Where Are You?

Religious Truth is Relational

God called out to the human being and said to him, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)

They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” (ayeh Sarah) And he replied, “There, in the tent.” Then one said, “I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him. (Genesis 18:10-11)

They had not yet lain down, when the town council and the militia of Sodom—insignificant and influential alike—the whole assembly without exception—gathered about the house. And they shouted to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men (ayeh ha’anashim) who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them. (Genesis 19:5)

Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he answered, “Yes, my son.” And he said, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where (v’ayeh haseh) is the sheep for the burnt offering? (Genesis 22:7)

[Judah] inquired of the council of that locale “Where is the cult prostitute (ayeh ha’k’desha), the one at Enaim, by the road?” But they said, “There has been no cult prostitute here.” (Genesis 38:21)

Variations on the question “Where is X?” recur throughout Bereishit with tremendous pathos and irony. Where is Abel, your brother? Where is Sarah, your wife? Dad, I see the knife and the kindling wood, but where is the lamb? The ur-question from which all these questions emanate is God’s question to the human being — “Where are you?”— when Adam and Eve are hiding in the garden just having eaten from the forbidden fruit. The question is often rhetorical, Socratic even. I know where you are, but do you? The question is also often a challenge to responsibility—you are evading yourself and your accountability because you are running from yourself. Look where you are, snap out of it, and face up.

I say that the question is ironic, because sometimes it is not used to face responsibility at all. When the townspeople of Sodom ask where are the men-angels, they aren’t asking, they are demanding. They are using the language of ethical awakening that close Biblical readers will hear as a fundamental leitmotif for sinister effect. Give up those guests so we can violate them. It’s also a profound inversion. In Genesis 3, God asks humanity where are you? In Sodom, the human beings effectively ask where is God. In one, God asks humans to face responsibility for their newfound freedom, in the other humans use their freedom to attempt a kind of deicide. Though less egregious, Judah asks where the cult prostitute is not realizing that it is his own daughter-in-law, Tamar, who had pretended to be one only to force him to confront his paternal responsibility for her when her previous two husbands die. She knows who she is and where she is, but he has no idea where he is. His searching question boomerangs back on itself. Yehuda refused to take Tamar as a wife, but took her as a prostitute. He cannot find her, because he is looking for her in the wrong mode. She is his wife.

While not every instance of where is X? has a marital undertone, many do, and the reason, as we shall see shortly, has to do with the following thesis: The path to true self-understanding and to genuine worship is through good human relationships. The Torah’s first mentioned human relationship is between Adam and Eve, which is a kind of dysfunctional marriage. Adam blames Eve for his downfall, and Eve blames the serpent. Despite an initial moment of intimacy (“This one is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”), they do not work as a good team. When Eve has a child she leaves Adam out, telling us that she acquired Cain with God. From these initial scenes we get the sense that Adam and Eve are competitive rather than collaborative with one another.

Abraham and Sarah do not have good role models for a successful marriage. Thus, Abraham twice passes Sarah off as his sister, and Sarah in turn tells Abraham to take Hagar, the Egyptian, as a handmaiden. In both cases, their marriage is a formality, but is symbolically and psychologically broken. Egypt is a place of fertility. Hagar is “the Egyptian.” Abraham gives Sarah over to Pharaoh’s harem. Why? Symbolically understood, because the fertile place, represented by Egypt, is enticing and easy. Yet the promise to Abraham—you will get to the Promised Land—is also a microcosmic promise of the difficult journey to making his marriage to Sarah work. Although you can’t seem to have a child together, you will. Believe in one another, work together. Don’t treat the other transactionally, mechanically. Don’t reduce the meaning of your relationship to its ability to produce offspring on demand. In fact, Sarah is Abraham’s half-sister, so as Abraham points out, he isn’t quite lying. But metaphysically speaking, he is lying, because Sarah is most significantly his wife.

It is in this context that we should hear the words of the angelic men who visit Abraham in this week’s parasha, Vayeira: “Where is Sarah, your wife?” It’s a multi-layered question. Do you know that Sarah is important? Do you know that she is your wife? Do you know that you can’t do the covenant thing without her? Do you know that the relationship to God is only as good as your relationship to your partner? The scene in which Abraham and Sarah work together to play host to the angels contrasts with the one in which Lot’s house is surrounded by xenophobes demanding to take them as hostages. But it’s not just a contrast in that one is a scene of welcome, the other of contempt. It’s also that Sodom represents the bottom of the slippery slope humanity will find itself in if it does not take its relationships seriously, if Abraham and Sarah regard each other as mere individuals, each to their own, instead of as interdependent beings who together form a whole that is greater than its parts.

Sodom and Gomorrah have come to be synonymous with sexual depravity, but the licentious aspect of this civilization is merely one data point within a larger pattern, namely the degradation of the human to the animal, the reduction of the ontological to the biological, the conflation of intimacy with instrumentality. In Kantian terms, Sodom and Gemorrah is a place where others are treated merely as means to my own ends. It is a culture of sociopathy lacking in any love and empathy. And it is held up in contrast to Abraham and Sarah not only to highlight their virtue, but also as a warning—If Sarah is interchangeable with Hagar, and if Abraham is interchangeable with Pharaoh—how will you be different?

My hypothesis is that God puts Abraham up to the task of defending Sodom and Gomorrah so as to cultivate his empathy, even for a rotten civilization. The best shield against becoming like them is by trying to find something to love in them. By getting Abraham to identify with them, God also gets Abraham to see that there is an aspect of Sodom and Gomorrah in himself that he needs to overcome.

Last week, the call to Abraham happened in the singular, “Lech l’cha.” Take yourself. But by the end of this week’s parasha, we see that it takes a couple—Abraham cannot be Abraham without Sarah, and vice versa. Lech l’cha becomes lech l’chem. When they do that, they achieve, for a brief moment, the impossible in Isaac. Of course, the tandem state does not last, as Abraham ascends the mountain with Isaac, having failed to mention it to Sarah. The Midrash tells us that Sarah essentially dies from this faux pas.

When Isaac asks Abraham where is the sheep we can hear a new possible undertone. My reading here is Midrashic, and by no means definitive. We need to hear the verses of the Torah like musical phrases holding many, even contradictory paths. Isaac knows what’s going on. He’s asking his dad are you really going to do this? Is this really what God wants from you? Maybe you are just hiding from God, the way Adam did in the garden, and using your stance of piety and devotion to cover it up? Look at my face and tell me that this is what our religion wants of you. Thankfully, Isaac is swapped out for a ram. (The sheep is never found). God doesn’t demand the sacrifice of Isaac. Just as Judah discovers there is not a prostitute, and Abraham discovers Sarah is not his sister, Abraham also learns that Isaac is not a sacrifice. But in another sense, Tamar is a prostitute, Sarah a sister, and Isaac a sacrifice, and these doubled identities haunt them, their relationships, and Jewish history to this day.

The angels who visit Abraham and Sarah and Lot (whose wife is notably missing and unnamed)) are also doubled. They are men, anashim, and divine beings. Why this doubling? Because of the point I have been making—the way to God is through one another; the metaphysical is revealed in the ethical (as Levinas teaches).

Where are you is a call to teshuva, repair, because there is no failsafe way to keep human freedom from estrangement. The best we can hope for is learning the lessons of failure, rather than preventing it. Abraham should not have passed Sarah off as his sister, but he did. Sarah should not have undermined her marriage by telling Abraham to take Hagar as her surrogate, but she did. Our ancestors were broken, as are we. Adam and Eve passed on some serious relationship trauma to the next generation. Just look at their children. But the question, “Where are you?” is nonetheless hopeful. There is an answer to that question. Here I am. Hineini. I am ready. I am ready to try again, to fail, and to learn.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @

Etz Hasadeh

P.S.:

1. Join my weekly seminar on Threadable where we collectively gloss the book of Genesis.

2. Will Jarvis interviews me on religion and liberalism for Narratives.