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September 2000 Issue, Volume 2

The Spirituality Of Sacrifice: Notes from the Edge

by Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein

A few months before I began rabbinical school in Jerusalem, my father proposed that we take a trip to Nepal. I was 22 and in the middle of writing the Great American Novel, but I didn't mind the interruption. I welcomed the prospect of the two of us trekking together through the rugged and remote mountain kingdom, a father and son bonding in the shadow of Everest.

Going to Nepal was his idea. But it was my idea to watch the animal sacrifices at a shrine in the Kathmandu Valley. I'd read about Dakshinkali in our guidebook, about the weekly pilgrimage of men and women from the surrounding towns and villages and the offerings they made there. I was intrigued by it all. As a Westerner, a Jew, and now as a future rabbi, I wanted to witness firsthand this bizarre and (so I thought) alien event.

A collision was about to occur, a collision between my modern mindset and Dakshinkali's ancient rites. As an Ivy League graduate and a student of philosophy and literature, I'd studied some of the greatest works in the Western canon: The Republic and The Inferno, Paradise Lost and Moby Dick. I thought I had a good grasp of concepts like truth and virtue, and of the way an enlightened mind can use reason to justify the basic principles of religion (I'd read Descartes and Kant). But what happens when our modern sensibilities confront rituals and ideas that seem archaic, even savage? Should we reject them out of hand, or might they somehow be able to help us with our contemporary lives?

The site buzzed with activity. Hundreds of people stood in line, their various animals in tow, waiting their turn. Everybody followed the same procedure, offering prayers at the shrine, handing over the animal (and a few coins) to the slaughterer, taking the carcass away for their feasts. The blood drizzled from the courtyard down to the stream below. The barefoot man killed with such precision that when he cut the heads off chickens it looked like he was doing nothing more than snapping his fingers.

One family gave him a goat. Taking out a much larger knife, the man swiftly slit its throat, and the goat let out a stunted scream as it was decapitated. My father grimaced and grabbed me, holding on to me as if his embrace would shield me from the knife. The only other time I'd ever seen my father so outwardly moved was when, years before, he was told of his own father's death. In that embrace I felt my father's greatest fear. But I also sensed his deepest love.

The role of sacrifice in the relationship between a father and his son also occurs in one of the Bible's most famous and powerful passages. In chapter 22 from the book of Genesis, the patriarch Abraham receives a command from God to offer up his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. The two of them ascend the mountain in silence, and it isn't until Abraham has bound his son, placed him on an altar, and lifted a knife above his throat that a second divine call prevents the slaughter. It was merely a test of faith. A ram is sacrificed instead.

The story of the binding of Isaac is a disturbing one, and it has been commented on for centuries by rabbis and priests, philosophers and poets. No Jew or Christian can be serious about his or her religiosity without confronting this difficult text, a text that depicts Abraham's willingness to slay his own son. How do we make sense out of the seemingly inexplicable? How can we, as modern people, adhere to religious traditions that hold up such a figure as the very paradigm of spiritual rectitude? It wasn't until I went to Dakshinkali that I began to understand.

Though my father's outer behavior differed dramatically from that of Abraham, the inner impulse of the two men was the same: trying to do the right thing, as they understood it, regardless of cost. Through Abraham's (hindered) attempt to sacrifice Isaac, and my father's (instinctive) attempt to protect me, both men were poised to give up that which was most precious to them. For Abraham, it was his child. For my father, an emotionally inward man, it was his guard. Since Nepal, I've never again been able to read the passage from Genesis--or view my father--in quite the same way.

I went to the shrine at Dakshinkali with a seminarian's zeal, fully expecting to find a den of heathenism. What I found instead was a spirituality of sacrifice that we in the West have rightly rejected, but a spirituality that was once a vital part of my own religious tradition and the context out of which Christianity later emerged. Sacrifice isn't significant simply because it is one of the historical foundations of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is significant because it is a spiritual value that still has much to teach us.

In today's social climate, the notion of sacrifice is about as absent from our sensibilities as Nepal is distant from our soil. Selfishness and materialism seem to be the idols of our age. Yet the idea of giving up, for a higher purpose, that which we treasure most isn't a primitive idea. It is a good one. By relinquishing not just part of our wealth, but also some of our time, ego needs, and love for the sake of our families and those around us, we can make the world a more caring, less lonely place. And we can make ourselves better people in the process.

God's order for Abraham to sacrifice his son, like many other religious commandments, appears to most of us as irrelevant and misguided. That's why most of us do not take organized religion very seriously, why we dismiss it as an opiate for the masses or the product of weak minds. Yet if we were to confront it openly and creatively, if we were able to tease out its central messages without surrendering any of our modern values or beliefs, then the rites, rituals, and texts of our ancient traditions would spring to life in ways we haven't yet imagined. It is imagination, not replication, that must serve as the engine for religious renewal. The machinery is there. It is up to us to set it into motion.

Niles Elliot Goldstein is the founding rabbi of The New Shul in Greenwich Village, New York City. He is the author or editor of five books. His most recent work, God at the Edge: Searching for the Divine in Uncomfortable and Unexpected Places (Bell Tower), was just published last month and can now be ordered through www.amazon.com.

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