Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you; you’re so like the lady with the mystic smile.Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?(Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, 1950; famously sung by Nat King Cole)
There is no lack of outstanding characters in the liturgy of the High Holy Days. There is Hannah, who is the master teacher of how to pray properly; there is Aaron the high priest, who dresses majestically and enters the Holy of Holies to plead for our national forgiveness; there is the prophet Jonah, who tries, but fails, to escape God’s omniscient supervision of the universe. But the first, and perhaps the most essential, personality we encounter as the Ten Days of Repentance begins is Abraham. The dramatic story we read on Rosh Hashanah begins with the miraculous birth of a child to Abraham and Sarah, sending the message that even the most outrageous and impossible requests can be granted to those who truly deserve them. This event is followed by the gripping episode of the Akeida, whereby son Isaac is bound and placed on an altar, at the command of God. This is no innocuous fairytale; the implications of what transpires on Mount Moriah – the future home of the Temple – will have serious ramifications for all of Jewish history.This is not a “whodunit” but rather a “will he do it?” Will Abraham show complete fealty to the will of the Almighty, even when it includes murdering his beloved son? Will the man who rejected idolatry and taught monotheism to the entire world now engage in child sacrifice, the most heinous form of idolatrous worship? Or will Abraham make a grandstand for the power of morality, debating – even denying – God when the situation calls for it?More on this in a moment, but let me digress for a bit to a subject you’ll no doubt find strangely out of place – the Mona Lisa. But have patience.This iconic portrait – by all accounts the most well-known work of art on the entire planet – was painted in Florence in 1503 by Leonardo da Vinci (and actually finished by one of his students). It graced the bedroom of none other than Napoleon from 1800 to 1804, and was permanently placed in the Louvre in Paris in 1815. While visitors are often struck by the painting’s relatively small size, it evokes a passionate reaction like no other objet d’art. Mona Lisa receives countless love letters and even has her own mailbox. In 1852, an artist jumped to his death off a Paris hotel, declaring, “For years I grappled desperately with her smile; now, I prefer to die.” In the 1960s, when the Mona Lisa went on tour, it was valued at $100 million; today it is assessed at $2.5 billion. In 1911, Mona Lisa was stolen; The New York Times retroactively compared the effect of its disappearance to the outpouring of grief for the loss of Lady Diana in 1997; crowds would come to stand and stare longingly at the empty space. Picasso was one of the suspects in the crime, but it was later found to be an Italian employee of the Louvre who took the Mona Lisa. Believing that da Vinci’s work rightfully belonged in his home country of Italy, he tried to sell the portrait to an Italian art dealer, who alerted the police and helped restore the treasure to its French home.
WHAT IS it about Mona Lisa that evinces such interest, such adulation, such notoriety?
Clearly, it is the mystery of her expression: is she smiling, and if so, why? What is she thinking about? Is she happy or sad? That tantalizing half-smile causes every onlooker to internally debate the lady’s mood and message, providing an eternal puzzle that can never be indisputably solved.And that is precisely the situation with Abraham. How, we wonder, does he feel about God’s radical command to carry out Isaac’s binding? On the one hand, Abraham seems willing – even enthusiastic – in his desire to carry out the divine mission. He gets up early in the morning, without hesitation, to saddle his donkey and says, “Hineni,” I am here and ready; he lifts up the knife to “slaughter” his son. The rabbis, writing a postscript to the episode, even describe Abraham as wanting to offer up his spiritual heir and offspring.And yet, there are other intimations of Abraham’s reluctance, if not rejection, of God’s directive. Abraham engages in a strange exchange with God, arguing somewhat disingenuously, seeming not to know which son he is to bring to the Akeida. He confidently tells his servant Eliezer and older son Ishmael – who had accompanied Abraham and Isaac to the mountain – that “we will return to you later.” And while it was God who had issued the command to offer the child, Abraham was quite content to stop the process, even when a lower-ranking angel told him to do so.Like the Mona Lisa, this uncertainty about Abraham is what lends such power to the episode. Would Abraham have gone through with the act of slaying his darling boy, had the angel not intervened? Or would he have held back at the last moment in a bold and stubborn refusal to do that one thing that would negate his entire persona, his worldview of the God of justice and compassion? Would he have elevated man to a level that allowed mere mortals to challenge the deity – as he had done previously when he disputed God’s plan to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah – or would he have meekly bowed to the divine will, an admission of man’s subservience to a higher power?This debate will – it must – continue unabated, without resolution; the mystery can and never should be solved. Those who proclaim that they are certain that Abraham would have taken one course of action or the other are not doing justice to either Abraham or God; in fact, they are degrading the power and passion that the Akeida, with all its uncertainty, is meant to generate. It would be as foolhardy as someone coming along today and altering Mona Lisa’s expression into a clear frown or smile. This is the crucial message behind this seminal story. Though God is indeed inscrutable, it is our charge and our challenge to come to conclusions about our maker. By employing our God-given faculties of mind and heart, we can and should devote ourselves to confronting the ultimate questions of life: What is right and what is wrong? And what does God ultimately require of us? That, dear reader, is our test; that is our Akeida.
The writer is the director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana. rabbistewart@gmail.com