Gender and Jewish Culture

31     However, maternal love is a double bind. One the one hand, when a mother sacrifices her child, she is never viewed in the same way as Abraham, as a free individual, able to detach herself from human relations, but as selfishly focused on her own needs. Fuchs continues: “On the other hand, the ‘maternal instinct’ is [also] portrayed as a highly selfish and confined inclination, mostly focused on one’s own child. Sarah’s concern for her son Isaac is presented as her primary motivation for driving Hagar and Ishmael out” (133–134). Gellman describes Sarah’s request to oust Hagar and Ishmael as a “vicious demand to usurpation and murder” (40). Thus, woman’s commitment to her male child, as well as the relinquishing of such a commitment, appears always as self-motivated and malicious.[11]Following Levinas, Katz points out that “had Sarah been asked, she would not have agreed to sacrifice Isaac, and second, that this response would have earned her passing marks on the test! [. . .] Thus, one’s relationship to a child is still the paradigm for the ethical” (127). It seems that no matter what a biblical female does with her male child, whether she chooses to protect it or to offer it on the divine altar, her actions can always interpreted as self-seeking. She seeks either salvation, or self-validation; but essentially, she is never described as capable of acts of pure love toward God. In other words, woman can not, should not, must not, either rhetorically or performatively, enter into the covenant with the divine/the law.[12]See also Dennis, T. <em>Sarah Laughed: Women’s Voices in the Old Testament</em>. Nashville: Albingdon Press, 1994.

“Out of My Sight”: Disposing of Sarah’s Body

32     Because woman is excluded from the sacrificial exchange and the rhetoric of law that this exchange structures, her access to the divine can be achieved only through the economy of her self-sacrifice. When Satan failed to persuade Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac, he “fell into a fury when he saw that his passionate wish to thwart Abraham’s sacrifice was powerless. What did he do? He went and told Sarah” (Spiegel 105). In the guise of an old man, he told her that Abraham killed Isaac, to which she replied:

O my son, Isaac, my son, O that I had this day died instead of thee. [. . .] But I console myself, it being the word of God, and thou didst perform the command of thy God, for who can transgress the word of our God, in whose hands is the soul of every living creature? Thou art just, O Lord our God, for all Thy works are good and righteous, for I also rejoice with the word which Thou didst command, and while mine eye weepeth bitterly, my heart rejoiceth. (Book of Jasher 23 79–82) [13]<em>The Book of Jasher</em> was added in the 16th Century, so its relationship to Genesis 22 is purely cognitive. Most feminist scholars treat the two stories as one, but it is important to keep in mind that although both stories are products of the same patriarchal apparatus, they have very different historical origins.

Afterward she became “still as a stone.” When she rose up, she went to the land of Hebron to look for Isaac. There, Satan appeared to her once again, telling her that Isaac was not dead after all. After hearing the news, “her joy was so exceedingly violent that her soul went out through joy; she died and was gathered to her people” (Book of Jasher 23 86). When Abraham found her dead, he tried to buy a piece of land to bury her body: “I pray you now, give me a burying-place with you, not as a gift, but for money.” Ephron, the chief of the children of Heth, offered him, as a gift, the field to bury Sarah. Abraham paid for the land, and she was buried and mourned for seven days.

33     To Ostriker, there is significance in Abraham’s twice-repeated comments to the Hittite land-sellers; he was looking for a burial site where he could “bury my dead out of my sight.” According to Ostriker, Sarah’s influence had to be disposed of in order for the male covenant to take place; that is the meaning of the Akedah:

Whereas the Hittite elders twice offer the patriarch a sepulcher to “bury thy dead,” he twice declares his intention to “bury my dead out of my sight” [. . .]. This interesting phrase, usually erased in modern translations, firmly emphasizes Sarah’s disappearance. The Hebrew mi-l’fanai literally means “from my face,” or “from before my face,” and idiomatically means “away from my presence” [. . .]. Thus the narrative of Abraham’s succession records a triple triumph of the Father over the Mother. First the power of the womb to generate life is appropriated by the Holy One, then the connective and sustaining power of the umbilical cord becomes the controlling power of the dead rope that binds Isaac, and thirdly Sarah herself must not merely die and be buried but must be eliminated from presence, that is from consciousness. Sarah’s burial signals that the defeat of maternal power is the condition/consequence of the male covenant. (42)

34     The story of Sarah’s death is poignant because it suggests that the space left by a woman as a subject of the sacrificial exchange creates a sacrificial crisis that is solved by reconfiguration of the woman as an object of the sacrifice. Someone had to die for the sacrificial contract to take place. Since Isaac survives, the gift of death is cemented with the death of Sarah, who cannot bear the joy of his survival. Isaac’s survival, literally, kills her. Symbolically, she replaces him as a sacrificial object. The logic of the sacrificial responsibility demands that she pay for her exclusion from the sacrificial contract by being the sacrifice herself. She is the embodied gift of death that is exchanged between man and God. Abraham’s first resolve, to buy the land for her burial and not to accept it as a gift, is once again a reiteration of the economy of the gift. Herself a gift of death, she is buried in a would-be gift. As Trible put it: “From exclusion to elimination, denial to death, the attachment of Genesis 22 to patriarchy has given us not the sacrifice of Isaac (that that we are grateful) but the sacrifice of Sarah (for whom we mourn). By her absence from the narrative and her subsequent death, Sarah has been sacrificed by patriarchy to patriarchy” (190). In this biblical story, as anywhere else, Levi-Strauss noticed, “the essential gift is always a woman.”

35     “A woman’s sacrifice or a sacrifice of a woman, according to one sense of the genitive or the other?” — Derrida asks ("Gift" 75). In French, sacrifice d’une femme has an ambiguous meaning: woman can be both a subject and an object of the sacrifice. What’s the difference? Does asking such a question imply that the rhetorical difference between a woman’s sacrifice and a sacrifice of a woman can be erased? Paul de Man writes an account of Derrida’s famous philosophical/grammatological question:

Jacques Derrida — who asks the question “What is the difference”—and we cannot even tell from his grammar whether he “really” wants to know “what” difference is or is just telling us that we shouldn’t even try to find out. Confronted with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. (29)

Following de Man’s separation of grammar and rhetoric, can we ask whether the difference between a woman’s sacrifice and the sacrifice of a woman is, like a gift of death, purely rhetorical? Does the difference between a woman’s sacrifice and the sacrifice of a woman collapse into the empty space of woman’s absence? Does the difference signify the collapse of the economy of the death-gift exchange, which is solved by being displaced onto the body of a dead female? Is the female the proof of the impossibility of the gift, filling out the operational space of the gift that is not given (Isaac who is not killed)? Buried in the gift, is she the gift she (who?) gives? A woman’s sacrifice or the sacrifice of a woman? The difference between one and the other is the space of female agency from which she can speak as an ethical subject. To see the difference and to deny it marks the moment of the surrender of the feminine subject attempting to reclaim her right to the sacrificial exchange.