REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN
When I think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, I think of a Rubik’s cube—with its colored squares you’re supposed to shift until each side of the cube is a single color. But shift one panel to make it right, and another shifts out of place. In the same way, that story about God and Abraham fails to make sense to me no matter how many times I turn it this way and that. I can admire Abraham’s faith as long as I don’t look at what God’s asking him to do. I can admire God’s provision of the ram, as long as I don’t look at what he put Abraham and Isaac through first.
Keith Tornheim’s recent collection of poems, The Sacrifice of Isaac, works the story as if it were Rubik’s cube: turning it every which way, each poem giving voice to a different participant (not only God, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, the servants, and the angel, but also the ram, the thicket, the rock). I found the juxtaposition of these viewpoints surprisingly moving, and surprisingly surprising: such an old story can still appear strange.
The thirty-one poems open with an account of a Persian plate the speaker’s mother admired in a Boston antique shop, a plate depicting “Father Abraham with the knife/raised above Isaac his son,/whom he clasps against his chest.” Tornheim bought the plate as a gift for her, then inherited it when she died, but found himself “uneasy as the heir/of this testament of her certainty and faith.”
He’s not the only uneasy one. How can a righteous God ask such a thing? How could a loving father do it? Kierkegaard, Leonard Cohen, and countless rabbis have asked the same question. Tornheim works very much within the Midrashic tradition of rabbinic commentary; in
fact, many of his poems have been read as part of High Holy Day services, when the “binding of Isaac” is the Torah portion for the day. “Who knows what really happened atop Mt. Moriah?” the speaker asks in the title poem. “All are dead, except God./Perhaps Abraham acted differently from what is written.”
Or perhaps the rocks did. In “Memorial Stones,” those rocks which “by God’s grace never tasted Isaac’s blood” become the site of future suffering:
And afterward that angel of the Lord
carried the stones away one by one
and dropped them at designated points
in places in a distant land.
There they waited for four thousand years
in Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen…
until at last their thirst was quenched
in Buchenwald, Treblinka and the rest…
with blood of Isaac’s seed.
Tornheim’s poems have the stark, paratactic style Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis associates with Biblical narrative—we see only spotlit actions, with minimal context. But each poem shifts the spotlight, aligning us with contrasting, contradictory viewpoints. In the process the emphasis shifts from the story’s message to what it might have felt like to the individuals involved.
One poem, “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” points out that the story is more properly known as the “binding,” not the “sacrifice” of Isaac, since Isaac is not sacrificed. For many rabbis, this is the point: the story teaches us that human sacrifice is not acceptable. But surely the same point could have been made without causing so much pain. Because “Abraham sacrificed his son/in the depths of his heart” the poem suggests, “it was his heart/that Abraham gave to God”:
And Isaac knew it.
And Sarah knew it,
and it broke hers.
So it was that Abraham sacrificed
their hearts, too.
The poem ends blessing God (somewhat bitterly, it seems to me) as “King of the universe,/Receiver of hearts.”
Because the human price seems so disproportionate to the lesson learned, Tornheim can’t rest with any single explanation. In “I Should Not Have Asked,” God decides it was all a mistake. Both “The Testing” and “Adonai-yireh”suggest that rather than God testing Abraham, perhaps Abraham was testing God:
And when I raised the knife,
God had to answer, to reveal Himself
as a God of life,
not one of the old gods of death.
Other poems suggest it was God’s test, but he failed to understand its consequences. Sarah’s heart, Abraham’s heart, Isaac’s heart: all are shattered by what they learn. “How long must I rock him in the night,” an angry Sarah asks Abraham on his return. “And then who will comfort me?”
But my favorite poem is “Borrowed,” in which no one’s heart gets broken. Even the sheep turns up unharmed, returned to its shepherd although “not so frisky as before,” and smelling of smoke. When the shepherd later journeys near an encampment “whose headman we were told worshipped/a strange and solitary god”:
. . . Abraham himself came out
to see that we were well provided for.
And when he saw our ram—
it was the strangest thing!—
he bowed his head in silent thanks,
and our ram nodded back at him.
In its simplicity, its refusal to explain, and in the stark beauty of its language (the assonance of “thing” and “him”; of “thanks” and “ram”; the defamiliarizing effect of Abraham as “headman”), “Borrowed” is typical of Tornheim’s best poems: their strange, evocative mix of understated mysticism and humanity.
Ultimately, The Sacrifice of Abraham suggests, we are the stories we tell. The book’s final poem, “Looking Back,” invokes history and collectivity—the “we” formed by shared stories:
Scars become legends,
legends become scripture;
a family becomes a people.
And the ram becomes “ancient smoke/that still swirls around us.” What all this says, finally, about God, violence, sacrifice, and humanity, I’m not sure. Maybe just that we need to think, when we read those old stories or even the newspaper, less of what the lesson is and more of whose heart is getting broken.