wouldn’t be contrarian and it wouldn’t be risky. 999/1000 Sodoms and Gemorras aren’t destroyed. 999/1000 Abraham and Sarahs don’t have Isaacs in old age. The text draws a parallel—I contend—between Sarah and Lot’s reasonably incredulous, but diagnostically wrong, family members. What are we to do with it?
One possible lesson is that being good or righteous doesn’t make us better at understanding reality, or accurately assessing risk (both upside and downside). Judgment and discernment are a separate set of skills from character. Sarah is not disqualified from her central role in Jewish history even if she gets it wrong. It’s human nature to be like Sarah, to live in Mediocristan, and assume a predictable world free of outliers. The result, though, in the case of Lot’s son-in-laws (or Lot’s wife, depending on how you read the gesture of her backward glance) is no less catastrophic. The two appearances of mitzachek illustrate the Dunning-Krüger effect, in which the strong underestimate their position and the weak overestimate it. Sarah perhaps still thinks of herself as a victim, despite her power. Lot’s son-in-laws imagine they are robust, when they are, in fact, fragile.
Surprises, by definition, can’t be expected. Yet we can still expect to live in a world in which we are surprised, and thus not surprised by the fact that we are surprised. Divinity teaches us that we live in an open universe, not a closed one. We are at once more vulnerable and more empowered than we know, equally one small step away from tremendous fortune and one small step away from doom. We can’t know in the moment whether our accepted heuristics (or their challenges) are “for real.” We need to be humble. But humility cuts in many directions, meaning we also need to be humble about our humility.
To walk up a mountain with a knife in one’s hand and then be able to drop it is no more difficult than changing one’s core beliefs and opinions. That is why, in one horrific Midrash, Abraham refuses to hear the angel telling him not to sacrifice Isaac, and it is only when the angel’s tears melt the knife that he understands. Disentangling the difference between “speaking our truth” and taking refuge in ideology and self-justification is a life-long and generations-long task. Vayera: And God appeared. The more we can make room for reality to be our teacher, for something other than the closed loop of our own ego, the more we can learn, grow, heal, and redeem.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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