Holy Laughter and the Kabbalah of Time

There's a point in this week's portion that features G-d promising a child to the childless Sara and Abraham, that reads, on the surface at least, like a poorly staged Biblical slapstick routine. G-d is all over Abraham, "Why is your wife Sara laughing at me?" Well, I could think of a couple of reasons. Let's start with the fact that Sara was ninety years old? Or that Abraham was ninety-nine? I keep imagining them showing up at back-to-school night after registering Isaac at the Aleph Academy preschool. Talk about handling a situation with "kid gloves." Or, in an even stranger reverie, I am called upon to intervene with the authorities who intend to place Yitzchak in foster care after the Akeda: "...Yes, sir, I can see your point, and yes, of course, the optics are not great, but it's not what it seems, please allow me to explain ..."

Abraham confronts Sara but she flat out denies it. "Nu uhhh, I didn’t laugh." He counters with, "Yah huh, of course you did; we all heard it." She then recalibrates: "OK, I was laughing, but it was a nervous laugh; like a socially awkward tic, a reaction to be expected in response to the sci-fi nature of the promise of conceiving and bearing a child when they are both more attuned to the grave than the cradle."

There is loads of spiritual symbolism here, beginning with the parallels between barrenness as a physical reality and the trope of "barrenness" as a metaphor for the gaping emotional void we experience when we are stuck, when we feel incapable of birthing any newness from within. A potent symbol of how we behave when the dinginess of our spent energy looms large. “TZCHOK ASAH LI ELOKIM” can be read as a divine mockery of human limits. “G-d fills me with the drive to do "important" things, to live with a sense of purpose, but he saddled me to the whims of time, the too-rapid passage of which has ‘cleaned me out’ of my energies. I can’t execute judiciously, my years have robbed me of my willpower, sucked out of me by the overarching presence of the Angel of death, dressed benignly as time itself.” The issue with time is that it doesn’t need to stop to catch its breath like we do. And, it just won't stop. Ever. We say "time stood still..." but it never really does. I would even settle for it slowing down a bit, but then, somewhat spitefully, as in response to the audacity of that need, it speeds up. I want to scream "time out" even as I know that life is not football and there ARE no temporary time-outs. Only permanent ones.

The sound that we make, shocked into the realization that the lives we keep planning to begin are not waiting around for that to happen is the sound of Sara crying/laughing over what could have been if only time didn't always beat us to the punch.

The truth is that there is another way to see the Biblical usage of humor, more as a template for a coping mechanism. A mindset that embraces the cosmic ridiculousness of our never-ending bout with time. In this reading, we laugh WITH G-d, and the joke is not on us; it's an inside joke, a laughter that we can “bond over” with G-d in our mutual realization that life stripped of time is bereft of meaning. We can chuckle in our mutual acknowledgement that any gains we might realize in “eliminating” the fear of death are overshadowed by the absence of urgency that comes in its wake.

The two Hebrew words Sara utters, "and my master is old," justifying her "laughter" by pointing out Abraham's advanced age, can be read differently as well. Instead of "Va Adonee Zaken" (my master is old) it can be read as "Va-ado-nay Zaken": "and G-D is Old!"

If our sense of the majestic and the holy is dead "inside us"—meaning, if our sense of the spiritual and our notions of G-d have not been updated from how we experienced it in our "youth," then we are truly old, regardless of our actual age, and indeed the joke IS on us.

If, however, we have scanned our internal G-d software, we will always find required updates; we just need to find the time to install them.

Given the option, my preference would be to serenade the time that has slipped through my grasp with the laughter of acceptance, echoing the holy laughter of our first matriarch, Sara Imenu.