Messengers of God

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Adam, or The Mystery of the Beginning

Parables and Sayings I

Cain and Abel: The First Genocide

Parables and Sayings II

The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story

Parables and Sayings III

And Jacob Fought the Angel

Parables and Sayings IV

Joseph, or The Education of a Tzaddik

Parables and Sayings V

Moses: Portrait of a Leader

Parables and Sayings VI

Job: Our Contemporary

Sources

About the Author

For

Rabbénu Saul Lieberman,

my teacher,

from whom I received more

than, with these pages,

I could ever give back

E.W.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I read these Biblical tales with a wonder mixed with anguish. I imagined Isaac on the altar and I cried. I saw Joseph, prince of Egypt, and I laughed. Why dwell on them again? And why now? It falls to the storyteller to explain.

• • •

Disciple more than anything else, his aim is not to plunge into historical exegesis—which surely lies beyond his competence—but to reacquaint himself with the distant and haunting figures that molded him. He will try to reconstruct their portraits from Biblical and Midrashic texts, and eventually insert them into the present.

For Jewish history unfolds in the present. Refuting mythology, it affects our life and our role in society. Jupiter is a symbol, but Isaiah is a voice, a conscience. Mars died without ever having lived, but Moses remains a living figure. The calls he issued long ago to a people casting off its bonds reverberate to this day and we are bound by his Law. Were it not for his memory, which encompasses us all, the Jew would not be Jewish, or more precisely, he would have ceased to exist.

Judaism, more than any other tradition, manifests great attachment to its past, jealously keeping it alive. Why? Because we need to. Thanks to Abraham whose gaze is our guide, thanks to Jacob whose dream has us spellbound, our survival, prodigious on so many levels, lacks neither mystery nor significance. If we have the strength and the will to speak out, it is because every one of our forebears expresses himself through us; if the eyes of the world often seem to be upon us, it is because we evoke a time gone by and a fate that transcends time. Panim in Hebrew is used in the plural form: man has more than one face. His own and Adam’s. The Jew is haunted by the beginning more than by the end. His messianic dream is tied to the kingdom of David and he feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor.