Va-Yeira: Have You Asked Any Good Questions Today?

This week, I begin my blog with a shoutout to my new Confirmation class. On Wednesday we had our very first get-together, with a nice mix of 8th, 9th, and 10th graders. We began our evening eating pizza, discussing the woes of wearing braces, and comparing science teachers; and finished up with citing movie quotes, eating jelly beans (it was a very health-conscious evening...), and me lamenting all the new stains on my carpet.

Somewhere in between all of that excitement, we learned how to ask rabbinic questions: What can we learn from the Biblical stories? How do we understand them, when our own values keep changing and evolving? And what does the Bible have to say to me about my life? Using examples from politics, movies, literature, and junk mail, we explored the importance of asking questions. Right on queue, this week's Torah reading contains perhaps one of the most disturbing Biblical stories, and one that provokes a myriad of complicated, and sometimes unanswerable, questions.

In Genesis, chapter 22, God decides to "test" Abraham by asking him to take his beloved son, Isaac, and bring him to a place where he will "offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains" (22:2). Let's ignore for a moment the fact that Abraham and Sarah had been childless for literally 100 years, and that giving birth to Isaac was supposed to be the fulfillment of God's covenant to make Abraham a "great and populous nation" (Gen. 18:18). How could God ask this of Abraham? How could Abraham go through with it? Ultimately, the story ends with an angel stopping Abraham right before the fatal blow, but personally, this "happy ending" doesn't leave me feeling much better about the whole ordeal. Not in the slightest.

In every generation, Jews have questioned this story, and created midrashim, rabbinic stories, to try and make sense of what they were reading. But every generation has different questions. What confounded one rabbi in Egypt in the 1100's was not what bothered another rabbi in Lithuania in the 1600's, and probably isn't my main issue in Wallingford, PA in 2010. The stories themselves speak to us differently, based on the questions we pose. In fact, our questions will actually frame the

way we understand these stories! And as I told my Confirmation class, the same concept applies to political mud-sling... I mean, ad campaigns, and to information we learn in school, in newspapers, and in witty, well-written, yet humble, blogs.

The ability to ask questions is one of our greatest gifts as human beings. This is especially important when the Torah challenges us with stories that shatter our beliefs about theology, morality, and trust. You simply cannot read this story and accept it at face value. It demands to be challenged and refuted! It forces us to think about our own value systems, and to outline what religion should, and definitely should not, expect of us. Hm, it's almost as if the Torah planted this story to provoke a reaction... Makes you wonder - and question - doesn't it?