On Seeing
by Cliel Shdaimah
This parasha is titled וירא, vayera, meaning “and he appeared.” The root of this word is ירא which means ‘to see, to get to know, look at, to choose.’ In the Torah, sight holds significant importance. During the creation of the world, the phrase vayera is used seven times, anthropomorphizing God as They see what They have created and move on to create more (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). Eve sees that the fruit is desirous for eating and defies orders (3:6). There are many avenues for sight in Vayera, some positive and others negative. Sarah uses what she sees as justification for abusing and exiling Hagar and her son (21:9). Hagar and her son are seen by God and are able to find the water they need to survive (21:19). Lot’s wife, escaping from Sodom and Gomorrah alongside her family with the help of angels, looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt (19:26). Abraham weaponizes sight against his son when he leads him to slaughter and then, when the murderous test is called off, it is the sight of an alternative sacrifice that solidifies that he does not, in fact, have to murder him (22:8, 13).
Let’s dwell here – at the Akeida, the binding of Isaac. In this story, Isaac has been physically restrained: he is bound to an altar by his father on God’s orders. He is at the mercy of his father and God, made vulnerable and penetrable. This is not the only time that Isaac’s body has limited capacity. In his old age, his ‘dimmed eyes’ enable his wife and son to conspire against him (27:1). While the Torah does not connect these two instances together, the rabbis certainly do. Here are two midrashim:
שבשעה שעקד אברהם אבינו את בנו אל גבי המזבח בכו מלאכי השרת, הדא הוא דכתיב: הן אראלם דמעות חכה וגו׳, ונשרו דמעות מעיניהם לתוך עיניו, וכיון שהזקין כהו עיניו, הדא הוא דכתיב: ויהי כי אקן יצחק
In the time that Abraham our father caused his son to be bound on the altar the attending angels cried, as is said: “behold, the angels cried outside … (Isaiah 33:7)” Their tears fell from their eyes into his eyes, and they marked the inside of his eyes. Thus, when he grew old, his eyes were weak, as it is written: “and it came to pass in his old age… (Gen. 27:1)” (Breishit Rabba 65:10).
הוא שילח יד לטל את הסכין ועיניו מורידות דמעות ונופלות דעמות [1] לעיניו של יצחק מרחמנותו של אבא, ואף פי כן הלב שמח לעשית רצון יוצו
He [Abraham] sent his hand to take the knife and his eyes brought down tears. The tears fell into the eyes of Isaac from the mercy [2] of his father. (Breishit Rabba 56:8)
These midrashim offer the idea that tears can both exit, enter, and ultimately transform a body. Isaac’s dimmed eyes are no longer due to an ageing process, but are the direct result of the trauma he experienced as a teenager which is then weaponized against him. Just as the act of looking has significance in the parasha we read this week, looking is what leads to the tears of Abraham and the angels in the midrashim. They are emotionally overcome by the sight of Isaac before them and cry as a result. While there is catharsis in the idea that a father would cry at the thought of murdering his own child, or that angels care enough to weep openly at the horrific scene in front of them, Isaac remains victim to an onslaught of foreign fluids. These tears come at the cost of Isaac’s bodily autonomy and his ability to discern, and are a site of further vulnerability.
This parasha is a difficult one: a vicious city is decimated, a marginalized woman and her son are exiled, a child offered as a sacrifice to God. But while these stories are bloody, heartbreaking, and faith-shaking, they end on relatively positive notes: there are survivors of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hagar and Ishmael are free to begin anew, and Isaac is not actually murdered by his father. The midrashim that expand on the impact of the Akeida on Isaac’s body indicate recognition that going through something terrible leaves unshakable traces, and that positive endings do not guarantee ease or invulnerability. Isaac, with these stories in mind, survives his father and lives with the ongoing trouble with his eyesight. He is quiet in the Tanakh, but resilient and undeniably present. He falls in love, navigates the social and geographical world around him, and fathers two children. Isaac has his favorites and his opinions, can fall prey to mal-intent and manipulation, be passive and also take responsibility for the outcome of his actions. While Isaac is fundamentally transformed through his eyes, he is also a person beyond them.
I write this dvar Torah while wearing thick, wired-framed glasses and occasionally rubbing my eyes at the tiredness that itches at them. Without the invention of glasses to help me see, the screen in front of me would be a bright blur and my keyboard would be a useless collection of clickable buttons. I probably would only be able to hear the Torah rather than read it, or I might need to feel the Torah if I could understand Braille. Most of you reading this are also doing so with the aid of glasses or an enlarged text of some kind for legibility. Because of the ability my glasses provide me, I don’t consider myself disabled and I don’t often consider how Isaac’s eventually dimmed eyes might resonate with me now. It is easy for me to accept the metaphorical use of ירא to identify Abraham’s mercurial perception of the humans around him.
Just as Isaac might have had to live the entirety of his adult life with altered vision, I have been relying on my glasses to engage ‘normally’ with the world since I was a teenager. I imagine that Isaac would have found ways to engage with the world around him in ‘normal’ and ‘passable’ ways until his vulnerable eyes were exploited in his old age by those he should have been able to trust. This, I also can understand on some level – there was a time when one of my younger brothers accidentally broke my glasses and I had to wear an old, blurry pair until the new ones came in, or when just a couple months ago, my glasses fell below my bed and I needed the help of my mother to retrieve them – when ‘normalcy’ can come crashing down at any given moment and with the necessity to rely on others to get through. Were there moments when that Isaac had trouble with his sight in which Rebecca, Esau, and Jacob proved themselves as trustworthy? When he called out to them for assistance and they answered without question or annoyance? Was Isaac able to construct a life for himself after his complex trauma that he could navigate the physical and social world around him confidently? I think all of these things can and would have happened. Without that resilience and building of familial trust, I am not sure that the deception against him and his eyes would have succeeded.
When we encounter parasha Vayera, we are tasked with thinking of how something might appear to others. We witness how humanity takes shape differently in Abrahams eyes: first as worthy of life (arguing with God to preserve the lives of people at Sodom and Gomorrah), then as under hierarchy (some humans, Sarah and Isaac, are more important than others, Hagar and Ishmael), and finally as wholly below the divine (accepting that his son’s life is less important than his obedience to God). Not only do can we understand how mercurial metaphorical sight can be for a character, with the midrashim I shared here, it is also clear how vulnerable sight is to external influence.
My intention here is not to project contemporary notions of disability onto Isaac, but to bring forth interpretations that lend themselves to a disability-informed discourse. The Akeida is alive and well in textual and cultural memory. Readers continue to grapple with divine tests and expectations and parental responsibility through this text, and there is always more to learn and understand from it. The incorporation of midrashim that locate Isaac’s physical vulnerability here hopefully presents an opportunity to think differently about what it means for a character to look or appear, the impact of a character’s sight, active or disrupted, and more spaces for malleable bodies, disability, and survivorship in our interpretation.
[1] The use of words for tears in these two midrashim is interesting - while the second one with Abraham only uses the words דעמות which literally are tears, the first midrash uses three different crying words: בכי, צעקו and דעמות, which all indicate different kinds of crying. בכה is an indicator of crying. צעק is more like ‘crying aloud’ and usually connoting a level of aggression – that the angels both have the capacity to cry and be aggressive seems to kind of level them with humanity. And that they haveדעמות grants them a level of humanish embodiment.
[2] I want to acknowledge that רחם can be translated as ‘womb’ not just mercy. That Abraham has a nonnormative reproductive system is also a pretty well-known midrash; why then could he not have a womb? How different this story would be if the tears that came from Abraham came from his womb rather than his eyes... (Yevamot)
Cliel Shdaimah, she/hers, is a four-year PhD candidate who studies queer interpretation of Jewish sacred texts. Her specific interest is the narratives which center marginalized embodiment and how they can be understood in our contemporary moment. Cliel works as a Grade 8 teacher at a pluralistic shul and has run educational program for Jewish adults regarding art and Torah. She shares torah related art on instagram and spends a lot of time reading, crocheting, and writing.
