Akeydah, Part Two
Slumping Back Downhill
Sodom’s always lurking there, just under the surface, in Leivick’s drama.
Not just the teenage, snickering at sex, Sunday School Sodom,1 but Sodom in all its sin of hostility, pride, avarice, all its forms and names…and we’re always potentially on the road to it.
Abraham Sends Hagar and Ishmael Away (1866), Gustave Dore
Before we get there, though, I’m stepping back to 1933’s Akeydah again. The two plays are from the same time, the same period of illness and sanatorium treatment (Leivick’s in and out of JCRS twice between 1932 and 1935, back in Liberty in 1937). Sodom — and what went on there — makes an appearance in the earlier play. Namely, in Ishmael’s horror at the cruelty he sees in the fate of Sodom and the suffering of sons for the sins of their fathers
This and other excerpts from H. Leivick, ‘Akeydah,’ Tsukunft, 1935.
Isaac and Ishmael, of course, suffering from both the sins and the holiness of their father. Or at least from both his former life and his later piety.
And Ishmael, well — he has a point, doesn’t he?
In fact, Ishmael and Satan2 both make really very good points. Satan tells us he is horrified by even the idea of bloodshed in ‘his’ desert — his guise here is as ‘Lord of the Desert’ and while he sometimes is a warped echo of the divine voice (he beckons Isaac to slaughter Abraham in the same words as Abraham was commanded to slaughter Isaac) he’s not entirely the opposite of God. Rather, he’s there to point out the contradictions, the absurdities, the doubts — he’s a rather traditionally legalistic figure, the heavenly prosecutor, a kateyger.
Ishmael also has his own code and idea of justice to be done — he wants to put an arrow straight through Abraham after a few years of satisfying himself attacking his flocks and shepherds. Not primarily for what he did to him, but for what he did to his mother, Hagar. That Abraham didn’t fight for her when Sarah wanted her driven away.
But while Ishmael doesn’t particularly want to know if Abraham regrets, or to hear Sarah’s please for forgiveness…one of the things the play makes clear is that regret isn’t enough. It’s not necessarily a failing of Ishmael that he feels the time for regret has long since passed. Even Abraham can see that.
Neither regret for an action nor regret for inaction is ever enough.
This is something Akeydah shares with In The Days of Job, where a vision of the sheep who actually is slaughtered confronts Isaac with the fact that silence, apathy and thankfulness it wasn’t you makes you as guilty as the one who lifted the knife — making Akeydah and Days of Job an interesting set of ‘bookends’ to the Second World War and the Khurbn.
We’re left to consider what Satan leaves us with at the end of the play, both as we finish reading and as we move on with our lives. Abraham has obeyed God in the name of his promised future generations. Isaac — Isaac seems to have recovered, but can he really recover from the trauma of his own death?
Isaac, in fact, joined by Ishmael (who loves him dearly) briefly does cease to be Isaac. Isaac is gone, he says. He is now ‘Fire and Knife’.3 This is only a brief interlude, and he does return to being Isaac again, but his rebellion against blind obedience, against professed but undisplayed love is striking. Not only that, it is Isaac who stops himself, stays his own hand. Abraham’s fear and resignation, he says, are enough.
And, as mentioned last time, it’s worth jumping forward a bit to look at 1945’s I Was Not In Treblinka, and the poem ‘Akeydah,’ where we find the speaker proclaiming himself Isaac and Abraham together, the slaughtering knife, the wood and the flame.
Everyone has their turn on the altar by the end, even Sarah. Most everyone will go on living. Well, except for the lamb.4
Satan’s the only one who spares a thought for the lamb in all this. The only one who actually seems to understand, even if he doesn’t think much of everyone and everything that’s happened.
Did anyone, Satan asks of Ishmael — of us, the readers — actually learn anything?
Which leads us onwards in time, and backwards in the Tanakh, to Sodom. Maybe we’ll learn something there.
But I would suggest not, if we move forward even further in time, to 1951, and Leivick writing for Tog about the execution of the last seven Nazis at Landsberg Prison who had been given the death sentence:
In my case, every-day school, followed by Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday School.
Or whatever you’d like to call him, so long as we bear in mind he’s not the Christian conception of Satan in the slightest.
This name is also taken up briefly by Ishmael. He uses it at Isaac’s request and then assumes it himself. Which he is at the end of the play, we are left uncertain — Ishmael or ‘Fire and Knife’. While Isaac might return to his own identity, there’s a bit of him which is permanently altered by the experience: his hair had turned grey over night. His image, for himself and others, is a different one now. He has been touched, marked.
By the time of 1953’s In the Days of Job, the lamb has grown to the size of a ram and Satan has given it the power of speech — which it uses to condemn Isaac for being silent, not intervening, and thus being complicit in its death.