Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
November 25, 2006

When the Mayflower set ground in November of 1620, having braved a daring and dangerous ocean voyage, her 102 weary passengers had little idea what the ensuing months would have in store for them.  The pilgrims’ first winter in the new world would prove to be disastrous – more than half perished.   In Spring the survivors gathered their strength and sewed their first seeds in the fertile New England soil.  When in Fall they were able to harvest a small but sufficient crop, they along with representatives from the Wampanoag Indians, gathered for the first Thanksgiving festival.  It was a moment that would come to define the best of the American dream: triumph against overwhelming odds; the quest for liberty and the sweetness that can only come when successfully completing a journey awash in the bitterness of sorrow and loss.

Three thousand years earlier, the Jewish people, having endured generations of servitude at the hands of a bitter tyrant, arrived at long last to the shores of the Red Sea.  And when they emerged battered but not broken on the other side, they too rejoiced and gave thanks to their Creator for bearing them hence.  But long before the rejoicing, long before the thanksgiving, there was a moment.  It was a one of those moments when one man could have made a different choice.  And that choice would have been, perhaps, saner than the one he did make.  But for whatever reason when a voice called out from the bush that burned but was not consumed, “Moshe, Moshe,” Moses answered “hineini” “here I am.”  Hineini, that simple yet overwhelmingly complex little word whose utterance did nothing less than set off a chain of events that would lead to the greatest prison break in the history of the planet.  Hineini is where it begins.  Thanksgiving is where it ends.

The scene of the sneh, the burning bush, is not the first place in Torah where this expression is found.  Indeed, the word hineini (in this grammatical form) occurs only nine times within the entire five books of Moses.  The Tally begins with the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.  God calls out to Abraham and Abraham responds “hineini, here I am.”  Later, as the boy and his father make their way toward Moriah, Isaac inquires “father?” and Abraham again responds, “hineini.”  And then Abraham, having tied his son to the rock, lifts his arm, knife in hand, to offer the ultimate sacrifice, and an angel of the Lord cries out “Avraham, Avraham” and he responds “hineini, here I am.”

It is worth noting that in each instance, the response “here I am” is followed by a particular revelation.  First, God tells Abraham to take his son and offer him as a sacrifice to the Lord.  Second, Isaac soon realizes that it is he, and no lamb to be offered up on that day.  And finally, the angel of God enjoins Abraham, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him.  For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.”  Rashi, the great medieval commentator explains that hineini is the “… response of the pious, the language of humility and preparedness.”  Abraham and his son use this word, and not another less-charged expression, to indicate their readiness for, if not their knowledge of the task at hand.

Jacob says hineini to the angel who tells him, in turn, that it is time to leave his uncle Laban and return to the Land of Israel.  Joseph, too, says hineini when his father asks him to go find his brothers, a journey that would lead him to a life of hardship and then to prominence in a foreign land.  Jacob, too, calls out hineini to the Almighty before God reassures him that he should not be afraid to go down to Egypt in search of his son.  And it is that journey that will ultimately make possible the final hineini as we arrive at the latter bookend in the series, as Moses stands on the “Mountain of God,” removes his shoes, and steps into the service of the One whose flame burns eternal.  We have moved, then, from the last great test of our father Abraham to the first great test of our teacher Moses.  Hineini is a response to destiny’s call.

The expression occurs two additional times in this week’s parasha.  In our Torah portion, Isaac calls out to his favorite son, Esau.  “Here I am,” he replies eager to do his father’s bidding.  “I am old now, and I do not know how soon I may die,” he says.  “...prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die” (Gen. 27:4).  Of course we know what happens.  While Esau is off hunting the game for his blind father’s favorite dish, Rebecca and Jacob conspire to trick Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing instead.  And when the moment of truth arrives, as Jacob stands decked out in lamb’s skins before the unseeing Isaac, the son calls out “avi, my father,” and the father responds, “hineini.”  To say hineini involves a good deal of risk.  As a farmer who plants a fruit tree hoping but not knowing for sure if it will one day bear fruit, so too one who calls out “here I am,” hopes against the odds to be rewarded for his effort, to greet the yield of his venture with gratitude and not despair.  This is what makes the story of Esau so tragic.  We hear him use that hallowed word, knowing that Isaac was spared on that mountain, knowing that Jacob would give birth to the twelve tribes of Israel, that Joseph would one day become second to Pharoah, knowing that Moses would lead a nation from slavery to freedom.  And yet, Esau is left weeping uncontrollably, begging his father, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?”  Did not Esau demonstrate his faith when he said hineini?  Why did God have so little faith in him?

Professor Menachem Kellner of the University of Haifa explains that faith or emunah is an oft-misunderstood concept within Judaism.  “The Torah,” Kellner explains, “teaches belief in God, as opposed to beliefs about God” (Must a Jew Believe Anything?, pg. 15-16).  “Emunah,” Kellner continues, “…is more than belief that certain statements about God are true; it is belief in God, trust and reliance upon God, all of which call forth behaviour consistent with that stance of trust and reliance.”  This trust-driven behavior is what Heschel calls, not a leap of faith, but a “leap of action,” a practical devotion to the service of God by honoring our ancient and covenantal relationship.  Though Esau elicits our sympathy it is clear that at his core he is a man of limited sophistication.  As the midrash explains “Esau wields power with his hands, with physical force, so he can only have an effect on what he can reach.  But Jacob’s power is in his words, his ideas, which can reach anywhere on earth” (Tanchuma).  In some ways Esau’s hineini smacks of insincerity.  Whereas each of the other characters in the Torah’s narrative demonstrate their faith in God, Esau places his faith in the material world.  As Esau demonstrates when he sells his birthright for a bowl of stew, he is a man of gratification, not gratitude.  He sees not his place in the chain of tradition, and so the tradition has little place for him.  

Hineini is our response to destiny’s call, a leap of action when one is not sure of the outcome.  To some this may seem like blind faith, but this is not the case.  Abraham and Moses each famously argue with God.  Jacob was the “God-wrestler.”  To trust in one’s Creator, to respond first with hineini is not necessarily to understand or even agree with the path set before us.  Rather it is a willingness to embrace flexibility, uncertainty and compromise that truly defines a person of faith.

There is a question in the Talmud (Ta’anit) as to which is preferred: the kaneh or the erez, the reed or the cedar.  The cedar is strong, to be sure; it can withstand some of the most powerful winds.  And yet the ruah dromit, the strong southerly winds can uproot even the most robust cedar tree.  The reed, however, can be moved by the lightest of breezes.  But even the strongest of winds (what in Israel they call the chamsin) cannot break the kaneh.  Its roots grow deep and it has the flexibility to bend to a changing environment.  

This is the difference between a covenantal relationship and a contractual one.  Contracts are like cedars, they can be broken: they are dependant on certain terms and conditions, belief that one’s contractual partner will meet particular stipulations.  If and when these terms are not met, the contract is broken and the agreement becomes null and void.  But a brit, a covenant, is like the reed: it cannot be broken.  Covenant is about relationship, loyalty and gratitude.  Contractual relationships are created through specific expectations between the signatories of that contract.  Covenantal relationships, conversely, create expectations between loving partners.  Failure to fulfill these expectations does not sever the connection, it merely highlights the extent to which we have disappointed the ones we love.   To say hineini is to stand committed to the relationship, even when it demands more or differently of us than we might hope.  This is why our sages teach us that it was the reed, and not the cedar, that merited to be turned into a kulmus, a quill, which is used to write the Torah, t’filin and mezuzot, our most sacred documents.  Torah is not a contract between God and the Jewish people.  It is rather a manifestation in deed, in ritual and ethical obligation, of our eternal brit and a way of honoring that covenantal relationship through what Kellner calls “…behaviour consistent with that stance of trust and reliance.”

But if this relationship is truly covenantal, reciprocal if not equal, shouldn’t God then stand ready to say hineini to us as well?  The answer is yes.  The prophet Isaiah (58:9-10) says:

Then, when you call, the Lord will answer, When you cry, He will say: Here I am.

God stands ready for us too.  The promise of brit is the assurance of presence.  And it is no small thing to simply “be there” for someone no matter what the circumstances; when we are lonely or confused, elated or content, God is there for us.  But, as we have learned, more than presence, hineini is the leap of action.  What, then, is the task to which the Kadosh Baruch Hu, when God says hineini, will respond?  The task, I would suggest to you, is guidance.  The Psalmist proclaims (23:1) “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  But the King James translation is misleading.  In contemporary English it is better rendered, “I lack nothing.”  The shepherd’s great task is to guide his flock: to set a “right path” before them, one of plenty: of “green pastures” and “still waters.”  The shepherd does not avoid the “valley of the shadow of death,” but does not abandon his flock to it either.  Presence and guidance are the gifts of the shepherd.   And when we emerge from those dark places, those places of hardship, bitterness and sorrow, we know that we have not had to endure them alone.  And the abundance of the bountiful table is not mitigated by the existence of our enemies.  And the sweetness and fragrance of our anointing oil is not tempered but only enhanced by the struggle through which it was achieved.

…Which brings us full circle, back to Thanksgiving.  My friends, Thanksgiving is not simply about giving thanks.  It’s about knowing that though certain cups of ours may “runneth over,” they did not always do so.  385 years ago, a group of brave souls gathered their ranks and prepared a three day festival to pay homage to the One who stayed with them in good times and bad.  They had no illusions about the past.  They knew the journey had been a hard one, and they knew that there was hardship yet to come.  And yet they gave thanks for their harvest.  Together with 91 of their native friends and future enemies, the pilgrims enjoyed the bounty of a new land.  This celebratory moment was so powerful that it became the foundational American myth, the family celebration par excellence observed by Americans of all stripes, backgrounds, religions and ethnicities.  Yet, the quality and magnitude of the pilgrims’ gratitude was only heightened by the fact that over one year prior they had answered a call.  Hineinu, they said: “here we are” and they left the known world for the shores of uncertainty.  It was the hineini that made the hoda’ah possible, the faithful response that gave birth to the fact and felicity of that first Thanksgiving.

And that journey toward gratitude is not so unlike the foundational story of the Jewish people as well.  Moses answered hineini on that fateful and “faithful” day on Mount Moriah and God, the shepherd’s shepherd, guided us forth from that land of “narrowness,” beyond the chains of our Egyptian captors.  We left in haste and full of uncertainty and traveled through the sea to freedom on the other side. There we sang shirat hayam, our song of thanksgiving, the celebration of our deliverance.  Without the sea there would have been no song.  And without the song we would scarcely have the words to express the immense gratitude we feel.  

This thanksgiving, we know that the world is far from perfect.  War rages in Iraq; famine and genocide dominate the headlines coming out of Darfur.  World temperatures are rising, and our brethren in Israel continue to fight against an unscrupulous foe.  If you’re like me, you may sometimes feel like it’s trivial to binge on football, turkey and pumpkin pie when faced with these bleak and compelling circumstances.  But wallowing in this kind of guilt helps no one.  The world is no less broken today, I would suggest, than it was in the days of the pilgrims, nor than it was in the days of our forefathers of the biblical narrative.  Thanksgiving is a time to acknowledge what we do have, not what we lack.  The pilgrims were willing to say hineini and then translate it into action: they stood with one another, in community, and recognized that community can extend beyond the boundaries of “sameness.”  We, these days, live in a global community.  As we express our gratitude this weekend for the bounty in our lives, we should also acknowledge that there are challenges yet to come.

In Pirkei Avot we are told, lo alecha ha’melakha ligmor, “it is not upon us to the complete the work,” “v’lo ata ben chorin lehibatel mimena,” “but we are also not free to abstain from it.”  Our lives are filled with moments of hineini.  We have been and will continue to be challenged to respond to God’s call.  With a sense of emunah, of faith in the covenantal relationship that has defined our people since the days of Abraham, we will continue to make those leaps of action, to act on those expectations that derive from our devotion to the One God of the Universe.  With God’s guidance and help, we will endure the darkest shadows in the deepest valleys, and with cups overflowing we will toast our bounty on friendly shores.  For we know that no matter what our lives will bring, “we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”  And that is something worth being thankful for, indeed.