'Without Feathers': Abraham sacrifices Isaac

There are certain passages in the Bible that, if they don't trouble you, there's something wrong with you.

Genesis 22 is one of those passages. In this passage, God speaks to Abraham and tells him to go and sacrifice his son at Mount Moriah. Over the centuries rabbis, theologians and other commentators have done a lot to make this passage easier to swallow. It was a test, and God didn't really want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abahrahm's relationship with Isaac had come to mean more to him than his relationship to God, and so this was a push to set things right. The sacrifice indicates the shift from human sacrifice in early Yahwism to animal sacrifice. The ram that Abraham did sacrifice foreshadowed the eventual sacrifice of Christ.

It all boils down to this. God told Abraham to sacrifice his own son. That's got to be a little unnerving. I can't help but wonder what was going through Isaac's mind during all this.

Back in college, we read the Woody Allen anthology "Without Feathers"  for James Woolley's class "Satire and the Comic Absurd." I've always liked Allen's take on the story:


And Abraham awoke in the middle of the night and said to his only son, Isaac, "I have had a dream where the voice of the Lord sayeth that I must sacrifice my only son, so put your pants on." And Isaac trembled and said, "So what did you say? I mean when he brought this whole thing up?"

"What am I going to say?" Abraham said. "I'm standing there at 2 a.m. I'm in my underwear with the Creator of the Universe. Should I argue?"

"Well, did he say why he wants me sacrificed?" Isaac asked his father.

But Abraham said, "The faithful do not question. Now let's go because I have a heavy day tomorrow."

And Sarah, who heard Abraham's plan grew vexed and said, "How doth thou know it was the Lord and not, say, thy friend who loveth practical jokes, for the Lord hateth practical jokes and whosoever
shall pull one shall be delivered into the hands of his enemies whether they pay the delivery charge or not."

And Abraham answered, "Because I know it was the Lord. It was a deep, resonant voice, well modulated, and nobody in the desert can get a rumble in it like that."

And Sarah said, "And thou art willing to carry out this senseless act?"

But Abraham told her, "Frankly yes, for to question the Lord's word is one of the worst things a person can do, particularly with the economy in the state it's in."

And so he took Isaac to a certain place and prepared to sacrifice him but at the last minute the Lord stayed Abraham's hand and said, "How could thou doest such a thing?"

And Abraham said, "But thou said ---"

"Never mind what I said," the Lord spake. "Doth thou listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?"

And Abraham grew ashamed. "Er - not really … no."

"I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately runs out to do it."

And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know when you're kidding."

And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor. I can't believe it."

"But doth this not prove I love thee, that I was willing to donate mine only son on thy whim?"

And the Lord said, "It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice."

And with that, the Lord bid Abraham get some rest and check with him tomorrow.

wine and water

To my friends who enjoy a glass of wine and those who don't:

As Ben Franklin said, "In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom." In water there is bacteria.

In a number of carefully controlled trials, scientists have demonstrated that if we drink one liter of water each day, at the end of the year we will have absorbed more than one kilo of E. coli, a bacteria found in feces. In other words, we are consuming one kilo of poop.

However, we do not run that risk when drinking wine, tequila, rum, whiskey or other liquor because alcohol has to go through a purification process of boiling, filtering and/or fermentation.

Remember: Water = poop, wine = health.

Therefore, it's better to drink wine and talk stupid than to drink water and be full of crap. There is no need to thank me for this valuable information, I'm doing it as a public service.

five favorite quotes

It has come to my attention, almost by accident, that I have been tagged and given the task of providing five of my favorite quotes on any subject I desire, by the JJ herself. So, out of a desire to be sporting, here they are:

1. "I would like to know what Jesus meant when He said, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.' I would like to know poverty of Spirit, for poverty is all I am left with. I would like the courage to be made poor before the shattering depth of the Creator and alongside the unthinkable breadth of humanity. Spiritual poverty is all I ask for now, and it is more than I can handle."

-- Gordon Atkinson, in the Wittenburg Door

2. "You are so full of what is right that you have lost sight of what is good. I do not believe you have taken a Christian stand, but a legalistic one -- one from which even the Apostle Paul would recoil."

-- Del Terry, religion professor, on an ethics paper I wrote in college

(In a lecture two years later, he said I had the role of Satan in his class)

3. "The boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see written that which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! Slander those who tell it to you! Admit it but do nothing about it, and make it worse! And bide the end!"

-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"

4. "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just ... nice."

-- Stephen Sondheim, "Into the Woods"

5. "It is not the slander of our enemies that we will remember, but the silence of our friends."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

And as a bonus:

"It's K-K-K-Ken, coming to k-k-k-kill me!" -- Otto (Kevin Kline), "A Fish Called Wanda"

Since it now falls to me to tag three other people, and the JJ already tagged Liadan, I suppose I shall have to pick three other people. So, I choose MJ, Brucker, and Greg Hartman, especially as Sir Ian McKellan never responded to the last time I tagged him.

scripture paraphrased

A great paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 4:7-11:

We're dying. Life is full of pain and perplexity. We have Christ, and so, in the future, his life will manifest in us in resurrection and glory. In the present, that life manifests in us in this very odd, contradictory experience. We are dying, afflicted, broken, hurting, confused...yet we hold on to Jesus in all these things, and continue to love him and believe in him. The power of God is in us, not in making us above the human, but allowing us to be merely human, yet part of a new creation in Jesus.

It's from another essay at Internet Monk.

moral values

What bugs me is that the definition of "moral values" has become so narrow, and mainly seems to be related to sex. I'm a Democrat because of my moral values. While neither party is perfect, the Democrats seem to me to be more concerned with the moral issues that are most important to me: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, educating the masses.

Republican approaches to these issues seem to be more concerned with making sure that no one is cheating the system than with making sure the needy actually get what they need. Democrats are more likely to be against the death penalty, and they are more likely to look for peaceful solutions to our international problems, as opposed to military solutions.

Unfortunately, the media don't seem to really want to analyze actual issues. It's much easier to say that Republicans are more likely to cast votes based on morals (implying that Democrats are less moral than Republicans) than actually take the time to look at what that means. I would say that almost all of us make our morals a major consideration when we vote, but we don't all base them on what the Republican Party and the media have managed to define as morality.
-- Rob Timmins

quote

Cervantes once wrote, "Even a fart can be musical" -- a memorable way of saying that even something that appears to be useless can still have beauty and something of quality about it. He saw the unauthorized sequel to "Don Quixote" as the only exception to this rule.