Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity — Page 5:
“Hearing the Voice of God”: The Power of the Sacred Absence
21 Some religious scholars (Westermann) have pointed out that one common and fundamental characteristic of most patriarchal religions is “the personal relationship to God.” The father figure in patriarchal stories is also a religious figure. He addresses God directly without any mediators: “The patriarchal stories know no priest (apart from Gen. 14), and the father of the household carries out the priestly function. He imparts the blessing and offers the sacrifice. Above all, the father receives the word of God directly, in particular the word that shows the group the way. There is no mediator of cult or word. Everything that happens between God and man happens directly, without any mediator” (Westermann 203). Only the male knows what God says, and his wife and his family (and later the community at large) learn from him what God wants. The blessings and the sacrifices are determined by the patriarch based on the divine commands that he alone receives. The patriarch asks no one to verify the voice that he hears, and there is no one to doubt his relationship with God as the law giver. In Abraham’s story, God addresses Abraham directly, and only Abraham knows what he says; God’s words cannot be verified by anyone but Abraham alone. Sacred power and the divine voice are channeled through Abraham alone.[8]In Islam, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is commemorated on the day of Haji, Islam’s holiest day. A male member of the household slaughters a ram to reenact Abraham’s story and to re-perform his obedience to God’s request. Substituting the ram for the child is seen as a sign of God’s mercy: without it, men would still be slaughtering their sons. By reenacting the story, the patriarch is channeling the divine words, thus reinforcing his patriarchal power (Delaney 181). Similarly, in Christianity, transmission of the divine word could only be performed by men (that is why only they could be priests).
22 In fact, Landy (1989) points out that in Genesis, God is not an anthropomorphized, visible figure who speaks from above, but rather is an internal voice that only appears as coming from outside, a spirit that speaks to Abraham alone and only in his consciousness. Landy writes:
The voice is experienced externally, as the voice of God, and yet it is an inner voice, since the narrative has hypostatized in it its creative and questioning drive, and since every outer voice, especially a disembodied one, corresponds to some inner reality. Otherwise it could not be heard. [. . .] The voice has special authority here, in Gen 22:1, since it has guided Abraham throughout his life. It represents, in narrative terms, the deepest part of his consciousness, since he only exists in the narrative insofar as he responds to that voice. (2)
23 Performatively speaking, Abraham exists only as a recipient of his inner voice. Like Abraham, God’s voice is a rhetorical device: the voice is both Abraham and God. God exists insofar as his voice speaks to Abraham, in the same way that Abraham exists only insofar as he is spoken to. Thus, God is a rhetorical device that sanctifies Abraham’s decisions. The performativity of the story consists of the interaction between Abraham and God: Abraham’s responses, his actions, are what perform God’s very existence. God is Abraham, and Abraham is God. They are both what Lacan called “nothing other than the condition sine qua non of speech” (69). It is by his actions (readiness to sacrifice Isaac) that Abraham sanctions the voice of God, and thus God comes into being at the moment when man is willing to kill in his name. God, who exists only as Abraham’s inner voice, is a rhetorical instrument of power.[9]In Judaism, the four-letter word for God’s name, Tetragrammaton, is ineffable. The word consists only of consonants, without any vowels. Since it is considered sacrilegious to pronounce it, the pronunciation has been forgotten (or perhaps was never there in the first place). The first letter of one of God’s pronounceable names, <em>Adonai</em>, is a letter that has no sound. What is pronounced is the vowel under the letter. The first, silent letter veils the existence of God in the absence of language that would name it. The other name of God, <em>Elohim</em>, is purposely mispronounced, <em>Elokim</em>, so as not to say it in vain. Because they are mispronounced or impossible to pronounce, the different names of God represent different aspects of the sacred while simultaneously concealing the true name of God, which is unknown. In other words, the sacred is above the language because only there can it conceal its secret. The absence of the signifier conceals the very absence of the signified it is meant to denote. Similarly, in Islam, neither the image of the Prophet nor that of God can be represented for fear of idolatry (to avoid praying to the image instead of to God), but also because their greatness is beyond representation. The precept veils the existence of God in the absence of an image. What is not shown becomes powerful precisely because it is not seen. Representation threatens secrecy and, thus, the very essence of the sacred. Likewise, in Christian liturgy, during the mass, what is worshipped is not the body of Christ (which is not there) but the piece of communion wafer that represents it. There is no body of Christ <em>per se</em>; it exists only through the symbolic and performative gestures that define the space of the sacred and the profane. The priest has to pronounce it “the body of Christ” (“Corpus Christi”) in order for the wafer to become the body of Christ (as he has to pronounce the wine to be the blood of the Christ for it to be consecrated as such). The secret is that what is worshipped is not the body of Christ, but his death symbolized by the absence of his body replaced by the wafer. The sacred is structured around the mystery of this symbolic replacement that reenacts Christ’s “gift of death” via weekly liturgy. What is reenacted is the tremor in the face of the self-sacrifice, the mystery of death voluntarily taken. The economy of this gift veils the absence of God, for whom the sacrifice was made. The liturgy reenacts the absence via the performative gestures, which reenact the sacrifice. Entering with the omnipotent and omnipresent Being into the covenant, passing the laws which the Being has asked him to pass, Abraham himself becomes powerful, one who speaks and executes the will of someone more powerful than he is himself. In such an arrangement, the woman, who is not spoken to by voice, whom voice does not test in order to make her its spokesperson, is naturally subjugated for as long as she accepts God’s order and God’s word as binding.
The Law of the Father
24 It is the father’s personal relationship with God that makes the patriarchal family what it is: “It is characterized by a personal relationship to God which corresponds in every single detail with the life-style of the patriarchs as they move to and from and live together as members of a family” (Berman xii). God’s word imbues family relations and guides family decisions, a format that is also transferred into the community. Westermann describes the phenomena:
The patriarchal story speaks of these basic forms of human community theologically, i.e., they cannot be spoken of without at the same time speaking of God. There is neither a vertical succession of generations down the years nor the horizontal dimension of communal family life without God acting and talking. [. . .] It follows from the talk about God in patriarchal story that the foundation of all subsequent religion is the simple, unencumbered relationship to God, just as it is the natural requirement for the small community. (116)
25 Abraham as a father figure has an almost god-like status. His position as a father, the maker and the creator, passes from generation to generation creating a patriarchal lineage, which makes the presence of a son the most sought-after blessing.[10]“The plight of a barren woman, and God’s promise that she will conceive, is another repeated biblical theme (e.g., Sarah, Hannah, the wife of Manoah, the Shunammite woman)” (Berman 44). In Abraham’s story, the promise of a son and annunciation is a focal point of the dramatic structure. Westermann notices: "The promise of the son is an essential part of the sequence of motifs which lead from Sarah’s barrenness to the fulfillment in birth and marriage. It occurs only in the Abraham cycle, where it is of crucial importance for the whole. . . it is an inseparable element of a self-contained narrative. The promise of the son is the starting point and center of the promise motif in the patriarchal stories." (217) The dramatic conflict usually ensues because “typically, the favored wife is barren, while the other wife bears children” (Berman 1997: 44). The annunciation and promise of a son from the favorite wife solves the dramatic tension, reinstating the patriarchal economy of reproduction as narratively logical and just. Fuchs (1985) points out that woman becomes a heroine only in those annunciation scenes when she is promised to give birth to a son: "The biblical annunciation type-scene consists of three major thematic components: the initial barrenness of the wife, a divine promise of future conception, and the birth of a son. . . [T]he most significant variations pertain to the role of the potential mother in the annunciation type-scene; these variations, . . . constitute a consistently increasing emphasis on the potential mother as the true heroine of the annunciation type-scene." (“Literary Characterization” 119) The father becomes one from who everyone and everything originates. Since he is the one who speaks to God, he establishes the laws that his sons have to follow, and he bestows blessings from which they benefit. The patriarchal economy thus is structured on the relationship between the father and God; it is imbued with the letter of the sacred, binding by faith and manifested through acts of supreme obedience. Westermann describes the role of father in the patriarchal stories:
What is peculiar to this extended idea of father is that it is irreplaceable: no one in the long series of generations that begins with Abraham can be father as he was. Paradoxically, Abraham remains father from generation to generation [. . .] the ancestor takes on the character of one who is unique, of the father par excellence; he remains, nevertheless, a man without the slightest trace of divinization or ancestor worship [. . .]. [Abraham] is the real, unique father of the people. (117–118)
The father becomes a law giver through the economy of the gift of death and the rhetoric of the divine voice that speaks to him alone. Thus, faith is the glue that cements the ideology of oppression: the patriarch’s unquestionable faith and unquestionable obedience validate the word of the divine, which in turn validates the word of the patriarch.