The Akedah
Or How I Became A Personal Essay Hack And Connected The Torah To Northwestern Football
Rosh Hashanah is one of my favorite holidays. It’s not Thanksgiving, though truly what is, but depending on the direction of the wind, I’m pretty comfortable putting it in the 2A/B slot alongside Passover.
Some of that is the competition. The Jewish calendar is full of holidays that are either sad (Yom Kippur), hardly celebrated (Purim, Sukkot), or unimportant (it remains funny that Chanukah is seen as an important part of the Jewish-American experience by the goyim, we really faked them out on that one). Some of that is the time of year (a crisp fall early afternoon coming back from services is pretty delightful). Some of it is the ancillary stuff that goes into any holiday: the menu, the company who attends the family function, and so on.
But most of it is the torah portion.
I remember my mom being asked the question “if you could only bring one book with you on a desert island what would it be?” and answering The Bible because surely you can read that forever and still find new things each time. I think I was in middle school or something at the time, and it hit me as a classic Mama G goody-two-shoes answer. Very childish response to a very thoughtful answer.
The Akedah is the proof point as to why her answer was so good.
I am not a fervent reader of scripture. I think I’ve read just about all of the interesting narrative parts of the Bible at least once, most of which were for a “Bible as Literature” class in college, so most of my experience with the stories told are breaking it down from a literary perspective and less so from a religious one. I do think knowing what’s in the books of the Torah is an important part of being Jewish, and I do feel like I would be more spiritually at ease if I spent a little more time engaging with the text of my faith rather than just the cultural aspects of it.
But the binding of Isaac is a story that captures me every year. There’s so much meat in the text, so many midrash to explain what’s in-between the lines, and endless interpretations that open up the more and more you read the passage.
I go to a reform synagogue. 99% of the time, I’m happy I do so. There are trappings of other, more (serious? traditional? not sure of the right word choice here, so pick your own) traditions of Judaism that bother me. That portions of Judaism still pray with men and women physically separated kind of blows me away. On a simpler, more base layer, I’m not especially excited by the 3-4 hour services that you can find if you want to seek it out.
But that 1% of the time is generally when the service feels not serious enough. It bothers me how much of our service is choral music. It bothers me how much of the service is in English. It bothers me that the torah is read with the intonations of English conversation rather than the traditional chanting of the trope. The power of communal worship isn’t in the trappings of the day, it isn’t even in understanding everything that’s happening. It’s in doing the same thing that’s been done in similar places in similar groups of people for thousands of years. Sometimes, the service of accessibility cuts against what I personally see as the cornerstone of what religion serves.
The interpretations of Genesis 22 that are often given in synagogue provoke a similar kind of dissatisfaction.
So many speeches from the bimah on the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his child Isaac claw at finding some positive lesson to be learned from the story. So many of the midrash serve to make Abraham more understanding, to make God seem more empathetic. None of that feels right to me. And beyond that, none of it has ever felt productive to me.
The challenge of being a modern Jew reading the Akedah is not in seeing the story as a fearsome warning about the dangers of blind faith. The challenge is not in trying to understand the story from Isaac’s point of view. The challenge of reading about the binding of Isaac is in knowing that the Torah is saying that this horrifying story is actually a good thing.
By doing this horrible thing, Abraham is blessed and his ancestors are blessed, because he did the right thing. That’s the lesson.
What does it mean to practice a faith in modern times founded on the ancient belief that this action is heroic? That is what matters.
And that’s why I love starting the year in that way. It forces a challenging internal conversation about the dissonance between the Judaism of the Torah, the Judaism I live, and the Judaism I want to live.
Northwestern closed its meaningful non-conference season with a teeth-shattering beatdown at the hand of Duke, made all-the-more painful by the particulars of the Duke Mechanism. Offensive coordinator, ex-Northwestern assistant Kevin Johns, is one of the last threads to the old, exciting Northwestern offense of the early and mid aughts. Their run game coordinator, ex-Northwestern offensive line coach Adam Cushing, has been name checked in some of the lawsuits and allegations coming out of ShrekGate. I hate Duke in the best of times. Right now, I hate them a little bit more, and after getting the doors blown off in Durham, I hate them as much as I ever have.
Duke is a good team, and is thus not a team Northwestern can dream of competing with this year. This year, Northwestern’s goal is to show just enough signs of life to not abandon all hope in the project and, perhaps more importantly for the program’s future, convince its talented young players to stay in Evanston.
All the things that were written about the Rutgers game remains still true, and while the UTEP game proved a tantalizing reprieve from doomposting, we’re right back to where we were before after another blowout. The challenge for Northwestern fans is to figure out what the endgame is for the fan experience in this era of Northwestern football where the team will be outclassed by 80% of its opponents for the foreseeable future.
Something I have never been good at as a fan is turning off the analytic part of my brain. There are people who watch sports (potentially you, the person reading this!) who watches their team and believes their team is good and the players on their team are good because they are on their favorite team, and that’s what fandom means. I have always been jealous of being able to engage with sports in that way, but I truly never have been able to do it. It’s part of the reason why I look at Northwestern fans who are wargaming ways for this team to win 4 games with a kind of scientific fascination.
The sober, rational read on the future of Northwestern football is an open-and-shut case. At the risk of litigating things I’ve written 8 times before and that are by no means fun to read, this season will be interminable and then it gets worse next season and then the rebuild begins in earnest. Northwestern will either hit a home run hire and re-establish relevance, or it won’t and will remain mired here for another cycle. It makes watching this season bloodless. This is a going-through-the-motions season even before you get into the weirdness of rooting for Northwestern in the post Shrek Gang season.
I’m not sure I can get into the headspace of someone watching this team who spends a lot of brain space on trying to determine whether Brendan Sullivan or Ben Bryant is the better fit with an offensive line that can’t keep the quarterback upright. My capacity for arguing over whether or not Northwestern’s linebacking corps is good is waning. Everything just feels like a waiting game until the season ends. And yet, I’ll watch all 60-minutes again next week.
My writing is not done to ask that Northwestern fans get completely blackpilled like me and see this season as a necessary bridge to get to The Next Thing. It’s an admission that I can’t get to any other place, at least not yet. I don’t think the team has given me any reason to change my tune. This is a team that is as short on talent as it is on ideas to maximize that talent. Minnesota provides one of the better opportunities for Northwestern to win a conference game. They are an abysmal offensive football team coached by a nautically obsessed maniac whose pores excrete Football Guy. If Northwestern wants to show any signs of life, it needs to be done this weekend. At a certain point, projecting wishes onto a football program that can’t fulfill them starts to look silly.
For those maintaining that shred of optimism, Saturday provides yet another test of faith.