Deathless - Andrew Ramer

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the Rodriguezes have for their saints.

      Then there’s old Mr. Rallway next door. He’s a fiery atheist socialist, in his late 80’s. His lesbian daughter Martine and her lover Patricia live around the corner. Their home is filled with images of goddesses from all over the world, including a museum reproduction of one by Kalyah. Martine’s father is always teasing “the girls” about them. The Tomlinsons across the way are Baha’i, Tina Phillips next door, and her mother Betty, are Fundamentalist Christians. The DeBecques are from Haiti and follow an Afro-Caribbean faith. The Rams family are Hindu, and I am—well, what am I? Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Spinoza was a splendid man, the first truly modern secular Jew, and his God comes close for me too. But I tell you all of this so that you get a sense of the diversity of the present, with the hope that you will use it as a lens into the past.

      Although we lived in a complex world, we didn’t have television or movies or radio. For us stories, especially the ones that were told at night around a fire, were our primary form of entertainment. Because we loved to hear and tell stories we always had multiple versions of them, and that didn’t bother us. In some ways it was like what happens to you when you compare a book with the movie made from it, the remake of that movie, and the opera that was created around them: multiple versions of the same story, some of which you like better than others.

      I remember an experience I had when I had first moved to North America. Being fluent in several languages including English, I got a job teaching music in a private school in New York City. One day not too long after I arrived I was invited to the birthday party of one of my students, a sweet little girl named Lissy. Her father Bruce led all the children in a game that I had never heard of before—Telephone. There were more than a dozen boys and girls at the party, all seated in a circle on the living room floor. My student’s father whispered to his daughter a sentence that she then whispered to her neighbor, who passed it on and on around the circle. The sentence Bruce whispered to Lissy was, “My father’s new car is shiny and red.” Imagine my surprise when the final student said out loud what he’d heard: “My mother’s new dog was run over and killed dead.” Lissy burst into tears when she heard it, as a sweet little puppy has been her father’s birthday present to her. Well, scripture is sometimes like that, stories passed around a circle for hundreds and even thousands of years, changing and changing.

      Am I making sense here? Are you following me? I hope so. Now let me get right down to our own history. You may have read those stories about how Abraham first discovered God, but even the redactors of the Torah didn’t think so. They had Adam and Eve talking to God, along with Enoch and Noah and all of Abraham’s ancestors. In their eyes monotheism came first and idolatry came later. In some ways the religion of your ancestors was more like Hinduism than what you think of as Judaism. In Hindu scriptures you will find the most exalted writings about the absolute unity of God, sometimes known as Brahman, alongside a great riotous conflagration of deities with the kinds of biographies that are found in all of the world’s mythologies. The religion of Sarah and Abraham was rather like that.

      For eons all of humanity considered God, the Absolute, to be Female. But just as many of you, born as Jews or Christians, have become Buddhists like my neighbors, or are studying with Native American or Sufi or Wiccan teachers, my ancestors were also dabbling in new and trendy religions. God hadn’t become absolutely male yet, although that was the general direction in which things were going. Sarah and Abraham belonged to a fairly new syncretistic religion that worshipped an androgynous deity known as Shaddai or El Shaddai, which literally means, “God, My Breast,” and can be interpreted as God the Nurturer, or God the Sustainer. While they built altars to Shaddai, they didn’t make images of him, but they talked about him and thought of him as a man with woman’s breasts, rather like the Egyptian god of the Nile, Hapi, who will show up in our story later on. Given that Hebrew was and is dual-gendered it was difficult to talk about and write about a Being who is both female and male, or neither. Shaddai was their best attempt to do that, an androgynous being who was never shown in pictures or statues. The closest we came to thinking of him in form was as light. Not firelight or sunlight but the primal spiritual light of the universe, from which all other things emerged.

      In our mythology Shaddai, the Absolute and Unknowable Unity of all that is, had two children, which he/she birthed without another parent. One child was female. Her name was Asherah and she was the chosen deity of our ancestors. The other child was male and we called him Yah, Yah-El, or Yahweh. They were the Yin/Yang of the ancient Hebrews, or like Shiva and Shakti in Hinduism. No one made images of them but they worshipped Asherah in sacred groves, and felt the presence of Yahweh manifest through certain big rocks. Both of these elements will reappear in my story so don’t forget them. Asherah and Yahweh were the creators of the physical world and the parents of all the other gods, of which we had many. We called them the Elohim, which means “the gods,” and we saw all of them as manifestations of Shaddai, the one ultimate Creator.

      Now let’s get back to the heart of the Torah story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. It’s a very moving story in some ways, and it’s maddeningly horrific in others. That it never happened should comfort you, and yet fiction is a marvelous mirror of the soul. Sometimes we can only tell the truth about human life though artifice, which you may have discovered yourself. So I ask you now, how many children, some in body and many more in spirit, have been done in by their parents? You perhaps are one of them.

      Writing was still uncommon in my childhood, and it was even more rare in the days of Sarah and Abraham, except by scribes in temples. Stories about their lives were told by all of their descendants, but they were first written down about three hundred years after they died. So think about what you know of your ancestors from three hundred years ago. Most of you probably know nothing about them, not even their names, unless they came over on the Mayflower or were titled nobility, or if you’re Mormon or have done a lot of internet research on genealogical sites. Given that we didn’t yet have books, or radio, movies, or TV, we did a lot more storytelling than you do, but three hundred years is still three hundred years. And stories evolve just like playing Telephone, a whole story emerging from a single misheard word or phrase. So let me tell you the story that morphed into the sacrifice of Isaac. (Isn’t morphed a marvelous word? From Ovid, to Kafka, to visual morphing in films.)

      Isaac was spoiled by his father, his four big sisters, his mother, and by Hagar and Ishmael too, when they were all still living together in the same encampment. The Torah isn’t clear on this, but Ishmael was three years older than Isaac, and the two brothers adored each other, the younger following the older about like a puppy, the older teaching him everything he knew. But the tension between their mothers increased. Hagar left for a time, returning to her favorite little village, but she missed the others and, hoping to be able to work things through with Sarah, she and Ishmael went back, as I said before.

      Sarah had some reason to be concerned about Ishmael’s influence on her son. He introduced Isaac to drugs at an early age, to the resins and hashish other herbal blends that were popular at that time. Sarah found out from their servants and went to Abraham in a rage, insisting that Hagar and Ishmael leave for good, which they did. Hurt and enraged when he found out, Isaac confronted his father and shouted at him, “Everyone knows you’re not my real father. Abimelech is!” This deeply wounded Abraham, in spite of the fact that Isaac was the very image of him (or so my Aunt Dinah told me) so there was no doubt about his paternity. Abraham couldn’t persuade Sarah to change her mind. A few months later Isaac disappeared. No one knew where he was, messengers were sent off to Hagar’s village of Lahai-roi, but Isaac wasn’t there. Finally Isaac’s sister Davah broke down and confessed, when she saw how distraught her parents were. Her brother had confided in her where he was going and what he wanted to do. Below are a few passages from a long lost written account of what happened.

      And Abraham heard that his son Isaac, the only son of his wife Innati the princess, had entered the temple of Asherah in the city of Luz, to be a novice priest there.

      There were many Asherahs in our time, the same way that there are Mary of Lourdes, Mary of Guadalupe, Mary of Fatima, who are the same Mary but also different. So too with Asherah, who was, again, the primary deity of our family. The Asherah of Luz was a goddess whose male cross-dressing priests castrated themselves after they were initiated, and this

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