A Ram in the Thicket: Hope in the Akeidah

I have a confession to make: I do not know how to do two things at the same time. I can’t juggle. I quit piano after a year because while my right hand was able to keep up, I couldn’t add in the left hand at the same time. If there’s too many things to focus on simultaneously, my brain goes static.

If juggling or playing piano feel overwhelming, how much more so the juggling act of daily life — the endless to-do lists that demand our attention.

There’s just so much to do. Gotta mail that check, you need to take the kids to soccer practice, make the doctor’s appointment, get dinner on the table, tackle the laundry that’s been piling up, read that interesting article someone sent you last week. And just when we think we have it all balanced — the to-do lists, the responsibilities — something happens that knocks everything out of rhythm.

As you’re sifting through your endless email inbox, sitting through another mundane meeting, you get a voicemail from your doctor, telling you to call them back about your test results. If everything came back normal, wouldn’t they just tell me that in a voicemail?

Or, as was the case last January for myself and thousands of people living in Los Angeles, you’re at work on an extremely windy day, talking about the winds with your coworkers, watching the palm trees bending - not swaying, but truly bending…

And then, you see smoke in the distance. Suddenly you find yourself standing in your living room that smells like a campfire, living on the edge of an evacuation zone, trying to find a safe evacuation route and a place to go, far away from the fires, all while deciding which keepsake belongings need to come with you.

A difficult, seemingly impossible event upends our plans, shifts our priorities, and creates anxiety and fear. This anxiety and fear drains us of all of our energy, throws us off balance, and before we know it, we find ourselves asking: how did I even get here?

Torah knows this feeling too — the shock of chaos, the test that feels impossible. On Rosh Hashanah, we read a story about perhaps the most jarring test of all: the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac.

In the Akeidah, Abraham is tasked by God with what is surely unthinkable — to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. He gathers the supplies needed for the sacrifice, but the text is silent about Abraham’s emotions. The rabbis imagine Abraham torn between love of God and love of his son. 

All the while, Abraham walks up the mountain with Isaac, who is unaware of the impossible, burdensome command that God has given his father. And then, atop the mountain, just as the story races toward catastrophe, just as Abraham lifts his hand to do the unthinkable, the Torah slows us down with a single phrase — an angel’s cry: “Abraham! Stop!”

At that moment, amidst the chaos, the Torah tells us: “Vayisa Avraham et einav vayar — Abraham lifted his eyes and saw” (Genesis 22:13). What did Abraham see as he lifted his eyes? A ram caught in the thicket.

Rashi, a beloved Medieval Torah commentator, teaches that this ram wasn’t a coincidence — it had been prepared from the very beginning of creation.

The biblical interpretation even says God placed the ram in the world at twilight on the sixth day, waiting for this very moment.

In other words: even before Abraham faced this test, the way out already existed. Salvation was waiting all along. Abraham only needed to lift his eyes to notice it. Abraham’s shift — from despair to hope, from looking down to lifting his eyes — is not just his story. It’s ours too.

We all know moments of chaos, moments when we feel trapped with no good choices. But our tradition reminds us: if we can listen for the angel crying out, if we lift our eyes and widen our horizon, we may discover that God has already placed a “ram in the thicket” for us — an opening, a glimmer of hope, a way forward we couldn’t see before.

Each year, the shofar serves as the angel’s cry for us at Rosh Hashanah, its unique sound halts us in our tracks and urges us to look up and examine our lives in a different light than we do during the year.

On this, Maimonides, the prolific 12th century philosopher, writes that the shofar is a wake up call, shouting “Wake up you sleepy ones from your sleep! Examine your deeds, turn in repentance, and remember your Creator.”

Even if we don’t find ourselves in a heartwrenching moment of crisis like Abraham in the Akeidah, the ram’s horn still challenges us to look up to the horizon for a new perspective, another way to reflect on the complicated, messy work of being a human.

And on the other hand, we might find ourselves wrapped up in an impossible dilemma, unable to immediately see the ram in the thicket amidst the fear and anxiety we’re feeling. There are certainly moments where we can get lost in distress, and looking to the horizon can feel too laborious, too impossible.

When we find ourselves feeling hopeless, unable to see a way out…this is precisely when we need to remember that we are not alone in our struggles, and that our relationships and community can serve as the angel’s call for us to look to the horizon.

In the last few weeks, this community has collectively moved from staring down at a chaotic, fearful moment to looking up at the ram in the thicket. You heard the painful cries of the shofar, looked up to the horizon, and you chose to paint over a message of hate with a paintbrush of hope, love, and redemption.

Instead of simply slapping a bandage on a painful wound, Or Shalom has taken the time to look up from a narrow place, to see where hope dwells after pain, where redemption and a new perspective can bring about healing.

As one of my rabbis, Rabbi Sharon Brous writes on the shofar, “The very shape of the shofar is a symbol of redemption. From out of narrowness (the tiny mouthpiece) comes the most expansive possibility (a sound great enough to make a room tremble). The shofar sound carries the promise of a different kind of reality, a wordless prayer that this new day might be the birth of something new for all of us.”

May we all listen for the call, and look up to the horizon with hope for a new perspective. Shanah tovah.