Leo Tolstoy opens “Anna Karenina” with the observation: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” When we open the Torah this week, we meet a very unhappy family. Sarah has died. Her husband Abraham is forced to bury her alone. His two sons are gone. He had kicked out his eldest, Ishmael (along with his mother Hagar) years ago; they have not been seen since. And his other son, Isaac, having recently experienced the trauma of almost being sacrificed, has also left home.
Perhaps hoping to bring Isaac back to the table, Abraham proposes that his servant find a wife for him — returning to their ancestral homeland to see if there are any suitable matches among the extended family. The servant asks a reasonable question, “What if this woman doesn’t want to come with a stranger to a place she has never been to marry a man she has never met? Maybe I can find Isaac and bring him with me?” Abraham panics, “Don’t take my son! If she refuses to come back, I’ll forgive you. But do not take my son away from me.” Abraham is desperate to keep the remains of his family, however unhappy, intact.
But the question remains: Where is Isaac? Some rabbis say he decided to study Torah, to make sense of a God that commanded the terrible deed of child sacrifice. Other rabbis say he went looking for his half-brother Ishmael, now understanding the wounds that their father had inflicted on him. A few say Isaac journeyed so far that he reached the Garden of Eden. But wherever he might be, he is not with Abraham. It’s too hard, too complicated, and too painful.
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I imagine that Abraham’s desire to find a wife for Isaac comes from a good place. But it’s not what Isaac wants, at least right now. When confronted with difficult emotions, our impulse is to find a solution for them — but sometimes what we need most is to simply have someone listen to our feelings. The researcher Brené Brown teaches that this is the key difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy tries to fix, to reason, to justify. Empathy is about creating space for our feelings, including some that might not actually have or need a solution.
Abraham may have abundant sympathy for Isaac, but he seems to lack empathy.
I imagine that this is why, when we do encounter Isaac in the Torah, he’s wandering alone, pouring his heart out to the emptiness around him. He needs to be heard, in all of his pain, rage, and sadness. Feeling like no one — not even his father — understands him, Isaac isolates himself. This is an understandable response to loss, anger, and grief, and to feeling like none of those emotions are being seen or heard by those around us. It’s a response that many of us know well.
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The Jewish community feels a lot like an unhappy family right now, divided by a broken world that tears away at our hearts. Many have proposed solutions to these problems, some we agree with and some that feel anathema to our moral compass. But what I have heard most, and what I have also felt, is that we are all talking past each other. That we are yelling to be heard and, in response, instead of listening, other people just yell louder. That our particular pain, our anger, our sadness is not being held in this moment by anyone, but especially not by the people who matter most: our friends, families, and loved ones.
The temptation is to isolate ourselves — to wander alone, like Isaac, speaking to the emptiness (or X, or Facebook, or Instagram) and hoping someone will hear us. But when we have experienced tragedy, Judaism asks us to be in community. We pray for the sick in community. We bury our dead in community. We comfort the mourner in community.
When Abraham dies, Isaac and Ishmael find their way back to each other to bury their father. I don’t know if this was a moment of reconciliation. Perhaps even while they shoveled dirt into his grave, they still nursed the wounds that had been inflicted upon them. The Torah doesn’t tell us if and how their relationship is healed. But what the Torah does tell us is that in the midst of despair, as they bury a father who both hurt and cared for them — each in their own way — they realize that they can still mourn together. That they can hold each other’s pain, rage, and sadness even if it’s not the same as theirs, even if they don’t agree with it or understand it. Repair is not a prerequisite for empathy, nor does holding another’s pain discount our own. But it is only through presence that we can begin to heal those wounds, together.
Rabbi Steven Philp, LCSW, is one of the rabbis at Mishkan Chicago, a spiritual community recapturing Judaism’s inspiration and transformative essence. He serves on the Jewish Engagement Council for the City of Chicago and the boards of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and Chicago Community Mikvah. He lives in the Boystown neighborhood of Chicago with his cat.